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963629.133964
In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions—predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc.—intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou, and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this talk, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: (i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; (ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.
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967484.134035
The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato ’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world ’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.
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969383.134058
A sentential connective ⋆ is said to be univocal, relative to a formal system F for a sentential logic containing ⋆ iff any two connectives ⋆1 and ⋆2 which satisfy the same F rules (and axioms) as ⋆ are such that similar formulas involving ⋆ and ⋆2 are inter-derivable in F . To be more precise, suppose is a unary connective. Then is univocal relative to F iff for any ⋆1 and ⋆2 satisfying the same principles as ⋆ in F, we have ⋆1α ⊢F 2 . And, if is binary, then is univocal relative to F iff for any 1 and 2 satisfying the same principles as ⋆ in F , we have α ⋆1 ⊢F α ⋆2 . In order to illustrate this definition of univocity, it is helpful to begin with a simple historical example.
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969422.134067
There seems to be such a thing as property inheritance, where x inherits a property F from y which has F in a non-derivative way. Here are some examples of this phenomenon on various theories:
I inherit mass from my molecules. …
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972912.134075
This paper interrogates the concept of luck in cancer diagnosis. I argue that while it might have some utility for individuals, at the clinical and research level, the concept impedes important prevention efforts and misdirects sources of blame in a cancer diagnosis. Such use, in fact, has the possibility of harming already vulnerable efforts at ameliorating social determinants of health and should therefore be eliminated from research and clinical contexts.
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981927.134082
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. …
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1029134.134089
We set up a general framework for higher order probabilities. A simple HOP (Higher Order Probability space) consists of a probability space and an operation PR, such that, for every event A and every real closed interval A, PR(A ,A) is the event that A’s "true" probability lies in A. (The "true" probability can be construed here either as the objective probability, or the probability assigned by an expert, or the one assigned eventually in a fuller state of knowledge.) In a general HOP the operation PR has also an additional argument ranging over an ordered set of time-points, or, more generally, over a partially ordered set of stages; PR({A,t,A) is the event that A's probability at stage ¢ lies in 4. First we investigate simple HOPs and then the general ones. Assuming some intuitively justified axioms, we derive the most general structure of such a space. We also indicate various connections with modal logic.
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1070743.134097
The debate over God’s existence starts to look very different once you take on board the following insight:
We should not expect a perfect being to create the best possible world (or universe), but rather the best possible multiverse. …
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1178853.134104
Welcome to the December leisurely cruise:
Wherever we are sailing, assume that it’s warm. This is an overview of our first set of readings for December from my Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to get beyond the statistics wars (CUP 2018): [SIST]–Excursion 3 Tour II–(although I already snuck in one of the examples from 3.4, Cox’s weighing machine). …
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1203638.134113
Theories of ‘actual causation’ aim to provide an informative guide for assessing which events cause which others in circumstances where almost everything else is known: which other events occurred or did not occur, and how (if at all) the occurrence or non-occurrence of a particular event (regarded as values of a variable) can depend on speci c other events (or their absence), also regarded as values of variables. The ultimate aim is a theory that can agreeably be applied in causally fraught circumstances of technology, the law, and everyday life, where the identi cation of relevant features is not immediate and judgements of causation are entwined with judgements of moral or legal responsibility. Joseph Halpern’s Actual Causality is the latest and most extensive addition to this e ort, carried out in a tradition that holds causation to be di erence making.
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1203666.134123
Should metaphysics be informed by the results of contemporary science? Should it be naturalized? The debate surrounding these and similar questions is one of the most vigorous in contemporary theoretical philosophy. However, until now many positions have only been roughly sketched out, and there has been very limited dialogue between the proponents of naturalization and the defenders of traditional metaphysics. This is unfortunate, considering the fact that the status and legitimacy of an entire philosophical sub-discipline is at stake.
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1203693.134134
Ryckman’s work derives its generic title from its being part of the series Routledge Philosophers, which features monographs on philosophers from Plato to Heidegger. His opening statement that ‘Einstein was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher in any customary sense’ (p. 1) seems an unnecessarily apologetic start since, among the Routledge philosophers, we also nd Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin, neither of whom would count as ‘philosophers in any customary sense’. But their work, like Einstein’s, has profoundly transformed our understanding of the world and, like Einstein, they have articulated explicit re ections that might well be classi ed as philosophical.
