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2705617.763996
I wrote last week about a kind of applied political philosophy conundrum that people like Donald Trump create for those of us who endorse the idea of public reason. As polls and predictive models are now putting Trump slightly ahead in the presidential race, I would like to expand on this discussion briefly. …
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2717502.76416
This paper is about the epistemology of quantum theory. We establish a new result about a limitation to knowledge of its central object—the quantum state of the universe. We show that, if the universal quantum state can be assumed to be a typical unit vector from a high-dimensional subspace of Hilbert space (such as the subspace defined by a low-entropy macro-state as prescribed by the Past Hypothesis), then no observation can determine (or even just narrow down significantly) which vector it is. Typical state vectors, in other words, are observationally indistinguishable from each other. Our argument is based on a typicality theorem from quantum statistical mechanics. We also discuss how theoretical considerations that go beyond the empirical evidence might bear on this fact and on our knowledge of the universal quantum state.
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2740341.76421
There was a very valuable panel discussion after my October 9 Neyman Seminar in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley. I want to respond to many of the questions put forward by the participants (Ben Recht, Philip Stark, Bin Yu, Snow Zhang) that we did not address during that panel. …
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2740902.764265
I present an exegesis of Henri Poincaré’s metaphysical position in three key essays within his book, The Value of Science. In doing so, I argue for three theses: First, that Poincaré’s metaphysical position in these sources is incompatible with his metaphysical position in his earlier book, Science and Hypothesis. Second, that the phenomenological relationism defended by Poincaré in these sources is not a form of structural realism but a structuralist form of empiricism, and (by design) has no greater metaphysical commitments than constructive empiricism. Third, that Poincaré holds in these sources that the existence of the external world is merely a convention. These theses serve to correct misconceptions about the consistency of Poincaré’s philosophical corpus, about his position(s) on the realism/anti-realism landscape, and about the scope of his conventionalism.
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2740928.764314
Sample preparation is the process of altering a naturally occurring object into a representative form that is amenable to scientific inquiry. Preparation is an important preliminary to data collection, ubiquitous in the life sciences and elsewhere, yet relatively neglected in historical and philosophical literature. This paper presents a detailed historical case study involving the preparation and study of blood crystals in the nineteenth century. The case is used to highlight significant features of preparation, which aid our understanding of the epistemology of sciences in which preparations play an important role. First, it shows the role of technical knowledge in efforts to characterize a scientific phenomenon or object of interest. Especially in early stages of characterization, scientists improve their understanding of what they are preparing by better understanding their preparation procedures. Second, this case contributes to recent views of characterization as a relatively autonomous domain of scientific activity. It shows how preparation functions as a site for integrating different experimental methods, and the difficulties that ensue. In light of these considerations, the case shows how characterization is capable of shaping or constraining explanatory pursuits as much as it is guided by them.
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2740954.764362
In this work we discuss the establishment of Standard Quantum Mechanics (SQM) developed through Schrodinger’s and Dirac’s wave-vectorial reformulations of Heisenberg’s original matrix mechanics. We will argue that while Heisenberg’s approach was consistently developed —taking as a standpoint the intensive patterns that were observed in the lab— as an invariant-operational formalism, Dirac’s axiomatic re-formulation was, instead, developed —taking as a standpoint Schrodinger’s wave mechanics and the methodological guide of Bohr and logical positivists— as an essentially inconsistent “recipe” intended (but unable) to predict (binary) measurement outcomes. Leaving SQM behind and attempting to restore the consistent and coherent account of a real state of affairs, we will present a new tensorial proposal which —taking as a standpoint Heisenberg’ original approach— will prove capable not only to extend the matrix formalism to a tensorial representation but also to account for new experimental phenomena. Keywords: matrix mechanics, tensors, quantum mechanics, realism.
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2740982.76441
Philosophers of science have come to accept that contextual values can play unavoidable and desirable roles in science. This has raised concerns about the need to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate value influences in scientific inquiry. I discuss here four such concerns: epistemic distortion, value imposition, undermining of public trust in science, and the use of objectionable values. I contend that preserving epistemic integrity and avoiding value imposition provide good reasons to attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. However, the trust and the objectionable values concerns constitute no good reason for demarcation criteria.
