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2427971.791324
The paper examines critically some recently published views by Ramsey on the contrast between ab initio and parametrized theories. I argue that, all things being equal, ab initio calculations are indeed regarded more highly in the physics and chemistry communities. A case study on density functional approaches in theoretical chemistry is presented in order to re-examine the question of ab initio and parametrized approaches in a contemporary context.
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2461295.791429
The optimism bias is a cognitive bias where individuals overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Associated with improved quality of life, optimism bias is considered to be adaptive and is a promising avenue of research for mental health interventions in conditions where individuals lack optimism such as major depressive disorder. Here we lay the groundwork for future research on optimism as an intervention by introducing a domain general formal model of optimism bias, which can be applied in different task settings. Employing the active inference framework, we propose a model of the optimism bias as high precision likelihood biased towards positive outcomes. First, we simulate how optimism may be lost during development by exposure to negative events. We then ground our model in the empirical literature by showing how the developmentally acquired differences in optimism are expressed in a belief updating task typically used to assess optimism bias. Finally, we show how optimism affects action in a modified two-armed bandit task. Our model and the simulations it affords provide a computational basis for understanding how optimism bias may emerge, how it may be expressed in standard tasks used to assess optimism, and how it affects agents’ decision-making and actions; in combination, this provides a basis for future research on optimism as a mental health intervention.
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2485676.791443
In the foundations of quantum mechanics (QM), one important distinction is that drawn by Harrigan and Spekkens (2010), between ‘ψ-ontic’ and ‘ψ-epistemic’ approaches. Here, recall, is how they put the distinction: We call a hidden variable model ψ-ontic if every complete physical state or ontic state in the theory is consistent with only one pure quantum state; we call it ψ-epistemic if there exist on-tic states that are consistent with more than one pure quantum state. (Harrigan and Spekkens , p. 126) Famously, ψ-epistemic approaches are at risk of falling prey to the no-go theorem of Pusey et al. (2012) (the ‘PBR theorem’). That being said, there are other approaches to QM which might be described (if only loosely) as ‘epistemic’, which (at least prima facie) reject the ontological models framework in which the PBR theorem is situated, and (prima facie, ipso facto) manage to evade it. These approaches include many of the ‘epistemic-pragmatist’ approaches which are the subject of the article under review here.
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2485722.791451
The Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect highlights the fundamental role of electromagnetic potentials in quantum mechanics. While extensively studied in the static case, the impact of a time-varying magnetic flux on the electron’s phase shift remains an open and debated question. In this paper, we derive the AB phase shift for a time-dependent magnetic vector potential and show that it is proportional to the time average of enclosed magnetic flux. Our analysis reveals that the AB phase is continuously accumulated as the electron traverses its path, challenging the conventional view that it emerges instantaneously at the point of interference. This generalized AB effect may provide deeper insight into the role of gauge-dependent potentials in quantum mechanics and also suggest novel experimental tests using alternating or pulsed magnetic flux.
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2485757.791459
This article concerns various foundational aspects of the periodic system of the elements. These issues include the dual nature of the concept of an “element” to include element as a “basic substance” and as a “simple substance.” We will discuss the question of whether there is an optimal form of the periodic table, including whether the left-step table fulfils this role. We will also discuss the derivation or explanation of the [n ⫹ ᐉ , n] or Madelung rule for electron-shell filling and whether indeed it is important to attempt to derive this rule from first principles. In particular, we examine the views of two chemists, Henry Bent and Eugen Schwarz, who have independently addressed many of these issues.
