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1133197.081546
In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between knowledge that talk and knowledge how talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that knowledge that belongs to the former, whereas knowledge how belongs to the latter.
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1144809.081675
A confession: at any given moment, I am liable to know the amount of money in my savings account, my uber rating, my Wordle scores from the last five days, and my h-index on Google scholar. For at least three months after publication, and probably more like six, I would be able to tell you the goodreads rating of my latest book. …
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1235726.081835
What makes a group an epistemic and moral agent? In this article, I argue the answer is: its decision-making procedures. The article begins by describing and motivating three popular positions in theories of group agency: functionalism, summativism, and organizationism. It explains how these three positions play out within Jessica Brown’s recent book Groups As Epistemic and Moral Agents. I explain how a focus on decision-making procedures can clarify and unify Brown’s account. Ultimately, the article proposes ‘proceduralism’ about group agency: we should figure out whether a group is an epistemic and moral agent by asking what decision-making procedures it has; group decision- making procedures are necessary and sufficient for group agency; and the group decision-making procedures explain group agency.
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1248262.081862
It is now a more or less biennial event: a professional philosopher, employed in an Anglophone philosophy department, publishes a book denouncing “analytic philosophy,” the predominant mode of the discipline in which they work. …
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1248512.081876
The reason why this article does not involve mathematical formulas is that the author 's mathematical ability is limited, and the article only has enlightening effect. A good beginning often ends up not wonderful, I prefer a wonderful end. Therefore, the first half of the article is not of great value, but more of a process of exploration.
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1290017.081893
Simple games in partition function form are used to model voting situations where a coalition being winning or losing might depend on the way players outside that coalition organize themselves. Such a game is called a plurality voting game if in every partition there is at least one winning coalition. In the present paper, we introduce an equal impact power index for this class of voting games and provide an axiomatic characterization. This power index is based on equal weight for every partition, equal weight for every winning coalition in a partition, and equal weight for each player in a winning coalition. Since some of the axioms we develop are conditioned on the power impact of losing coalitions becoming winning in a partition, our characterization heavily depends on a new result showing the existence of such elementary transitions between plurality voting games in terms of single embedded winning coalitions. The axioms restrict then the impact of such elementary transitions on the power of different types of players.
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1338645.081907
The target article highlights research known to have promoted unjustified politicized claims. It also points out that, although researcher political biases might account for this, there are often alternative explanations. It then discusses areas of research in which those alternative explanations are unlikely, so that the best explanation is political bias. The target article is fundamentally correct. Nonetheless, we argue that political bias is a characteristic of the claims made in research articles rather than primarily a characteristic of scientists. Inasmuch as some claim is not wrong simply by virtue of supporting an ideological narrative, to detect politically biased research, we identify four questions to be answered. Test 0 is necessary but not sufficient to infer political bias. If Test 0 is passed, then at least one of Tests 1, 2, or 3 must also be passed. Test 0: Does the study vindicate some political narrative? Test 1: Did they misinterpret or misrepresent their results in ways that unjusti fiably advance a particular politicized narrative? Test 2: Do the authors systematically ignore papers and studies inconsistent with their ideology-af firming conclusions? Test 3: Did they leap to ideology-affirming conclusions based on weak data? We close with recommendations for preventing politically biased conclusions.
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1363813.081934
In this contribution I will start in Section 2 by introducing epistemic competence. I will stress that like Bussmann, I regard it as fundamental that people in a democratic society possess epistemic competence and that it would be important to teach epistemic competence at school. In Section 3 I show that even for countries where the epidemiological situation is roughly the same or very similar such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there are often very different recommendations concerning vaccinations. In Section 4 I will identify and discuss five rational reasons that can alone or in combination lead to different vaccine recommendations. Finally, section 5 will reflect on epistemic competence and vaccine recommendations. In particular, I will point out that different vaccine recommendations are an example where students can develop epistemic competence. Further, I will stress that different vaccine recommendations are an example where epistemic competence among the general population is desirable; if it is not present, this can lead to science scepticism and mistrust about science.
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1363868.081949
It is typically held that Thomas Kuhn was committed to a descriptivist view of the meaning of theoretical terms, and that his most infamous thesis – incommensurability – was a consequence of this. The causal theory of reference supposedly rules out incommensurability by allowing the extension of a term, rather than merely the intension, to (at least partly) constitute the meaning of the term, thereby ensuring that part of the ‘meaning’ remains constant across theory changes. It is therefore surprising to find Kuhn endorsing aspects of the causal theory in several later essays while still maintaining the possibility of incommensurability. This paper will investigate how Kuhn understood both the causal theory and incommensurability, such that his endorsement of both was not the bald-faced contradiction it would be according to the standard reading. In fact, many of the affinities of Kuhn’s view with the causal theory are part of what make ii incommensurability possible, or so I will argue. More generally, I will suggest that Kuhn should be thought of as rejecting the very idea that the meaning of scientific terms is some aggregate of extension, and intension or sense.
