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1855213.284169
Overwhelmingly, philosophers tend to work on the assumption that epistemic justification is a normative status that supervenes on the relation between a cognitive subject, some body of evidence, and a particular proposition (or “hypothesis”). This article will explore some motivations for moving in the direction of a rather different view. On this view, we are invited to think of the relevant epistemic norm(s) as applying more widely to the competent exercise of epistemic agency, where it is understood that cognitive subjects are simultaneously engaged in a number of different epistemic pursuits (distinct “lines of inquiry”), each placing irreconcilable demands on our limited cognitive resources. In effect, adopting this view would require shifting our normative epistemic concern away from the question of how a subject stands with respect to the evidence bearing on the hypothesis at stake in any one line of inquiry, and over onto the question of how well they cope with the inherent risks of epistemic resource management across several lines of inquiry. While this conclusion brings to light important connections between practical and epistemic rationality, it does not collapse the distinction between them. It does, however, constitute a step in the direction of a more systematically developed account of “non-ideal epistemology.”
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1890551.284324
Gingerich uses examples from literature and song to introduce a kind of freedom he calls ‘spontaneous freedom’. He argues that spontaneous freedom is central to our ordinary talk of freedom, but overlooked by the philosophical literature on free will, which focuses on a kind of freedom that is constitutively moral r. I argue that spontaneous freedom is the standard kind of freedom, the constitutively moral kind. What is distinctive about Gingerich’s examples isn’t that they involve a new kind of freedom, but that they involve an agent feeling their freedom.
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1915119.284357
Objective: In reviewing the literature on various topics in the field of ’ageing’, similar issues kept resurfacing. To avoid redundancy, I decided to compile these recurring themes into a single discussion. The goal here is to examine the utility of the current concept of ’ageing’. In particular, this discussion considers how well this concept serves in addressing key objectives, such as measuring ’ageing’, evaluating the validity of ’ageing’ theories, assessing interventions, and examining the validity of experiments conducted in the field of ’ageing’.
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1915150.284379
This study investigates the potential of deterministic systems, specifically large language models (LLMs), to exhibit the functional capacities of moral agency and compatibilist free will. We develop a functional definition of free will grounded in Dennett’s compatibilist framework, building on an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation that integrates Shannon’s information theory, Dennett’s compatibilism, and Floridi’s philosophy of information. This framework emphasizes the importance of reason-responsiveness and value alignment in determining moral responsibility rather than requiring metaphysical libertarian free will. Shannon’s theory highlights the role of processing complex information in enabling adaptive decision-making, while Floridi’s philosophy reconciles these perspectives by conceptualizing agency as a spectrum, allowing for a graduated view of moral status based on a system’s complexity and responsiveness. Our analysis of LLMs’ decision-making in moral dilemmas demonstrates their capacity for rational deliberation and their ability to adjust choices in response to new information and identified inconsistencies. Thus, they exhibit features of a moral agency that align with our functional definition of free will. These results challenge traditional views on the necessity of consciousness for moral responsibility, suggesting that systems with self-referential reasoning capacities can instantiate degrees of free will and moral reasoning in artificial and biological contexts. This study proposes a parsimonious framework for understanding free will as a spectrum that spans artificial and biological systems, laying the groundwork for further interdisciplinary research on agency and ethics in the artificial intelligence era.
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1915214.284404
The distinction between pure states and mixed states is a kernel ingredient of what is considered to be the standard formulation of quantum mechanics and plays today a kernel role in foundational debates about the meaning of quantum probability, the separability of quantum systems, the definition and measure of entanglement, etc. In this work we attempt to expose the many inconsistencies introduced by this distinction and the serious consequences this has for many ongoing research programs within quantum physics which apply these notions uncritically.
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1915247.284429
Natural Selection has produced living beings who universally perceive they live in a 3- dimensional spatial environment well described by classical physics. However, during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it became progressively more apparent that there were critical physical phenomena that could not be understood within this framework. About one hundred years ago, after intense intellectual effort, quantum mechanics (QM) opened the door to deeper understanding. For example, the existence of stable Structures such as tables, chairs, and humans was no longer fundamentally mysterious. However, the mathematical formulation of QM requires configuration space (CS), a space of very high dimensionality that is not perceived [1, 2].
