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3091825.131061
According to most writers on lying, to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, as captured by what is sometimes called “The Assertion-Based Definition of Lying:” The Assertion-Based Definition of Lying (AL) A lies to B if and only if there is a proposition p such that (AL1) A asserts that p, and (AL2) A believes that p is false.
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3091850.131265
This paper examines a form of talking about speech acts, mental states, and other features so far unexplored in philosophy: quotative be like. Quotative be like is the use of like and to be that occurs in constructions such as "Ellen was like "I'm leaving!"" We argue that neglect of quotative be like represents a gap in our understanding of our ways of characterizing the minds and speech of ourselves and others. Further, we show that quotative be like is not reducible to more familiar forms of direct discourse or indirect discourse. Mapping out a number of different options for theorizing about quotative be like, we argue for an account on which the quoted material in quotative be like picks out properties.
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3127287.131288
[#4 in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good. ]1
How much should we care about future people? Total utilitarians answer, “Equally to our concern for presently-existing people.” Narrow person-affecting theorists answer, “Not at all”—at least in a disturbingly wide range of cases.2 I think the most plausible answer is something in-between. …
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3145955.131304
Our adversarial system of international relations poses substantial risks of violent catastrophe and impedes morally urgent initiatives and reform collaborations. The domestic politics of our more advanced societies provide guidance toward a better world, governed by just rules which ensure that basic human needs are met, inequalities are constrained, and weapons and wealth are marginalized as tools for influencing political and judicial outcomes. Impartial administration, adjudication, and enforcement of just rules requires a strong normative expectation on officials and citizens to fully subordinate their personal and national loyalties to their shared commitment to the just and fair functioning of the global order. As we have fought (and often defeated) nepotism within states, we must fight nepotism in behalf of states to overcome humanity’s great common challenges. To moralize international relations, states can plausibly begin with reforming the world economy toward ending severe poverty, thereby building the trust and respect needed for more difficult reforms.
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3147942.131326
The relation between sensing/cognition and mental disorders (āfāt al-dhihn) receives special attention in Avicenna’s writings on psychology and medicine. Avicenna identifies two ways of diagnosing mental disorders: one way is in relation to the function of the senses, while the other is in relation to the internal faculties. A psychological phenomenon commonly exhibited in such disorders is the experience of hallucinatory content, that is, registering perceptible content that does not exist to what assumed to be the correspond to an existing object in external reality. In this chapter, I set out to investigate the cognitive process underlying the experience of hallucinatory content, and to show the significant roles that compositive imagination plays in creating and imposing this content upon sensory experience.
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3172461.131345
Ted Sider famously argues for the universality of composition on the grounds that:
If composition is not universal, then one can find a continuous series of cases from a case of no composition to a case of composition. …
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3211368.13136
Current political affairs offer interesting, even if dramatic, instances of applied political philosophy problems. Reading the news today, I found at least two such problems, both related to populist politics – one concerns Meloni and Italy, and the other concerns Trump and the U.S. …
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3211369.131375
Drug overdose deaths have more than doubled in America in the past 10 years, mainly due to the appearance of Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. These drugs combine incredible ease of manufacture with potency in tiny amounts and dangerousness (the tiniest miscalculation in dosage makes them deadly). …
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3211370.131389
To Advocate "Don't Do Anything Risky!" is Risky
Passivity norms and status quo bias
Many people endorse norms that presumptively oppose action in the face of uncertainty. They unreflectively assume that passivity is the “cautious”, risk-averse option. …
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3248422.131404
Chandrashekar, P., Adelina, N., Zeng, S., Chiu, Y., Leung, Y., Henne, P., Cheng, B., Feldman, G. (2023). Defaults Versus Framing: Revisiting default effect and framing effect with replications and extensions of Johnson and Goldstein (2003) and Johnson, Bellman, and Lohse (2002). Meta-Psychology, 7.
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3265577.131421
Readers: With this third stop we’ve covered Tour 1 of Excursion 1. My slides from the first LSE meeting in 2020 which dealt with elements of Excursion 1 can be found at the end of this post. There’s also a video giving an overall intro to SIST, Excursion 1. …
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3269677.131441
Relevance Theory (RT; Gutt, 1989, 1991, 2000) stipulates that translation is an act of interpretive language use, establishing interlingual interpretive resemblance between source and target language utterances, rather than describing, assessing or transferring truth values of utterances. In an extension to the original RT framework, Gutt (2004, 2005) distinguishes between two modes of translation - a stimulus mode (S-mode) and an interpretive mode (I-mode) - by which translators establish interpretive resemblances across languages. S-mode translation is tightly linked to linguistic forms, while I-mode translation appeals to the translator’s (self) awareness of the cognitive/cultural environment in which the translation unfolds. In this chapter, I argue that interlingual resemblance and contentful representation, as in descriptive language use, are two incompatible categories and that translation – defined as interlingual interpretive resemblance – can be seen as a form of non-representational language production. I suggest that translation as interpretive language use is heavily based in priming processes. While perceptual/semantic/affective priming mechanisms drive S-mode translation, the phenomenal consciousness of subjective experiences underly I-mode translation.
