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46224.339173
This post is a sequel to an earlier discussion of close reading, though it should be self-contained, if closely read. Let’s begin with points of convergence. Like Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory posits close reading as a skill or technê, a form of acquired know-how or expertise. …
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63263.339301
The neurodiversity movement grew out of the autism community but is now being applied to many neurological types, from dyslexia to schizophrenia. The resulting neurodiversity paradigm maintains that these neurological differences are normal variations in the human species, like race and sexual orientation, which should be valued and accommodated, not “fixed” or eliminated. Yet some clear-eyed individuals view their brain differences as deficits and would continue to seek treatment in the absence of discrimination or lack of accommodation. I argue that fully appreciating cognitive diversity requires more nuanced normative claims that respect individual differences and fluid circumstances. Although analogies to minority statuses can be useful, variations in personality traits provide a more flexible and inclusive model for neurodivergence. Despite ultimately rejecting the biodiversity metaphor, a more nuanced neuro-diversity paradigm emphasizing our shared humanity can promote compassion, respect, and support for all.
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74585.339311
This article has three purposes. First, it illustrates the strengths of social constructivism (SC) as a major thesis and its two interrelated corollaries: the “social dependency” thesis, the “communitarian” theory of meaning, and the “contingency” view of knowledge. Second, by underscoring these strengths, it will show how one can counter the anti-social critique of the kind Boghossian espouses, highlighting some genuine disagreements that cannot be resolved by appealing to the assumptions and resources that are at the heart of the matter in the first place. To this end, the following points will be discussed: (1) Boghossian misses the mark primarily by focusing his main critique not on “social dependency” but on a conceptually different doctrine, namely “relativism” (defined as the “social relativity” thesis); (2) he criticizes SC by presupposing the very “non-social” view of meaning that SC was originally proposed to attack; and (3) the logic of SC “debunks” the very epistemic system on which Boghossian relies by claiming that it is as dependent on “(historical) contingencies” as any other. Finally, some responses are offered to “rationalist” concerns, which are mainly concerned with the application of SC’s logic to its own arguments. KEYWORDS: social constructivism, knowledge, meaning, contingency, normativity, Boghossian.
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74627.339318
Phil Dowe’s Conserved Quantity Theory (CQT) is based on the following theses: (a) CQT is the result of an empirical analysis and not a conceptual one, (b) CQT is metaphysically contingent, and (c) CQT is refutable. I argue, on the one hand, that theses (a), (b), and (c) are not only problematic in themselves, but also they are incompatible with each other and, on the other, that the choice of these theses is explained by the particular position that the author embraces regarding the relationship between metaphysics and physics.
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74671.339324
This paper begins with some brief intellectual autobiography, recalling my first engagement with philosophy of biology . The substantive part of the paper then focuses on the plurality of possible classifications central to the theses of scientific disunity and metaphysical disorder developed in my early career . After discussing this in terms of biological classification, and introducing the reasons for thinking of classifications as typically value-laden, I discuss two sets of human classifications bearing on normatively vital questions, those around sex and gender and those involved in the distinctions between human races .
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74690.339331
In this paper I discuss the process ontology that has been the central focus of my research for almost 20 years . I explain what this is, and illustrate how it applies to biology through the example of the organism . I also aim to show how naturally process ontology fits with the disordered world I described in the preceding article . Finally, I show how process philosophy illuminates a number of topics relating to the human condition, including personal identity and freedom of the will, and provides a deeper understanding of the issues around human classification, notably by sex and gender and by race .
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74733.339341
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in dual character concepts (DCCs) . These concepts are defined by their internal structures, which consist of two distinct dimensions: a descriptive and an independent normative dimension . However, a more in-depth exploration of their internal structures is still needed . This article examines the internal structure of one DCC that has garnered significant attention in the literature, scientist . First, I analyze the components of the different dimensions of this concept . Second, I explore the interaction between these two dimensions . To do so, I investigate scientist in the enTenTen20 corpus using Sketch Engine, focusing on the expressions “good scientist” and “true scientist”, as the literature suggests they interact more directly with the descriptive and normative dimensions, respectively . The findings from this investigation offer valuable insights for studying other DCCs, as the results suggest, among others, the following key points: first, that the complexity of the two dimensions of scientist is greater than previously recognized; and second, contrary to what is agreed, both the descriptive and the normative dimension interact with “good” and “true,” which implies that both expressions can be used to make the two types of normative evaluation proper of DCCs .