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1203720.134144
Debates on the ontology of space used to gesture at some root in history—of philosophical groundings of dynamics and gravitation theory—a history as old as the physics it engaged with. In our century, however, this tribute to the philosophical past has become an absent-minded nod, a ritual invocation of credos whose real origins are now occulted by mythopoiesis. A regrettable outcome, in many ways, but not entirely unexpected. History of philosophy of science has matured greatly, and the threshold of admission to its peerage has gone up dramatically—it is now too high for most full-time workers in ‘general’ philosophy of science to pass. Conversely, the latter eld has taken a broadly naturalistic bent, and turned away from (philosophical) history as a source of insight. Instead, it often nds analytic metaphysics a more congenial interlocutor. Hard-headed spectators might nd it a bit self-serving; historians are a demanding bunch, whereas latter-day metaphysicians are kind to anyone who does not mind relying on personal intuitions.
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1203747.134153
This collection of nine free-standing essays o ers a fresh perspective on science and language and a fascinating critique of much of contemporary philosophy. The essays can be grouped as follows: Chapter 1 serves as an introduction and a brief for pragmatism; Chapters 2 and 5 concern science; Chapters 3 and 4 deal with historical gures (Leibniz and Duhem); Chapters 6 and 7 critique contemporary analytic metaphysics; and Chapters 8 and 9 discuss language and mathematics. The style is opinionated, contrarian, humorous, and expansive. The essays focus on case studies that develop in detail some of the themes of Wilson’s earlier Wandering Signi cance ([2006]). Though they avoid general dogma, they re ect a uni ed critical perspective organized around puzzles that emerge when one considers the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the practical successes that attend conceptual development in applied mathematics. Those already familiar with Wilson’s work will appreciate the novel developments in this long-awaited publication; those new to his work, despite its sometimes technical challenges and hard-to-tame aspects, will nd ample reward in the surprising new light it sheds on contemporary philosophical issues in language and science.
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1203802.134161
For a few years now there have been strange rumblings emanating from Exeter. Many of them have been coming from the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, Egenis, and the process philosophy research-group set up by John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, with Stephan Guttinger and Anne Sophie Meincke. Nicholson and Dupré are the editors of this collection, and its publication marks the conclusion of their ve-year ‘PROBIO’ project, collecting together the contributions from their rst major workshop, ‘Process Philosophy of Biology’, alongside others. And while they may object to the suggested metaphysical implication, I’m happy to say this is a substantial contribution to discussions of process in analytic philosophy of biology.
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1203831.13417
The publication of Saunders Mac Lane’s ([1971]) Categories for the Working Mathematician (CWM) was a signal event in the history of category theory. This in uential textbook grew out of the recognition that there had emerged a well-established body of material that one might consider ‘basic’ category theory, and that it provided an architecture of concepts (such as categories, functors, limits, and adjoints) that uni ed many areas of mathematics. One of the explicit aims of CWM was thus to transmit this meta-mathematical lingua franca to mathematicians in other sub elds.
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1203860.134181
Is philosophy of science best carried out at a ne-grained level, focusing on the theories and methods of individual sciences? Or is there still room for a general philosophy of science, for the study of philosophical questions about science as such? For Samuel Schindler, the answer to the last question is a resounding ‘yes!’, and his book Theoretical Virtues in Science is an unapologetic attempt to grapple with what he regards as three key questions for philosophy of science-in-general: What are the features—the virtues—that characterize good scienti c theories? What role do these virtues play in scienti c inquiry? And what do they allow us, as philosophers, to conclude about reality?
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1203888.134197
The historical sciences appear to present a challenge for mainstream views about the epistemology of science, which have largely been developed with the physical sciences in mind. While debates over realism about microphysical entities still continue, what are we to make of the epistemic situation of historical scientists? The objects of their investigation, namely, historical entities and processes, are, like microphysical entities, not directly observable, but unlike microphysical entities, they are unmanipulable. As Derek Turner ([2007]) has argued, this appears to put historical scientists in a worse situation, epistemically, than microphysicists. But most philosophers (I presume) would not want to be anti-realists about the entities and processes of the past. What, then, is the proper attitude we should have towards the historical sciences? And might thinking about this question provide us with insights that we could direct back towards more traditional debates about the epistemology of science?
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1231534.134213
In 1979 Bob Dylan became a born again Christian, and worse, released three albums of songs about God. About this perceived betrayal, I was too young to have an opinion; it was part of a lore I learned much later. …
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1254746.134224
Expected value maximization gives plausible guidance for moral decision-making under uncertainty in many situations. But it has extremely unappetizing implications in ‘Pascalian’ situations involving tiny probabilities of extreme outcomes. This paper shows, first, that under realistic levels of ‘background uncertainty’ about sources of value independent of one’s present choice, a widely accepted and apparently innocuous principle—stochastic dominance—requires that prospects be ranked by the expected value of their consequences in most ordinary choice situations. But second, this implication does not hold when differences in expected value are driven by tiny probabilities of extreme outcomes. Stochastic dominance therefore lets us draw a surprisingly principled line between ‘ordinary’ and ‘Pascalian’ situations, providing a powerful justification for de facto expected value maximization in the former context while permitting deviations in the latter. Drawing this distinction is incompatible with an in-principle commitment to maximizing expected value, but does not require too much departure from decision-theoretic orthodoxy: it is compatible, for instance, with the view that moral agents must maximize the expectation of a utility function that is an increasing function of moral value.