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3269705.131456
I offer a response to the explanatory challenge, ‘Why is time Markovian?’ (i.e., why is it that the future is constrained by the present just as strictly as it is constrained by the entire history of the universe up to and including the present?). My response to this explanatory challenge does not rely on any claims about the ontology of time, undermining a recent empirical argument for Presentism which appeals to the fact that Presentism can be used to address this explanatory challenge. My account shows that we can accept explanatory challenges of this sort, while denying that they lead to any strong metaphysical conclusions.
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3269774.13147
I analyze the possibility of free-will in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), arguing for their compatibility. I use as a starting point Nicolas Gisin’s “The Multiverse Pandemic” (Gisin, 2022, ), in which he makes an interesting case that MWI is contradicted by our hard to deny free-will. The counts he raised are: (1) MWI is deterministic, forcing choices on us, (2) in MWI all our possible choices happen, and (3) MWI limits creativity, because everything is entangled with everything else. I argue that each of these features of MWI is in fact compatible with more freedom than it may seem. In particular, MWI allows compatibilist free-will, but also free-will very much like the libertarian free-will defined by Chisholm. I argue that the position that alternative choices exist as possibilities does not make sense from a physical point of view, but MWI offers a physical ground for alternatives.
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3269801.131485
The extant literature on AI (and popular culture more generally) has a few popular slogans that seek to dismiss the cognitive capacities of current large-language models (LLMs). Here, from a conceptual standpoint, we assess whether two such slogans have any teeth. The first such slogan is that “LLMs can only predict next-tokens”. The second is that “AIs are stochastic parrots”. We will briefly explain these two slogans, and argue that, in plausible construals, they do not imply fundamental limitations to cognition and semantic grounding (which of course does not imply anything positive about current AI’s cognitive capacities). The difference between our approach and that of the burgeoning literature reaching a similar conclusion is that we base our arguments on the idea of ‘knowledge-first epistemology’.
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3269832.131498
The hole argument of general relativity threatens a radical and pernicious form of indeterminism. One natural response to the argument is that points belonging to different but isometric models should always be identified, or ‘dragged-along’, by the diffeomorphism that relates them. In this paper, I first criticise this response and its construal of isometry: it stumbles on certain cases, like Noether’s second theorem. Then I go on to describe how the essential features of Einstein’s ‘point-coincidence’ response to the hole argument avoid the criticisms of the ‘drag-along response’ and are compatible with Noether’s second theorem.
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3269865.131513
In the philosophical literature, symmetries of physical theories are most often interpreted according to the general doctrine called ‘traditional sophistication’. But even this doctrine leaves two important gaps in our understanding of such theories: (A) it allows the individuation of isomorphism-classes to remain intractable and thus of limited use, which is why practising physicists frequently invoke ‘relational, symmetry-invariant observables’; and (B) it leaves us with no formal framework for expressing interesting counterfactual statements about different physical possibilities. I will call these Limitations of TS. Here I will show that a new Desideratum to be satisfied by theories with symmetries allows us to overcome these Limitations. The new Desideratum is that the theory admits what I will call representational schemes for its isomorphism-classes. Each such scheme gives an equally valid reduced formalism for a theory.
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3351811.131527
I claim that there is no general, straightforward and satisfactory way to define a total compa.rative 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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3384398.131542
Today’s essay is about “normalization,” a concept that appears repeatedly (though sometimes called differently) in many different contexts in social sciences and political discussions. An approximative definition is a social process through which individuals increasingly conform to a set of norms and patterns, making their behavior more predictable and uniform. …
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3385172.131556
This paper sets forward a novel theory of temporal binding, a mechanism that integrates the temporal properties of sensory features into coherent perceptual experiences. Specifying a theory of temporal binding remains a widespread problem. The popular ‘brain time theory’ suggests that the temporal content of perceptual experiences is determined by when sensory features complete processing. However, this theory struggles to explain how perceptual experiences can accurately reflect the relative timing of sensory features processed at discrepant times. In contrast, ‘event time theories’ suggest that the temporal content of perceptual experiences reflects the relative event time of external sensory features and that the brain accommodates differential processing times. We can formulate retrodictive and predictive versions of this theory. Retrodictive event time theories propose that we accommodate desynchronised processing retrodictively. Predictive event time theories propose that we accommodate desynchronised processing by predictively modelling the event time of sensory features. I argue that both views have strengths and weaknesses.
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3385201.131574
Human computers and scanners were scientific workers who performed calculations or reduced and analysed data before the advent of electronic computers. They were a staple of big science during the 19th century and early to mid 20th century. Yet, despite their prevalence within big science their epistemic roles remain virtually unexamined. This paper investigates the epistemic roles of the Harvard Human Computers at the Harvard College Observatory 1880-1920 and of the Bristol Scanners at the Bristol Nuclear Research Group 1935-1955.