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1915286.284462
This paper challenges “biodiversity skepticism:” an inferential move that acknowledges the proliferation, heterogeneity, and lack of covariance of biodiversity measurements, and concludes that we should doubt the scientific validity of the biodiversity concept. As a way out of skepticism, philosophers have advocated for eliminating “biodiversity” from scientific inquiry, revising it, or deflating its meaning into a single measurable dimension.
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1947028.284497
I love reading about the medieval physics: you can see people struggling against mental traps, often failing, but still putting up a fight. We shouldn’t laugh at them: theoretical physicists may be stuck in their own traps today! …
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1995469.284517
ʿAyn al-Quḍāt was a first-rate philosopher, Sufi
master, theologian, legal judge, poet, and scriptural exegete. He was
a highly innovative author who wrote in both Arabic and Persian, and
whose ideas in so many domains, from cosmology and metaphysics to
epistemology and theory of love, left an indelible mark upon later
Islamic thought. His writings in Persian had a lasting influence upon
various Sufi figures and orders in Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and
particularly India, while his Arabic writings were studied in
intellectual circles throughout the Muslim east into the early modern
period, and were even influential during the time of the British
Raj.
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2001239.284546
The task that Hume explicitly sets himself in 3.2 of the Treatise is to identify the motive that renders just actions virtuous and constitutes justice as a virtue. But surprisingly, he never provides a clear account of what this motive is. This is the problem of the missing motive. The goal of this paper is to explain this problem and offer a novel solution. To set up my solution, I analyze a recent proposal from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and illustrate what it gets right and what it gets wrong. I develop a solution that retains the benefits of his proposal while addressing its defects. The result is a significant advancement in our understanding of Hume’s theory of justice.
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2001270.284567
Spinoza is often described as an ethical perfectionist—one who accepts an account of the good centered on the development of our natural capacities. Perfectionists typically accept a perfectionist theory of value, in which the properties of good and evil are grounded in a normative property of perfection. Yet I argue that Spinoza rejects a perfectionist theory of value because he believes it conflicts with the doctrine of necessitarianism. This leads him to conclude that attributions of perfection in ethical contexts must be regarded as fictions. If Spinoza is indeed an ethical perfectionist, his perfectionism must be grounded in a theory of value that is not itself perfectionist.
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2001300.284585
I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the resources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with at least some aspects of the reason-responsiveness theories. Moreover, by treating practical knowledge and practical understanding as gradable notions, the paper offers a strategy to respond to enduring objections against cognitivism about intention, control, and autonomy.
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2001329.284606
Aristotle’s account of the virtue of justice has been regarded as one of the least successful aspects of his ethics. Among the most serious criticisms lodged against his views are (i) that he fails to identify the proper subject matter of justice (LeBar 2020), (ii) that he wrongly identifies the characteristic motives relevant for justice and injustice (Williams 1980), and (iii) that his account is parochial, i.e., that it fails to correctly recognize or characterize our obligations of justice to those outside our community (Annas 1995; Curzer 2012). Indeed, Mark LeBar has recently argued that, although Aristotle’s eudaimonist framework remains the most promising metaethical strategy to ground justice as a virtue of individual human beings, the normative content of his theory is so flawed that neo-Aristotelians ought to adopt a Kantian theory of justice that centers on according respect to persons (LeBar 2020). My aim in this paper is to defend Aristotle’s views from these criticisms in order to show that it holds promise as an account of justice as a virtue. Notably, neo-Aristotelians have generally neglected the topic of justice, despite its centrality to Aristotle’s ethics and to our own social lives. I argue that they ought to take Aristotle’s account seriously as a starting point for their own theorizing, while recognizing that it needs modification on some points.