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74793.33935
Investigation of Indigenous concepts and their meanings is highly inspirational for contemporary science because they represent adaptive solutions in various environmental and social milieus. Past research has shown that the conceptualisations of consciousness can vary widely between cultural groups from different geographical regions. The present study explores variability among a few of the thousands of Indigenous cultural understandings of consciousness. Indigenous concepts of consciousness are often relational and inseparable from environmental and religious concepts. Furthermore, this exploration of variability reveals the layers with which some Indigenous peoples understand the conscious experience of the world. Surprisingly, the Indigenous understandings of global consciousness was found not to stay in opposition to local consciousness. The final concluding section of this study discusses the usability of Indigenous concepts and meanings for recent scientific debates regarding the nature of consciousness. Issues such as material versus non-material sources of consciousness, the energy component of consciousness, or the interconnection of consciousness with the environment arose from the in-depth exploration of Indigenous concepts and their meanings.
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176506.339358
Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is. In his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat”, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world. The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat.
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188710.339375
Mind uploading promises us a digital afterlife. Critics believe that this promise is void, since we are not the type of thing that could be transmitted as data from one location to another. In this paper, I shall make the case that even if the critics are right and we cannot be uploaded, much of uploading’s appeal can be maintained. I will argue for Parfitian Transhumanism, a view that comprises two claims. First, it maintains that our minds can be uploaded, even if we cannot. Second, uploading our minds preserves what matters in survival.
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247947.339388
The two times problem, where time as experienced seems to have distinctive features different than those found in fundamental physics, appears to be more intractable than necessary, I argue, because the two times are marked out from the positions furthest apart: neuroscience and physics. I offer causation as exactly the kind of bridge between these two times that authors like Buonomano and Rovelli (forthcoming) are seeking. It is a historical contingency from philosophical discussions around phenomenology, and methodological artefact from neuroscience, that most studies of temporal features of experience require subjects to be sufficiently still that their engagement with affordances in the environment can be at best tested in artificial and highly constrained ways. Physics does not offer an account of causation, but accounts of causation are tied to or grounded in physics in ways that can be clearly delineated. Causation then serves as a bridge that coordinates time as experienced, via interaction with affordances in the environment, with time in physics as it constrains causal relationships. I conclude by showing how an information-theoretic account of causation fits neatly into and extends the information gathering and utilizing system (IGUS) of Gruber et al (2022).
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247969.339395
This article offers a hybrid account of regulatory kinds and subjective fit to explain why the oft-invoked analogy between gender transition and so-called race transition fails both conceptually and normatively. The argument—recently circulated in popular commentary and endorsed by figures such as Richard Dawkins—suggests that if gender transition is legitimate on the basis of social construction, then racial transition should be equally so. Yet since racial transition is generally regarded as illegitimate, the analogy concludes that gender transition must be suspect. I argue that this inference rests on a category error: it conflates social construction with norm-governed intelligibility.
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248035.339401
This article analyzes some of the methodological tensions that can be observed in the regulation of science and technology, and that often manifest themselves as controversies. We offer a three-way classification of such tensions. The latter can arise from: 1) external (non-cognitive) factors that are specific to a particular regulation; 2) external (non-cognitive) factors of wider societal importance that are not related to any particular regulatory process; and 3) internal (non-cognitive, as well as cognitive) factors related to the cognitive, as well as practical limitations of a particular scientific methodology in the context of regulatory decision making. We analyze case studies of regulation of, among other, pharmaceuticals, chemical products, health claims on foods, as well as genetically modified organisms. The analysis shows that most often such methodological tensions are driven, directly or indirectly, by different stances with respect to non-cognitive factors that underlie the fundamental choices of methods and standards, and therefore the data that underpin regulatory decisions. Our paper makes clear an important feature of regulatory science: cognitive factors (like improved scientific data or accepted best practices), that in academic science facilitate the resolution of debates, in regulatory science do not suffice for achieving closure with respect to such tensions. Any attempt at closure has to deal primarily with the relevant non-cognitive factors.
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363352.339407
Patterns and pattern ontologies are a powerful way for pragmatists to address metaphysical issues by rejecting a false dichotomy between pluralism and realism. However, there is a common misconception about patterns that I call the philosophically perverse patterns (PPP) problem. Here, critics of patterns invent perverse examples that meet the metaphysical criteria to count as patterns. I defuse this concern by showing how PPP misunderstands what the pragmatist metaphysics of patterns is supposed to accomplish: the bare definition should not rule out, or in, substantive examples of patterns that instead should involve methodological considerations. I use this response to the PPP problem to show how the metaphysical definition of 'pattern' allows the pragmatist to capture the rich intricacies of ontologies in the sciences and yields two illustrative norms by which methodology can be guided in developing or refining ontologies: cohesion and coherence.