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2487797.791466
Here’s an option that is underexplored: theistic Humeanism. There are two paths to it. The path from orthodoxy: Start with a standard theistic concurrentism: whenever we have a creaturely cause C with effect E, E only eventuates because God concurs, i.e., God cooperates with the creaturely causal relation. …
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2487798.791473
It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:
- everything is cancellable—including giving intellectual arguments against specific DEI policies, or teaching students about a Chinese filler word (“ne-ge”) that sounds a little like the N-word, or else
- nothing is cancellable—not even tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,” shortly before getting empowered to remake the US federal government. …
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2507999.79148
This post is free for all, so feel free to share it widely if you feel so inclined. And please ‘like’ it via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. …
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2529770.791488
Picking up where I left off in a 2023 post, I will (finally!) return to Gardiner and Zaharos’s discussion of sensitivity in epistemology and its connection to my notion of severity. But before turning to Parts II (and III), I’d better reblog Part I. …
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2533682.791497
In an ingenious and provocative paper, “Individualism, Type Specimens, and the Scrutability of Species Membership”, Alex Levine argues that “species membership, by which I mean the relation that connects a given organism, o, with the species S of which it is part, is a fundamentally contingent matter” (2001, 333). He finds this contingency in conflict with the role of “type specimens” in biology. He points out that “naming a species requires collecting and preserving one, or at most a very few specimens of the species in question” (327). David Hull has the following view of this practice: The sole function of the type specimen is to be the name bearer for its species. No matter in which species the type specimen is placed, its name goes with it. (Hull 1982, 484) Levine takes Hull’s view, together with the “rigid designation” theory of reference, to entail that any organism selected as the type specimen for a species is necessarily a member of that species. This generates the conflict that Levine sums up neatly as follows: “qua organism, the type specimen belongs to its respective species contingently, while qua type specimen, it belongs necessarily”; he finds this “paradoxical” (Levine 2001, 334).
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2533997.791506
Until the ‘70s, the received view in the theory of reference was that the referent of a term was identified by certain descriptions that competent speakers associated with the term; for example, the referent of the proper name ‘Aristotle’ was determined by its association with a description like ‘the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great’; the reference of the natural kind term ‘tiger’, by a description like ‘large feline with yellow and black stripes and a white belly’. But then came the revolution in the theory of reference, stemming particularly from the works of Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975). It was argued that this “Description Theory” was fundamentally wrong for many terms, including ‘Aristotle’ and ‘tiger’. “Ignorance and error” arguments were particularly influential. People are often too ignorant to supply descriptions that would uniquely identify the referents of their terms. Most of us refer successfully with ‘elm’, but could not come close to describing those trees well enough to distinguish them from other trees like beeches. Speakers can also associate erroneous descriptions with a term; some who use ‘Einstein’ to refer successfully to the famous physicist wrongly think he invented the atomic bomb.
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2534012.791516
In our paper, “The reference of proper names” (2018), we raised and rebutted the “New-Meaning” objection to our methodology. Our rebuttal rested on theoretical considerations and experimental results. In “Do the Gödel vignettes involve a new descriptivist meaning?”, Nicolò D’Agruma provides an interesting argument against our theoretical considerations (but does not address the experimental evidence). Our present paper argues against D’Agruma. So, our original rebuttal of the objection still stands. We offer further evidence against the objection.
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2534028.791526
Una Stojnic´ urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnic´’s theories of demonstrations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet the demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnic´’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnic´ strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning.
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2534100.791535
Stojnić holds the radical view that coherence relations determine the reference of context-sensitive language. I argue against this from the theoretical perspective presented in Overlooking Conventions (2021). Theoretical interest in language comes from an interest in thoughts and their communication. A language is a system of symbols, constituted by a set of governing rules, used (inter alia) to communicate the meanings (contents) of thoughts. Thought meanings, hence speaker meanings, are explanatorily prior to semantic meanings. So, we start our consideration of the theoretical place of coherence by considering the bearing of coherence on thought meanings. The paper argues that a person can have any thought at all, however incoherent. So, a thought’s meaning is independent of its coherence. Any thought can be expressed in an utterance. The semantic meaning of any utterance governed by the linguistic rules will be the meaning of the thought it expresses. So, the utterance’s meaning is independent of its coherence. The paper concludes that coherence has no place in the theory of meaning or reference. Nonetheless, it has a place in the theory of communication. I suspect that the error exemplifi es the widespread confusion of the metaphysics of meaning with the epistemology of interpretation.