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2741070.76446
This chapter aims to shed light on the normative questions raised by medical imaging (MI), paving the way for interdisciplinary dialogue and further philosophical exploration. MI comprises noninvasive techniques aimed at visualizing internal human body structures to aid in explanation, diagnosis, and monitoring of health conditions. MI requires interpretation by specialized professionals, and is routinely employed across medical disciplines. It is entrenched in clinical guidelines and therapeutic interventions. Moreover, it is a dynamic research field, witnessing ongoing technological advancements. After surveying philosophical issues arising from MI, which are relatively unexplored, the chapter focuses on the epistemology of diagnostic imaging.
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2763127.76451
Experimental philosophy of art and aesthetics is the application of
the methods of
experimental philosophy
to questions about art and
aesthetics. By taking a scientific approach to experiences with art
and aesthetic phenomena, it is continuous with the longstanding
research program in psychology called empirical aesthetics
(see Nadal & Vartanian 2022 for overviews of work in this
program). However, it is also continuous with traditional research in
philosophy of art and aesthetics because it is centered on many of the
same timeless questions. Like other branches of experimental
philosophy, such as
experimental moral philosophy,
it involves gathering data using empirical methods and bringing
analyses of the data to bear on theorizing on a wide range of topics
in philosophy of art and aesthetics: definition of art, ontology of
art, aesthetic properties, aesthetic judgments, aesthetic adjectives,
morality and aesthetics, and emotion and art.
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2771893.764555
I debate immigration habitually. Whenever there’s before-and-after voting, I always lose. No matter how leftist the audience is, the anti-immigration side need only warn “Immigration could hurt some Americans” to flip the vote. …
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2784034.764604
Polysemy is a phenomenon involving single lexical items with multiple related senses. Much theorizing about it has focused on developing linguistic accounts that are responsive to various compositional and representational challenges in semantics and psychology. We focus on an underexplored question: Why does systematic polysemy cluster in the ways it does? That is, why do we see certain regular patterns of sense multiplicity, but not others? Drawing on an independently motivated view of kind cognition—i.e., the formal structures for different classes of kind representations—we argue for an answer centered on conceptual individuation. Specifically, we argue that classes of kind concepts vary in what they individuate (i.e., counting as one and specifying what makes it the same or different from others). By elucidating these differences, we can explain why a range of patterns of systematic polysemy are found cross-linguistically and why other patterns are not attested. Overall, our account provides an explanatory framework addressing an important question at the interface between language and mind and opens new avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.
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2784063.764668
We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals.
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2822807.76473
Assume actual result utilitarianism on which there are facts of the matter about what would transpire given any possible action of mine, and an action is right just in case it has the best consequences. …
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2852618.764789
Having previously lamented the (unnecessary) conceptual limitations of the utilitarian tradition, it’s time to turn to the rival deontological tradition. Whereas many utilitarians focus on value to the point of neglecting other significant normative concepts, my sense is that deontologists’ hyper-focus on permissibility can lead to similar problems. …
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2856419.764898
I discuss reproducibility issues in animal-based research in biomedicine and scrutinize the notion that the causes of non-reproducible results are the same as in other disciplines. I argue that there are aspects characteristic of animal experimentation that are important for analysing reproducibility problems but have not yet been discussed in this context. Using an approach that integrates epistemological and ethical questions, I explore these aspects and show that the prevalent focus on questionable research practices and methodological reforms falls short in understanding and managing key challenges to reproducibility in animal-based biomedicine.
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2856447.764953
Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion pre-cession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’ tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental confirmation of that theory in particular. In this article, we question this orthodoxy, by showing there are classes of both relativistic theories (with spatiotemporal geometrical properties different from those of GR) and non-relativistic theories (in which the lightcones of a relativistic spacetime are ‘widened’) which would also pass such tests. Thus, (a) issues of underdetermination in the context of GR loom much larger than one might have thought, and (b) given this, one has to think more carefully about what exactly such tests in fact are testing.