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1363902.081962
This paper addresses the issue of the different levels of description of matter and the relationships between them. Specifically, it focuses on the area of crystalline solids, a topic that has been scarcely analyzed in the philosophy of chemistry. Unlike other cases where the relevant levels are clearly defined, the scientific practice related to crystals introduces new entities, such as phonons, which complicate the ontological landscape. In order to organize the discussion, the conceptual implications of describing crystals through three distinct levels are explored: the atomistic, the phononic, and the crystal as a whole. Existing proposals for understanding the phenomenon are analyzed, and based on the introduction of the Tensor Product Structure approach, it is argued that the ontological perspectives of crystals depend on external criteria beyond the formalism that describes them. In the absence of external criteria, a pluralistic ontology is obtained, granting equal status to all entities. On the other hand, privileging the total system or the fundamental components leads to holistic or atomistic ontologies, respectively.
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1453181.081975
What are the conditions under which an agent is morally responsible
for some action that they have performed? Put another way, and
acknowledging that this rephrasing might be contentious, what are the
conditions under which it would be appropriate to praise or blame the
agent for something they have done? (Strawson 1962; Wallace 1998;
Coates & Tognazzini 2013). An account of moral responsibility
supplies answers to these questions. (See the entry on
“Moral Responsibility” ). Most theorists agree that moral responsibility requires satisfying at
least two core conditions. The first is a control condition;
the agent must have the right sort of control over what they do
(Dennett 1984; Fischer & Ravizza 1998; Shepherd 2014).
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1453201.08199
Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses
questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing
traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those
methods include survey experiments that examine laypeople’s
intuitions about legal-philosophical thought experiments and concepts
of legal significance (e.g., causation, intent, reasonableness). Other
times, experimental jurisprudence focuses on the cognitive processes
underlying legal reasoning. This entry reviews representative work in
experimental jurisprudence and discusses major objections and
critiques.
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1454147.082004
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . Subject to this licence, all rights are reserved.
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1479235.082019
This paper introduces the conceptual foundations of the Ontomorphic Peircean Calculus, a first-order formal system constructed from Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic logic and recast in categorical, topological, and algebraic terms. Identity, inference, and modality are defined as consequences of recursive morphism closure over a non-metric symbolic manifold Φ. Presence arises from symbolic saturation governed by the compression functional I(p). This system unifies logic, physics, and ontology through symbolic recursion and curvature, replacing metric assumptions with recursive cost topology. All structures—identity, mass, time, causality—emerge from the self-coherence of morphic braids in a purely symbolic substrate, thereby replacing metric foundations with compression-curvature dynamics that computationally bridge the essential logical architecture of the theoretical and practical sciences simultaneously.
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1501096.082035
Very short summary: This essay argues that local governance is less prone to succumb to populism because, compared to national politics, citizens are more empowered and monitoring of elected officials is easier. …
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1532204.082049
Let’s say we want to identify effective strategies for multi-agent games like the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma or more complex environments (like the kind of environments in Melting Pot). Then tournaments are a natural approach: let people submit strategies, and then play all these strategies against each other in a round-robin tournament. …
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1536904.082066
Scientific data without uncertainty estimates are increasingly seen as incomplete. Recent discussions in the philosophy of data, however, have given little attention to the nature of uncertainty estimation. We begin to redress this gap by, first, discussing the concepts and practices of uncertainty estimation in metrology and showing how they can be adapted for scientific data more broadly; and second, advancing five philosophical theses about uncertainty estimates for data: they are substantive epistemic products; they are fallible; they can be iteratively improved; they should be judged in terms of their adequacy-for-purpose; and these estimates, in turn, are essential for judging data adequacy. We illustrate these five theses using the example of the GISTEMP global temperature dataset. Our discussion introduces a novel adequacy-for-purpose view of uncertainty estimation, addresses a weakness in a recent philosophical account of data, and provides a new perspective on the “safety” versus “precision” debate in metrology.
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1536933.082082
Although William Herschel (1738-1822) is most well-known as an astronomer and instrument-maker, he also had interests in speculative philosophy (e.g., metaphysics), as several papers he read at the Bath Philosophical Society reveal. These papers, arguably, are the context in which Herschel engaged most directly in philosophical argumentation and are thus worthy of greater scholarly attention. In this article, I focus on Herschel’s paper entitled “On the Utility of Speculative Inquiries,” in which he debates the legitimacy of speculation with an unnamed interlocutor, referred to as the “Gentleman.” In section 1, I briefly discuss Herschel’s intellectual background.
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1536959.082099
Methodological anthropic reasoning (MAR), popularized by Bostrom ([2002]), aims to correct for observation selection bias by appealing to observer-relative information. I show that MAR's inferential structure is not uniquely tied to observers but applies to any set of entities subject to selection uncertainty. By miscasting a general epistemic problem as uniquely anthropic, MAR obscures its metaphysical assumptions and bypasses established probabilistic methods. Once stripped of its observer-centric framing and functionally reduced, anthropic reasoning collapses into ad hoc inference—forcing a choice: either acknowledge the metaphysical specialness of observers or concede there is no reason to privilege one physical pattern over another.