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2572968.791543
This entry surveys the literature surrounding certain kinds of views
about metaphysics. In particular, the central concern here will be
with critiques of metaphysics and responses to those
critiques. And so the views under discussion can be thought of as
metametaphysical views, or metaontological
views. Section 1
distinguishes the views to be discussed—namely, realist and
anti-realist views about metaphysics—from views of
another kind (namely, realist and anti-realist views in
metaphysics). Then the survey of views begins in
section 2. The survey is organized around anti-realist views—i.e.,
views that offer critiques of metaphysics—and realist responses
to the anti-realist critiques.
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2578807.791551
Individual relativism may initially seem to do justice to the idea of our autonomy: our moral rules are set by ourselves. But this attractiveness of relativism disappears as soon as we realize that our beliefs are largely not up to us—that, as the saying goes, we catch them like we catch the flu. …
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2601070.791558
In this Special Issue, we explore the rise of non-empirical physics from a historical perspective. This exercise is meant, furthermore, as an attempt to open new pathways in contemporary history and philosophy of physics. We use this introduction to provide the theoretical background necessary to flesh out this program and to appreciate the manner in which the articles in the collection substantiate it. To do this, we proceed in the following manner. First, we briefly lay out the development of contemporary philosophy of physics, and the manner in which the range of topics covered in the specialized literature expanded over the past few decades. After that, we chronicle the advent of non-empirical physics during the second half of the twentieth century, and we introduce the philosophical debates triggered by this development. These debates, as we show, did introduce new topics of discussion in philosophy of physics. However, these discussions did not arise as a deliberate attempt to add new ideas to the philosophy of physics repertoire. Instead, they emerged as a natural consequence of the historical development of physics itself. Taking this observation as our starting point, we argue that engaging with the debates around non-empirical physics, and with the historical circumstances behind their appearance, provides a more fruitful, more historically grounded approach towards updating the canon of philosophy of physics. We then single out some areas in which historical work would be particularly illuminating, and we highlight the contributions made by each of our authors. We conclude by inviting others to join the philosophical program sketched here, and to add their own insights to the ones contained in this Special Issue.
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2601087.791567
Scientific realists with traditional semantic inclinations are often pressed to explain away the distinguished series of referential failures that seem to plague our best past science. As recent debates make it particularly vivid, a central challenge is to find a reliable and principled way to assess referential success at the time a theory is still a live concern. In this paper, I argue that this is best done in the case of physics by examining whether the putative referent of a term is specifiable within the limited domain delineated by the range of parameters over which the theory at stake is empirically accurate. I first implement this selective principle into a general account of reference, building on Stathis Psillos’s works. Then, I show that this account offers a remarkably reliable basis to assess referential success before theory change in the case of effective theories. Finally, I briefly show that this account still works well with other physical examples and explain how it helps us to handle problematic cases in the history of physical sciences.
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2601122.791575
In On Madness: Understanding the Psychotic Mind, published in 2022, Richard G.T. Gipps embarks on a philosophical exploration of psychosis. Generally speaking, Gipps’s book presents an approach he calls “apophatic psychopathology” (Gipps 2022, 2), borrowing from negative (that is, apophatic) theology and its method of understanding God’s nature by seeing how it defeats the predication of even those most supreme qualities we are drawn to predicate of Him. Gipps’s central insight regarding psychotic phenomena is that we best come to understand them not positively, by predicating of the psychotic subject this or that rationally intelligible, intentional state, but instead negatively, through seeing how such predications are here defeated. Sitting down with a person suffering from psychosis requires that we develop the capacity to stay with them in their brokenness, rather than projecting onto them an intentional structure that their illness has abrogated. Gipps comments critically on the relativistic tendencies we encounter these days, concluding that people suffering from severe psychosis are not happily thought of as just living in an “alternative reality” as good as the one populated by nonpsychotic people.