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363513.339413
Ecosystems are increasingly being represented as marketplaces that produce goods for humanity, and because of this, economic metaphors for increasing efficiency have been introduced into conservation. A powerful model for economic growth is the globalised free market and some are implicitly deploying it to suggest changes in conservation practice. Ecological globalisation is the position that we should not control the free movement of species and re-wilding occurs most efficiently through non-intervention. When species can move and interact with new ecological systems, they create novel ecosystems. These novel arrangements create experimental markets in nature's economy, providing opportunities for the efficient production of goods for humans, also known as ecosystem services. When invasive species supersede local populations, it indicates previous biotic systems were inefficient, which is why they were replaced, and therefore it is wrong to protect indigenous ‘losers’ from extinction. Those who defend indigenous species are accused of being xenophobic against recent biotic migrants. This position is flawed both empirically and morally as there is a disconnect between these economic and political arguments when applied to human economies and nature's economy.
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411981.339421
Our adversarial system of international relations poses substantial risks of violent catastrophe and impedes morally urgent initiatives and reform collaborations. The domestic politics of more evolved societies provide guidance toward a better world governed by just rules, which ensure that basic human needs are met, inequalities constrained, and weapons and wealth marginalized as tools for influencing political and judicial outcomes. Impartial administration, adjudication, and enforcement of just rules require 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 nepotism within states, we must fight nepotism on 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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412293.33943
I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame facilitates moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to a blamer’s standing serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue, is blaming hypocritically, or is complicit in the wrongdoing at issue. In contrast, I argue that three widely recognized conditions on standing to blame—the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions—serve as epistemically tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame. Standing matters because, and to the extent that, it indirectly informs our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.
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421470.339446
In his 1997 paper “Technology and Complexity” Dasgupta draws a distinction between systematic and epistemic complexity. Entities are called systematically complex when they are composed of a large number of parts that interact in complicated ways. This means that even if one knows the properties of the parts one may not be able to infer the behaviour of the system as a whole. In contrast, epistemic complexity refers to the knowledge that is used in, or generated by the making of an artefact and is embodied in it. Interestingly, a high level of systematic complexity does not entail a high level of epistematic complexity and vice versa.
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421585.339456
It has long been known that brain damage has negative effects on one’s mental states and alters (or even eliminates) one’s ability to have certain conscious experiences. Even centuries ago, a person would much prefer to suffer trauma to one’s leg, for example, than to one’s head. It thus stands to reason that when all of one’s brain activity ceases upon death, consciousness is no longer possible and so neither is an afterlife. It seems clear from all the empirical evidence that human consciousness is dependent upon the functioning of individual brains, which we might call the “dependence thesis.” Having a functioning brain is, at minimum, necessary for having conscious experience, and thus conscious experience must end when the brain ceases to function.
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536384.339463
|A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant|
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations. Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. …
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635084.339472
My daughter, S, who is five, has a special stuffed unicorn who she received for her third Christmas. Once white, she is now gray: the color of love—and drool. Once replete with a magnificent mane of pale pink yarn, she now boasts a tangled, grizzled, dishwater-colored ‘do. …
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635902.339478
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino, Yoshua Bengio, Jonathan Birch, Axel Constant, George Deane, Stephen M. Fleming, Chris Frith, Xu Ji, Ryota Kanai, Colin Klein, Grace Lindsay, Matthias Michel, Liad Mudrik, Megan A. K. Peters, Eric Schwitzgeb...
best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive ”indicator properties” of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. We use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and we discuss how future systems might implement them. Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.
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706488.339483
This is a stand-alone essay, but if you’re curious you can read Part 1, Against Feet Revisited. 1. Timothy Steele’s book All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing aims to offer “an explanation of English meter,” especially iambic pentameter. …
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706489.339489
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares are publishing a mass-market book, the rather self-explanatorily-titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (Yes, the “it” means “sufficiently powerful AI.”) The book is now available for preorder from Amazon:
I was graciously offered a chance to read a draft and offer, not a “review,” but some preliminary thoughts. …
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767941.339494
How ought scarce health research resources be allocated, where health research spans “basic”, translational, clinical, health systems and public health research? In this paper I first outline a previously suggested answer to this question: the “fair-share principle” stipulates that total health research funding ought to be allocated in direct proportion with suffering caused by each disease. Second, I highlight a variety of problems the fair-share principle faces. The principle is inattentive to problems of aggregation and distribution of harms incurred from disease and benefits accrued from research, and neglects considerations of cost-effectiveness. Moreover, the principle fails to recognise that using Global Burden of Disease Study estimates as proxies for “suffering” underdetermines health research resource allocation. Importantly, in drawing on these estimates, which are disease-centric and only take “proximal” causes of health loss into account, the fair-share principle disregards the social determinants of health. Along with them, the principle ignores public health research, which often focusses on “distal” causes of health loss to improve population health and reduce health inequalities. Following the principle therefore leads to inequitable priority-setting. I conclude that despite relatively widespread appeals to it, the fair-share principle is not an ideal to aim for during priority-setting.