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2001358.284625
What is the relation between desert and other values such as equality, priority for the worse off, and utility? According to the common (pluralist) view, desert and these other values reflect distinct concerns: some are about distributive justice, some about retributive justice, and some (most clearly, utility) are not concerned with justice at all. However, another (monistic) view holds that while desert is a basic value, other values are merely derived from it. This controversy is relevant, for instance, to allocative decisions and criminal punishment, where we need to know if other values should be balanced against desert. Yet, despite its theoretical significance and practical importance, this topic is underexplored. Aiming to fill this gap, we consider the arguments for and against the competing views. We demonstrate that the interaction between desert and other values raises a difficult dilemma: there are powerful arguments for and against both the pluralistic and the monistic accounts of desert. Indeed, we suggest that this dilemma is due to the unique nature of desert. Unlike other values, desert, especially its more robust forms, does not only sometimes conflict with competing considerations that favor different courses of actions, but rather seems to dispel other values even as pro tanto ones.
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2001388.284653
The main source of perplexity raised by Leibniz’s (mathematical) argument against the soul of the world stems from the idea that it is the infinity of the universe that precludes it from having a soul. But if this is so, how is it possible that organic bodies, which, having infinitely many parts, are also infinite, are endowed with a soul? The present paper aims to provide a new solution to this puzzle. The solution explains the difference between the body and the universe by looking at how their respective parts are arranged. It is the arrangement of the parts of the body that allows a body to be divided into infinitely many parts whilst, at the same time, having a finite magnitude. By contrast, the way in which the alleged parts of the world are arranged makes it impossible that the world has a finite magnitude: the world cannot be a whole, and so it cannot have a soul. The consequence is that it does not matter how many parts bodies have, but only that they have a finite magnitude. In this case, bodies respect the Part-Whole Principle (the whole is bigger than any of its proper parts) and therefore can be described as finite wholes with parts.
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2001421.284673
Against philosophical orthodoxy, Kornblith (2012) has mounted an empirically grounded critique of the epistemic value of reflection. In this paper, I argue that this recent critique fails even if we concede that the empirical facts are as Kornblith says they are, and assume that reliability is the only determinant of epistemic value. The critique fails because it seeks to undermine the reliability of reflection in general but targets only one of its variants, namely individual reflection, while neglecting social reflection. This critique comprises two arguments which have a common structure: they both impose a requirement on the reliability of reflection, but deny, on empirical grounds, that the requirement is met. One argument imposes an introspection requirement, which I reject as superfluous. I show how reflection can proceed without introspection. The other argument imposes an efficacy requirement. This requirement concerns whether reflection is causally efficacious i.e., whether it leads us to change our minds for the better. I accept this as a genuine requirement. Even if we concede that individual reflection fails to meet this requirement, I argue that we have not been given sufficient evidence to believe that social reflection is bound to violate this requirement. Furthermore, my analysis of the conditions under which social re- flection works best provides us with prima facie grounds for optimism regarding the reliability of social reflection. Ultimately, then, these arguments fail to undermine the epistemic value of reflection in general.
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2001454.284693
Some words express different meanings in different contexts, such as “bank” and “I.“ Linguistic alethic pluralists claim that “true” is another such word. This is a surprising thesis that holds implications for debates about the nature of truth. Yet it is in need of careful elaboration and evaluation. I describe several versions of linguistic alethic pluralism, alongside tests that natural language theorists use to identify different types of meaning variation. I also consider empirical studies that have recently targeted the use of “true.” I conclude that there is currently no evidence for linguistic alethic pluralism, and unlikely to be any forthcoming.
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2001484.284712
If you ought to do something, does it follow that you are able to do it? The Kantian thesis that ought-implies-can seems intuitive and is widely accepted.1 It is neatly expressed in the Latin motto: Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur: No-one is bound to do the impossible. Nevertheless, there are several powerful purported counterexamples. In this paper I will apply an independently motivated contextualism about ‘ought’ to the debate. The idea is that, as ‘ought’ has different meanings depending on the context in which it is uttered, there are contexts where ‘ought-implies-can’ is true and contexts where it is false. Specifically, we can distinguish an ideal sense of ‘ought’, a deliberative (or guidance) sense of ‘ought’, and a hypological (involving praise or blame) sense of ‘ought’. I will argue that ought-implies-can is true in the deliberative sense, false in the ideal sense, and false in the hypological sense unless the agent is blameworthy for the inability.