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2669138.791582
[The final chapter of my undergraduate thesis on Modal Rationalism. The initial sections contrast realist vs conceptualist understandings of “metaphysical possibility”, with an eye to helping skeptical readers to grasp the core concept (e.g. …
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2716441.79159
Spontaneous collapse models use non-linear stochastic modifications of the Schrodinger equation to suppress superpositions of eigenstates of the measured observable and drive the state to an eigenstate. It was recently demonstrated that the Born rule for transition probabilities can be modeled using the linear Schrodinger equation with a Hamiltonian represented by a random matrix from the Gaussian unitary ensemble. The matrices representing the Hamiltonian at different time points throughout the observation period are assumed to be independent. Instead of suppressing superpositions, such Schrodinger evolution makes the state perform an isotropic random walk on the projective space of states. The relative frequency of reaching different eigenstates of an arbitrary observable in the random walk is shown to satisfy the Born rule. Here, we apply this methodology to investigate the behavior of a particle in the context of the double-slit experiment with measurement.
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2716457.791597
Philosophers like to tell stories about knowledge that crackle with drama. We have wizards (who deceive), adventure (kidnapping neuroscientists), and surprise endings (‘and it turns out that Brown was in Barcelona!’). A cynic might wonder whether all the whiz-bang is cover for weak material. Hilary Kornblith puts these cynical doubts to rest in this slim, elegant book about knowledge. Kornblith spins a yarn that is accessible enough for a general reader and theoretically compelling enough for epistemologists and philosophers of science. Kornblith’s story is distinctive because he takes knowledge to be a scienti c category—it’s a concept that manages to do a lot of explanatory work without all the whiz-bang.
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2716475.791607
The recent Oscar-nominated lm Maestro, both starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, concerns the personal life of composer, conductor, and polymath Leonard Bernstein. On the one hand, it depicts a life-long love story between Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre. On the other, it is a story about Bernstein’s desire for and a airs with di erent men throughout his life. I thought about this lm and the role of sexuality in Bernstein’s life while reading Of Maybugs and Men: A History and Philosophy of the Sciences of Homosexuality by Pieter Adriaens and Andreas de Block.
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2716493.791617
Valde, K. [2024]: ‘Stavros Ioannidis and Stathis Psillos’s Mechanisms in Science’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 In Mechanisms in Science: Method or Metaphysics? Ioannidis and Psillos o er a metaphysically minimal account of the concept of mechanism as it is used in science. They believe that what scientists mean when they talk about mechanisms can be adequately captured by what they call ‘causal mechanism’: ‘a mechanism is a causal pathway described in theoretical language’ (p. 3). Simply put, they argue that mechanism in science is a methodology, not an ontology. The larger aim of the book is to defend this claim on the grounds of both metaphysics and the practices of science.
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2716526.791626
Wol , J. [2024]: ‘Nina Emery’s Naturalism beyond the Limits of Science’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 Nina Emery’s book Naturalism beyond the Limits of Science is an exciting and much needed contribution to the ongoing debate over naturalistic metaphysics. The return of metaphysics—understood as the philosophical study of what the world is like—has prompted di cult questions about the relationship of this branch of philosophy to science, which is arguably our best way of addressing questions about what the world is like. Are metaphysicians o ering an alternative to scienti c theories about the world, is their work complementary, or should they feel constrained by our best scienti c theories? Emery frames these questions as a dilemma: either metaphysicians and scientists are doing the same thing, in which case, ‘what is the point of doing metaphysics at all?’ (p. 3); or else metaphysicians are doing something substantially di erent, in which case, ‘metaphysics starts to seem like a pretty mysterious enterprise’ (p. 3).
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2716544.791635
Weinberger, N. [2024]: ‘Jonah Schupbach and David Glass’s Conjunctive Explanations’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 Explanation is a strange beast. While theories of explanation have been central to the last century of philosophy of science, explanation itself is not a rst-order concept in most scienti c theories. Analysing explanation is not a matter of unpacking an antecedently determinate scienti c term, but rather part of a philosophical project of systematizing the methods, outputs, and aims of science. Unsurprisingly, there are many di erent approaches to pursuing this, including those rooted in psychology, linguistics, history, probability theory, formal epistemology, and causal inference, and these approaches have been pursued largely independently. It thus seems fair to ask: is there any epistemic or cognitive bene t to pursuing this heterogeneous set of projects under the label of ‘explanation’?