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874183.339501
In the early 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart articulated a republican politics suited to the political condition of Black Americans in the antebellum United States. She did so by reimagining the core republican concepts of domination and civic virtue. Stewart argued that Black Americans, both enslaved and nominally free, were reduced by the white-dominated polity to a position of servitude: as merely fit to serve the good of the white Americans who dominated them and lacking any claim upon the polity’s common good themselves. At the same time, Stewart drew a nuanced distinction between servitude and service that cast Black mothers as exemplars of republican virtue, engaged in social reproductive labor that supported the common good of Black Americans as a people, in which Black mothers themselves partook. Furthermore, Stewart emphasized the liberatory power of partial sympathy- - fellow feeling among the dominated-- as a foundation for racialized civic virtue and solidarity organized around the common good of Black Americans as a people. Stewart’s is a republican politics in which the dominated struggle for their common good in the face of a polity that denies them a claim upon its own.
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882523.339508
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring David Sobel and Steven Wall’s paper ‘The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well-Being‘ with a précis by Chris Heathwood. Précis and commentary on Sobel and Wall, “The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well- Being” (Ethics, 2025) for PEA Soup ‘Ethics discussion’
Chris Heathwood May 26, 2025
Précis
Theories of well-being aim to identify those things that are basically or fundamentally good for subjects of well-being. …
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883276.339515
Teleosemantics explains meaning by appealing to the biological norms that make error possible, but most work in the field still anchors those norms in evolutionary “selected‐effect” functions. We develop an organismic alternative grounded in the self-maintenance of autonomous systems. Building on sensorimotor theory and enactivism, we reconceptualise goals as second-order constraints—transient attractors in a dynamic sensorimotor field—and show how they are nested into a heterarchy of means–end relations connecting global self‑maintenance of the sensorimotor organization and identity of a system with the most basic sensorimotor coordinations. Drawing on this framework, we identify the minimal necessary requirements for genuine teleological behaviour: 1. Initiation that individuates an action in relation to a goal, 2. Modulatory execution that adaptively compensates perturbations or deploys alternative strategies in relation to the goal, and 3.
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883339.339523
This paper presents a new account of pragmatic understanding based on the idea that such understanding requires skills rather than abilities. Specifically, one has pragmatic understanding of an affordance space when one has, and is responsible for having, skills that facilitate the achievement of some aims using that affordance space. In science, having skills counts as having pragmatic understanding when the development of those skills is praiseworthy. Skills are different from abilities at least in the sense that they are task-specific, can be learned, and we have some cognitive control over their deployment. This paper considers how the use of AI in science facilitates or frustrates the achievement of this kind of understanding. I argue that we cannot properly ascribe this kind of understanding to any current or near-future algorithm itself. But there are ways that we can use AI algorithms to increase pragmatic understanding, namely, when we take advantage of their abilities to increase our own skills (as individuals or communities). This can happen when AI features in human-performed science as either a tool or a collaborator.
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940989.33953
This paper critically examines the central thesis of Kieran Fox’s I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein—namely, that Einstein’s intellectual development constitutes a coherent spiritual path culminating in a form of pantheistic mysticism shaped by both Western and Eastern traditions. Fox presents Einstein as the modern heir to a long-suppressed lineage of rational spirituality, extending from Pythagoras and Spinoza to Vedanta and Buddhism, unified by wonder, reverence for nature, and a vision of cosmic unity. While Fox’s account is imaginatively rich and philosophically syncretic, it risks conflating distinct conceptual registers—scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual—and thereby oversimplifying Einstein’s intellectual complexity. Drawing on Einstein’s scientific writings and personal reflections, this study reconstructs a historically grounded portrait of his thought, emphasizing its tensions, ambiguities, and resistance to spiritual closure. The paper argues that Fox’s interpretation, though rhetorically compelling, substitutes a harmonizing spiritual mythology for the conceptual rigor and epistemic humility that defined Einstein’s actual worldview.