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1567922.082113
Greetings from Kyoto, Japan! Here’s an excerpt from Unbeatable’s last chapter. [from Chapter 6: Four Candid Conversations]
This is the dialogue chapter, where I argue against a wide variety of fictional archetypes. …
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1619872.082127
Guess I’m A Rationalist Now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. …
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1652281.08214
The notion of quantum state plays a fundamental role within the Standard account of Quantum Mechanics (SQM) as established by Dirac and von Neumann during 1930s and up to the present. In this work we expose the deep inconsistencies that exist within the multiple definitions of the notion of quantum state that are provided within this axiomatic formulation. As we will argue, these different inconsistent definitions continue to be —even today— uncritically confused within the mainstream physical and philosophical literature leading to self-contradictory statements and wrong conclusions. We end with a discussion regarding the untenability of this concept for any rational understanding of theoretical physics.
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1652303.082156
In the “information age”, the world’s knowledge is at everybody’s fingertips: all one needs is a device connected to the internet. As information becomes more accessible than ever, optimists expected a corresponding rise in scientific education and knowledge—with the passing of time, superstitions and misconceptions that fly in the face of scientific consensus would be destined to disappear. Yet, as we know all too well, this reassuring prophecy did not come true. Scientifically disproven misconceptions are still alive and well, and continue to be fairly widespread among digital citizens.
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1652356.082173
Networks are used for many different purposes in science -- for example, to provide diagnoses, as when differences in functional connectivity in brains, represented by networks, are used to distinguish subjects with mental disorders from those who are healthy. Networks are also used to classify diseases on the basis of patterns of co-occurrence or to group proteins together on the basis of whether they interact with other proteins. But in addition, networks are also used to explain. The main focus of this paper is one very common form that such explanations can take. Put informally these are cases in which what is of interest is the spread of some process along a network and the explanandum is some overall behavior of the system characterized by the network (as opposed, say, to why some particular node in the network is in a certain state) . Examples include the spread of a disease along a contact network (explaining why the disease spreads rapidly or becomes an epidemic), the propagation of neural signals along structural or anatomical connections in a brain (explaining why these are associated with the presence of some mental disorder), the spread of beliefs along social networks (explaining the presence of extensive misinformation), and movement (of cars, planes etc.) along transportation networks (explaining patterns of traffic congestion). Examples of this sort represent important uses of networks and are 1 "Process" is not meant to suggest anything metaphysical or something necessarily meeting the requirements of a "process theory" of causation.
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1652383.082188
This paper investigates the status of inference to the best explanation (IBE), in contrast to inference to the only explanation (IOE) against the background of Woodward's what-if-things- had-been-different (w) account of explanation. It argues that IBE is not a defensible form of inference. By contrast IOE is defensible and objections to its use (e.g., on the basis of claims about underdetermination) are exaggerated. Although some accounts of explanation in conjunction support IBE, the w-account does not. It is also argued that we should think of explanation as an independent goal of scientific investigation that is valuable in its own right and not because it is a means to discovering truths via IBE. The correct picture of the connection between explanation and truth is simply that successful explanation requires a true or effectively correct explanans. However, we cannot establish that an explanans has this feature by appealing to its potential explanatory power-- that it would if true explain well. Instead, evidence that is independent of potential explanatory power is required. This is what IOE provides.
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1652404.082201
Trevor Griffith and Adrian Kind argue that we should reject a standard interpretation of pain asymbolia, according to which asymbolics experience pain even though their pain lacks the affective-motivational element that typical pains possess. We make the case that Griffith and Kind’s reasons for rejecting the standard interpretation are relatively weak. We end by arguing that debates between the standard interpretation and alternative interpretations cannot be resolved without addressing the issue of how we should taxonomize pain asymbolia as a neurological condition.
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1706363.082216
Metafiction is the phenomenon by which we often talk about fictions. Traditionally, metafiction has been understood as the mirror image of fictional truth, or truth in fiction. This paper argues that this paradigm is too narrow. It is shown that we routinely use metafiction to talk about fiction in ways that do not track what is fictionally true. The paper provides a way of understanding this kind of metafiction. It argues that audiences keep track of information conveyed by narrators independently of what is fictionally true, and it shows how metafiction can be understood as aimed at representing such information.
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1710091.08223
The origin of memories is thought to be found in sensory perception. This conception is central to how the memory sciences characterize encoding. This paper considers how novel memory traces can be formed independently of external sensory inputs. I present a case study in which memory traces are created without sensory perception using a technique I call optogenetic memory implantation. Comparing this artificial process with normal memory encoding, I consider its implications for rethinking the causal chain that leads to remembering.
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1733014.082245
The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). …
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1763557.08226
Millstein’s comprehensive but accessible work brings back to the present the importance of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic”. It functions as much more than a revisiting of his most famous work, A Sand County Almanac, but opens modern conservationism to the light of Leopold’s ideas and critique.