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2913171.765004
The Octoberfest is a noble tradition in category theory: a low-key, friendly conference for researchers to share their work and thoughts. This year it’s on Saturday October 26th and Sunday October 27th. …
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2936413.765046
The passage of time undoubtedly complicates questions of the rights and duties that are owed as a result of past wrongdoing. Writing in 2001, Janna Thompson outlines what she called the “Exclusion Principle,” claiming, “It is a principle basic to reparative justice . . . that individuals or collectives are entitled to reparation only if they were the ones to whom the injustice was done.” She continues, “It is also part of the Exclusion Principle that only perpetrators, whether these are groups or individuals, should be punished for injustice or required to make recompense.” This is the central challenge faced by accounts of reparative justice relating to historic injustice: What, if anything, can be owed today if some or all of the original perpetrators and victims are dead? I here assess Andrew I. Cohen’s recent work on apologies for historic injustice. His account, I will argue, is both persuasive and far-reaching—indeed, more far-reaching than Cohen suggests. Some might think that this renders the theory implausible; to the contrary, I argue that this is the right way to confront the vast scale of historic wrongdoing.
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2936439.765089
In his Apologies and Moral Repair, Andrew I. Cohen has given us a wonderful piece of moral philosophizing. It is in my view the best sort of contribution moral philosophy can make. He examines closely an important (even though mundane) moral practice: the practice of apologizing. He attempts to understand what apologies are, what makes them appropriate, what makes them successful (when they are), and other aspects of this practice. Since human beings treat one another badly so very often (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not), apologies are an important lubricant for decent and peaceful social life. What is more, as I shall argue, we can learn something important about ourselves from considering them.
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2936566.765132
David Schmidtz has long been one of the best writers in political philosophy, remarkably managing to defend his ideas with analytic precision without sacrificing readability. In Living Together, he continues that while providing us with a masterful work that harks back to classical liberals such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. In doing so, he offers a model of what scholars of PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) should strive for: clarity of writing and philosophical acuity matched with clear appreciation of the best social science available to describe and analyze what we want from a social, political, and economic order (hereafter “the social order”).
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2936593.765176
Rawls’s claim that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” (p. 24). To the contrary, Schmidtz writes: “The first thing we need from institutions is a settled framework of mutual expectation that keeps the peace well enough to foster conditions that enable society to be a cooperative venture for mutual benefit” (p. 24). Several pages earlier, though, he says that “[j]ustice enables people to navigate the social world” (p. 19), which sounds a lot like “the first thing we need from institutions” (p. 24), and four pages earlier he tells us that “Humean justice is not everything—not even close—but almost everything depends on it” (p. 20). If “almost everything depends on” justice, why isn’t it “the first virtue of social institutions”?
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2936693.765328
David Schmidtz’s book Living Together contains rich discussions of several important topics in political philosophy, political economy, legal philosophy, and moral philosophy. The overall theme tying these topics together is that our theories must be realistic, based on empirical evidence. Ideal theories ignore this. A famous example of such a theory is John Rawls’s second principle of justice—the difference principle—in his A Theory of Justice. In spite of its counterintuitive nature, Rawls assumes that everyone will comply with it.
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3025672.765376
I claim that there is no general, straightforward and satisfactory way to define a total comparative probability with the standard axioms using full conditional probabilities. By a “straightforward” way, I mean something like:
- A ≲ B iff P(A−B|AΔB) ≤ P(B−A|AΔB) (De Finetti)
or:
- A ≲ B iff P(A|A∪B) ≤ P(A|A∪B) (Pruss). …
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3029375.76542
The question of whether chemical structure is reducible to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM) should be of interest to philosophers of chemistry and philosophers of physics alike. Among the three realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, EQM resolves the measurement problem by claiming that measurements (now interpreted as instances of decoherence) have indeterminate outcomes absolutely speaking, but determinate outcomes relative to emergent worlds (Maudlin, 1995). Philosophers who wish to be sensitive to the practice of quantum chemistry (e.g. Scerri, 2016) should be interested in EQM because Franklin and Seifert (2020) claim that resolving the measurement problem also resolves the reducibility of chemical structure, and EQM is the interpretation which involves no mathematical structure beyond that used by practicing scientists. Philosophers interested in the quantum interpretation debate should be interested in the reducibility of chemistry because chemical structure is precisely the kind of determinate three-dimensional fact which EQM should be able to ground if it is to be empirically coherent (see Allori, 2023). The prospects for reduction of chemical structure are poor if it cannot succeed in EQM; the prospects for EQM as a guide to ontology are poor if it cannot reduce chemical structure.