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1261732.134241
Is stand-up comedy akin to psychotherapy? Yes, argues psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir in Animal Joy:
As part of my research … I had frequented comedy clubs and noticed how each performance, had it been delivered in a different tone of voice and context, could have been the text of a therapy session. …
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1288608.13425
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a book arguing that the Earth revolves around the Sun: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. This is sometimes painted as a sudden triumph of rationality over the foolish yet long-standing belief that the Sun and all the planets revolve around the Earth. …
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1319260.134262
In this work we present an invariant-objective formalization of multi-screen entanglement grounded on Tensorial Quantum Mechanics (TQM) [12]. This new tensorial formulation of the theory of quanta —basically, an extension of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics— allows not only to escape the many problems present in the current account of multi-partite entanglement grounded on the Dirac-Von Neumann Standard formulation of Quantum Mechanics (SQM) but, more importantly, to consistently represent entanglement phenomena when considering a multiplicity of different screens and detectors.
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1319326.134278
In recent years, some productive connections have grown up between Pittsburgh School philosophy, which derives from the rich philosophical investigations of Wilfrid Sellars and his students, and certain realist-inclined corners of the pragmatist philosophical tradition, particularly those focussed on Charles Peirce. These two research communities arguably are in many ways fellow travellers who increasingly find themselves sharing common themes. These themes include critiques of metaphysical realism and representationalist semantics in favour of an appreciation of the sociality of meaning and truth, a determined antireductionism about normativity in the face of ongoing positivist currents in mainstream philosophy, and thoughtful and original discussions of how the natural sciences might be used to ground naturalistic philosophy methodologically rather than ontologically. It is also interesting to observe how both philosophical perspectives were founded on strong critiques of modern philosophy’s Cartesian legacy, including its methodological individualism and its supposed ‘foundation’ of radical doubt.
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1333546.134293
The standard way of thinking about ethics distinguishes axiological questions (about value) from deontic ones (about right action). On this way of carving things up, it’s the deontic question that’s central to ethical debates—after all, a non-consequentialist could agree with a consequentialist about which action results in the best outcome, yet disagree about which action is right. …
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1343933.134304
Plutarch of Chaeronea in Boeotia (ca. 45–120 CE) was a
Platonist philosopher, best known to the general public as author of
his “Parallel Lives” of paired Greek and Roman statesmen
and military leaders. He was a voluminous writer, author also of a
collection of “Moralia” or “Ethical Essays,”
mostly in dialogue format, many of them devoted to philosophical
topics, but not at all limited to ethics. Plutarch’s significance as a philosopher, on which this article
concentrates, lies in his attempt to do justice to Plato’s work
as a whole, and to reconstruct a coherent and credible philosophical
system out of it, as Antiochus (1st c. BCE) tried to do and as
Plotinus will also do later (204–270 CE).
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1370066.134311
The aim of this paper is to examine in detail the similarities and dissimilarities between Werner Heisenberg’s account of closed theories and Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. My analysis draws on a little-known discussion that took place between Heisenberg and Kuhn in 1963, in which Heisenberg, having just read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, compares Kuhn’s views to his own account of closed theories. I conclude that while Heisenberg and Kuhn share a holist conception of theories, a revolutionary model of theory change, and even a notion of incommensurability, their views diverge fundamentally when it comes to the issue of scientific realism. I show that, contrary to popular opinion, Heisenberg is not an instrumentalist, but rather a pluralistic realist.
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1370801.134318
If a part of x has dignity, x has dignity. Only persons have dignity. So, a person cannot be a proper part of a non-person. (1–2)
A person cannot be a proper part of a person. So, a person cannot be a proper part of anything. …
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1373822.134326
As a warmup to his arguments against the existence of ordinary objects, Trenton Merricks argues against the existence of pairs of gloves. Here’s another argument against pairs of gloves. I recently bought a pack of 200 nitrile gloves. …
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1377177.134333
Halvorson has proposed an intriguing example of a pair of theories whose categories are equivalent but which are not themselves definitionally equivalent. Moreover, it seems obvious that these theories are not equivalent in any intuitive sense. We offer a new topological proof that these theories are not definitionally equivalent. However, the underlying theorem for this claim has a converse that shows a surprising collection of theories, which are superficially similar to those in Halvorson’s example, turn out to be definitionally equivalent after all. This offers some new insight into what is going “wrong” in the Halvorson example.