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2014688.284732
Are you interested in using category-theoretic methods to tackle problems outside of pure mathematics? Then you might like the Adjoint School. You’ll work online on a research project with a mentor and a team of other students for several months. …
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2065983.284751
It’s standard for consequentialists to distinguish “criteria of rightness” (or what considerations, in theory, have fundamental normative force) from “decision procedures” (or what real-world practical norms are worth endorsing and inculcating). …
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2082285.28477
According to Ex-Post Average Utilitarianism, prospect ? is at least as good as prospect ? if and only if the expected average well-being is at least as great in ? as in ?. Relative to the ex-ante approach of taking the average of peoples’ expectations, this ex-post approach has the advantage of not needing well-defined expectations of well-being for contingent people — people who exist in some but not all states of nature. Nevertheless, we show that Ex-Post Average Utilitarianism can oppose the interests of all affected persons. Moreover, we show this without relying on any comparisons of expectations of well-being for contingent people: Our objection can be made with cases in which no contingently-existing person is affected. Finally, we show that our objection can be made even if lifetime well-being has only an ordinal structure (in which case prior objections to Average Utilitarianism would not apply).
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2112408.284802
I have elsewhere shown the consistency of the theory commonly called New Foundations or NF, originally proposed by W. v. O. Quine in his paper “New foundations for mathematical logic”. In this note, I review that original paper and may eventually review some other sources one might consult for information about this theory . Quine himself made some errors in this paper and later in his discussion of NF, and there are other characteristic difficulties that people have with this system which such a review might allow us to discuss.
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2119514.284831
Thurston’s paper Shapes of polyhedra and triangulations of the sphere is really remarkable. I’m writing about it in my next column for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Here’s a draft — which is also a much more detailed version of an earlier blog post here. …
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2145747.284852
We are starting on Tour II of Excursion 1 (4th stop). The 3rd stop is in an earlier blog post. As I promised, this cruise of SIST is leisurely. I have not yet shared new reflections in the comments–but I will! …
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2145909.284877
Scientists are once again worried about ideologically driven bad science. We explain that this problem results from the conjunction of two worthy values that make science susceptible to recurrence of such situations. The solution is to acknowledge the social, political, economic, and ideological frameworks in which science is embedded.
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2145967.284899
Paper accepted to the 2024 edition of the Philosophy of Science Association (New Orleans) and for publication in the related special issue in Philosophy of science. This version of the article has been accepted for publication after peer review but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections.
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2145993.284922
One may demarcate at least three major forms of philosophical antirealism: scientific, sceptical, and transcendental. Each regards certain systems as unknowable. And for each, it has been argued that even if the nature of a system is unknowable, its structure may still be known. Structuralism in this sense is as yet ununified: even though structure is supposed to solve a similar problem in each case, proposals tend to be formulated in ways that make them specific to their respective contexts. Here I present a unified framework for making claims about only the structure of a target system which are not undermined by any of the three forms of antirealism. The framework may therefore provide a baseline for our knowledge of the world which is safe from most philosophical antirealism. The defining characteristic of my approach is how it leverages the role that an unknowable system plays in underlying experiences. I develop a formula for sentences making claims about the structures of target systems and I account for the representation of systems by mathematical structures as well.
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2187680.284947
Philosophical interest in structural injustice has risen sharply since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (Young 2011). In short, a structural injustice occurs when social, economic, or political processes operate to produce an unjust outcome, where those processes cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents (regardless of whether those agents are individuals or collectives, such as governments or corporations). Paradigm examples of structural injustices include widespread homelessness and exploitative labour practices—both of which are examples analysed by Young.
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2203647.284973
The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.
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2203675.284994
Despite all the encyclopedic knowledge that biological sciences have accumulated regarding living beings, their physiology and behaviour, their molecular bases, their development and evolution, it is still frustratingly elusive to find a neat and uncontroversial answer to the (apparently) simple question “What are living beings?” The traditional approach to answering this question has been by means of definitions. Many have been proposed in the literature over the years (each one emphasising different aspects of living beings, such as biochemical composition, metabolism, thermodynamics, evolution, or self-organisation), but none have achieved transversal acceptance in the community (Sagan 1970; Pályi, Zucchi and Caglioti 2002; Tsokolov 2009; Bedau and Cleland 2010; Trifonov 2011; Kolb 2018). So much is the case that some have declared, with resignation, that it is impossible to find such a definition and that we should better forget the whole question (Machery 2012).