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2716564.791644
Liston, M. [2024]: ‘Penelope Maddy’s A Plea for Natural Philosophy’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 This collection comprises Penelope Maddy’s latest thoughts on second philosophy, a version of methodological naturalism she has been developing since the 1990s. In contrast with rst philosophy, second philosophy eschews epistemological apriorism and transcendental approaches to objectivity, embracing instead the methods of science as the most reliable route to nding out about the world. Maddy characterizes the method by showing how an ideal inquirer with unlimited time and resources tackles philosophical questions: she begins with ordinary perceptual beliefs, proceeds to generalization and experimentation, and develops theories and techniques of con rmation, always revising as she goes. Maddy’s own work embodies this ideal. The eleven essays, ve new and six post-2010, are divided into four groups: method (essays 1 and 2), scepticism (essays 3–5), logic and language (essays 6–8), and mathematics (essays 9–11). Those familiar with Maddy’s work will appreciate the novel developments here; those new to it will be rewarded by the light it sheds not only on methodological naturalism, but also on the various topics she takes up.
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2716582.791653
In his paper ‘The Road since Structure’ ([1991]), the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn emphasized the parallels between his own theory of scienti c development and biological evolution. His theory had been introduced almost thirty years before, in 1962, in the well-known book The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions. Three decades later, Kuhn showed that scienti c revolutions—those episodes in which a certain community of experts leaves behind a set of paradigmatic problems and problem-solutions to adopt a new one—split the scienti c community into two or more sub-groups, each of which in turn devotes its e orts to developing new problem-solutions for new problems. Scienti c development has thus the appearance of ‘a layman’s diagram for a biological evolutionary tree’ (Kuhn [1991], p. 98). Each new branch in that tree usually deals with increasingly specialized issues with increasing success, and this is part of the evidence of scienti c progress. Communication between these specialities tends to be limited. Kuhn’s lexical theory helped to show why, and provided reason to think of this limitation as a welcome consequence.
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2716602.791662
A few remarkable examples of alternative cosmological theories are shown, ranging from a compilation of variations on the Standard Model (inhomogeneous universe, Cold Big Bang, varying physical constants or gravity law, zero-active mass, Milne cosmology, cyclical models), through the more distant quasi-steady-state cosmology, plasma cosmology, or universe models as a hypersphere such as the Dynamic Universe, to the most exotic cases including static models with non-cosmological redshifts of galaxies. Most cosmologists do not usually work within the framework of alternative cosmologies very different from the standard one because they feel that these are not at present as competitive as the standard model. It is true that they are not so developed, but that is because cosmologists do not work on them. This vicious circle is to a great extent due to a sociological phenomenon known as the “snowball effect”, in which resources are distributed to the most successful theory at a given time; the effect acts as a potential in a field that attracts cosmologists, causing funds, research positions, prestige, telescope time, publication in top journals, citations, conferences, and other resources to be dedicated almost exclusively to standard cosmology.
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2716623.79167
Recently, Alvarado (2024) provided a conceptual framework to individuate and identify a specific kind of loneliness, namely epistemic loneliness. According to him, epistemic loneliness arises in virtue of and responds primarily to an absence of epistemic partners— i.e., willing, able, and actually engaged epistemic peers — as well as the lack of opportunities to engage with such. In this paper I argue that Alvarado’s framework and conceptual analysis of epistemic loneliness allows us to identify yet another kind of loneliness, namely one that can only be addressed at an axiological level. As we will see, this loneliness arises in virtue of and is particularly responsive to value-affirming, value-creating, and value exchanging circumstances, peers and contexts. Given its source and the factors which have an effect on it (either increase it or decrease it), this kind of loneliness is significantly distinct from epistemic loneliness. As will be shown here, we can have axiologically antagonistic epistemic partners. If this is so, it is possible that one can have epistemic partners, in the sense defined by Alvarado, and still be axiologically lonely. Axiological loneliness may prove to be even more central than epistemic loneliness already is to a person’s social, psychological and personal sense of belonging and hence of well-being.