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3029402.765461
Levels-of-reality talk is common among practicing scientists and philosophers of science, yet such talk of levels has been criticized by Jaegwon Kim, Amie Thomasson, and Angela Potochnik, which I analyze into three objections of increasing strength. The first requires abandoning only some of the wilder claims about levels, while the second prunes off many biological uses, and the third poses serious challenges even for metaphysicians. Metaphysicians who wish to save realism about levels must be prepared to make serious revisions. I argue for a novel approach which carves up levels using a neo-Aristotelian answer to the question of fundamental mereology which takes substances as the tiles of the world and uses metaphysical priority aconformities these generate in the mereological graph to identify levels. This emergentist account of levels is more coherent than varieties less connected to mereological structure, and places fewer constraints on that mereological structure than views like van Inwagen’s. While starkly revisionist, it fares better in recovering historical levels discourse than competitors like material atomism and priority monism. Further, the most painful revision is treating much of the biological levels discourse as representation and metaphor, but Potochnik argues that such talk was never a good candidate for metaphysics.
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3029436.765502
The mechanistic approach in the cognitive and biological sciences emphasizes that scientific explanations succeed by analyzing the mechanisms underlying phenomena across multiple levels. In this paper, we propose a formal strategy to establish such multi-level mechanistic models, which are foundational to mechanistic explanations. Our objectives are twofold: First, we introduce the novel "mLCA" (multi-Level Coincidence Analysis) script, which transforms binary data tables from tests on mechanistic systems into mechanistic models consistent with those tables. Second, we provide several philosophical insights derived from the outcomes generated by this script and its underlying algorithm. Using illustrative examples, we defend the following claims: 1. Inference methods for generating mechanistic models generally require information on how causal factors are assigned to different levels within data tables generated by multi-level structures. 2. The mLCA script successfully produces appropriate mechanistic models from binary data tables, demonstrating the practical application of the philosophical mechanistic approach in the sciences. 3. The number of solutions generated by mLCA increases significantly as the number of relevant factors grows, reflecting adaptations in causal inference methods to meet the demands of multi-level mechanistic modeling. 4. Any further reduction of solutions, if possible, involves pragmatic considerations, a point that carries profound implications for the broader ambitions of the mechanistic approach. By addressing these points, our paper contributes both to the development of practical algorithmic tools and to a deeper philosophical understanding of multi-level mechanistic modeling.
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3029465.765555
This paper investigates whether the philosophical supervenience problem has any bearing on the economic sciences. It first reconstructs some examples of economics normal science that aim at a correct description and explanation of causes of observable phenomena in an economic reference system. Subsequently, the supervenience problem is presented as it is known from the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. A formulation of the problem for economic causes is then developed in an analogous way, even though the ontological commitments of economics are less obvious. The main hypotheses defended in this paper are the following ones: (i) Economic models are amenable to causal interpretations and (ii) the efficacy of economic causes characterized by such models is fundamentally problematic from a metaphysical point of view, analogously to that of biological and mental causes. Moreover, it is shown that (iii) the problem of causal exclusion is even more drastic for economic causes than for biological or mental causes due to a non-localizability and an overlap of economic events.
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3029493.765631
This paper focuses on two arguments recently developed in the literature against the interpretation of rational choice theory as an empirical theory. It starts with a reconstruction of a historical analysis, according to which rational choice theory has mostly been used in the past as a methodological principle and rarely as a deep empirical theory. In a next step, it challenges an argument found in the literature that social and economic phenomena are ontically emergent and that they by themselves can enter genuine explanations. Subsequently, it criticizes the methodological assumption about the irrelevance of psychological mechanisms of the individual for economic models. The main reason offered is the observation that such models, even if predictively adequate, will be very limited in their explanatory power. The overall conclusion of the paper is that rational choice theory ought to be treated as a theory after all − and potentially extended by future empirical research.
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3043594.765691
1: Caravaggio, in his religious art, reminded people
that these miracles had transpired neither in primary colors, nor in brilliantly hued paintings of sanitized saints and celestial fireworks, but in dusty streets and dark rooms much like the streets and rooms in which they lived. …
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3059689.765744
It’s been a while since I wrote about my online reading. In part, that’s because I’ve had less time to keep up with the magazines I like, in part because I’ve been unusually hard to entertain—
in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent. …