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3385230.131589
Relativistic quantum field theory (QFT) is ostensibly a quantum mechanical theory of fields, but determining exactly what these are is a thorny metaphysical task in the face of no-go arguments given by Baker (2009). This paper explores three possible answers according to which quantum fields are (I) superpositions of classical fields, (II) fields of expectation values for local observables, or (III) fields of local quantum states. I argue that each of these ontologies has resources available to respond to Baker’s challenge, though all three face residual puzzles.
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3385264.131604
I extend the literature on norms of assertion to the ubiquitous use of graphs in scientific papers and presentations, which I term “graphical testimony.” On my account, the testimonial presentation of a graph involves commitment to both (a) the in-context reliability of the graph’s framing devices and (b) the perspective-relative accuracy of the graph’s content. Despite apparent disagreements between my account and traditional accounts of assertion, the two are compatible and I argue that we should expect a similar pattern of commitments in a set of cases that extends beyond the graphical one. I end by demonstrating that the account resolves apparent tensions between the demands of honesty and the common scientific practice of presenting idealized or simplified graphs: these “distortions” can be honest so long as there’s the right kind of alignment between the distortion and the background beliefs and values of the audience.
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3385299.131618
This paper is an exploration of the nuanced realm of reference frames within the framework of General Relativity. Our analysis exposes a violation of Earman’s SP1 principle in scenarios involving fields that are dynamically uncoupled, a common assumption for reference frames. Unlike other violations, we cannot foreclose it by eliminating background spacetime structure. Our analysis also leads us to challenge the conventional notion of partial observables as quantities that are associated with a measuring instrument and expressed within a coordinate system. Instead, we argue that a partial observable is inherently relational, even if gauge-variant, and needs dynamical coupling with other partial observables to form a bona-fide, gauge-invariant complete observables. This perspective allows us to distinguish between being relational and being gauge-invariant, two properties that are often conflated.
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3385332.131632
We attempt to reconstruct Hans Reichenbach’s arguments for a macroscopic causal definition of the direction of time. Our analysis reveals that Reichenbach’s formulation of “screening off” is equivocal between the now common notion of conditional independence of two variables given others and a weaker notion that requires the conditional independence only for specific values of the variables. We also find that on the now common notion of screening off his own conditions for the “usual…conjunctive forks” are mathematically impossible for binary variables. Finally, we note that as a corollary to his familiar Principle of the Common Cause, Reichenbach’s argument embraces a No Fatalism principle that forbids explaining earlier probabilistic associations by values of later variables.
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3385398.131649
In general relativity, the strong equivalence principle is underpinned by a geometrical account of fields on spacetime, by which all fields and bodies probe the same geometry. This geometric account implies that the parallel transport of all spacetime tensors and spinors is dictated by a single affine connection. No similar account of gauge theory is put forward by standard textbooks, which use principal bundles to coordinate the parallel transport of different, interacting particles. Nonetheless, here I argue that gauge theory does afford such a geometric account, obviating the need for principal bundles.
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3407888.131665
While Locke is remembered for his numerous contributions to a wide
range of fields—philosophy, political theory, economics,
religious exegesis, education and psychology—and while he took
on numerous roles in his career—academic, diplomat, secretary,
tutor, advisor and civil servant—it is easy to forget that he
was a trained and qualified professional. Locke spent a good part of
his career—at least a decade—studying, training, writing,
apprenticing and eventually practicing as a physician. He worked
closely with a number of leading researchers on a range of
contemporary medical, physiological and related subjects, taking
hundred of notes, and authoring several extended reflections on
medical matters.
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3427010.131679
Works by (Humberstone 1981, 2011), van Benthem (1981, 2016), Holliday 2014, forthcoming, and Ding & Holliday 2020 attempt to develop a semantics of modal logic in terms of “possibilities”, i.e., “less determinate entities than possible worlds” (Edgington 1985). These works take possibilities as semantically primitive entities, stipulate a number of semantic principles that govern these entities (namely, Ordering, Persistence, Refinement, Cofinality, Negation, and Conjunction), and then interpret a modal language via this semantic structure. In this paper, we define possibilities in object theory (OT), and derive, as theorems, the semantic principles stipulated in the works cited. We then raise a concern for the semantic investigation of possibilities without a modal operator, and show that no such concerns the metaphysics of possibilities as developed in OT.
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3430417.131694
David Hume is perhaps most celebrated for his analysis of causation and of inductive causal reasoning. Moreover, his quest to understand causal power and necessity played a central role in his philosophy and was arguably the primary stimulus behind his Treatise of Human Nature (Millican 2016, 86–93).
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3430573.131716
Since the influential work of Norman Kemp Smith, it has become standard to interpret and debate Hume’s philosophy in terms of the broad themes of “scepticism” and “naturalism”. This has been particularly popular with scholars – notably Peter Strawson – who favour a relatively consistent narrative, whereby Hume’s “naturalism” is understood as providing some general response – or even a resolution – to the sceptical problems (and some related issues) that he raises. My aim here is to challenge this sort of narrative, by drawing distinctions within both scepticism and naturalism, and showing how Hume’s attitudes and responses to his most prominent philosophical challenges are importantly different, while the idea that he employs a broadly consistent “naturalist” strategy to address them is also misguided when examined in detail.