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6352.075546
The epistemic projection approach (EPA) is an intermediate approach to value management in science. It recognizes that there are sometimes good reasons to make research responsive to contextual values, but it achieves this responsiveness via the careful formulation of a research problem in the problem-selection stage of investigation. EPA is thus an approach that could be acceptable to some parties on both sides of the debate over the value-free ideal. Independent of this, EPA provides practitioners with concrete guidance on how to make research responsive to contextual values. This is illustrated with an example involving air pollution.
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172841.075621
In this paper, I challenge the Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism by arguing that the inference principle it relies upon is not well motivated. The sorts of non-question-begging instances that might be offered in support of it fall short.
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172863.075638
It is commonplace to note that libertarians about free will face a compatibility problem of their own. Indeterminism appears to be at odds with freedom rather than a condition for it, since it injects only chance or luck into the etiology of action. This problem, the luck problem, is widely regarded as unique to libertarians. However, this is false. Compatibilists face the same luck problem that animates libertarians. In this paper, I set out what the luck problem is and why compatibilists face it too. I then show that the most natural resources one might think a compatibilist should use to solve the problem are insufficient. I close with a proposal for compatibilists.
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179396.075649
Achilles and the tortoise compete in a race where the beginning (the start) is at point O and end (the finish) is at point P. At all times the tortoise can run at a speed that is a fraction of Achilles' speed at most (with being a positive real number lower than 1, 0 < < 1), and both start the race at t = 0 at O. If the trajectory joining O with P is a straight line, Achilles will obviously win every time. It is easy to prove that there is a trajectory joining O and P along which the tortoise has a strategy to win every time, reaching the finish before Achilles.
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254427.075658
I argue that rationality does not always require proportioning one’s beliefs to one’s evidence. I consider cases in which an agent’s evidence deteriorates over time, revealing less about the world or the agent’s location than their earlier evidence. I claim that the agent should retain beliefs that were supported by the earlier evidence, even if they are no longer supported by the later evidence. Failing to do so would violate an attractive principle of epistemic conservatism; it would foreseeably decrease the accuracy of the agent’s beliefs; it would make the agent susceptible to simple Dutch Books; it would allow them to manipulate their evidence to increase their confidence in desirable propositions over which they have no control. I defend the background assumption that dynamic considerations are relevant to epistemic rationality.
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257042.075665
Sebens and Carroll (2018) propose that self-locating uncertainty, constrained by their Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP), derives Born rule probabilities in Everettian quantum mechanics. Their global branching model, however, leads to local amplitudes lost, undermining this derivation. This paper argues that global branching’s premature splitting of observers, such as Bob in an EPR-Bohm setup, yields local pure states devoid of amplitude coefficients essential for Born rule probabilities. Despite their innovative framework, further issues with global branching—conflicts with decoherence, relativistic violations via physical state changes, and constraints on superposition measurements—render it empirically inadequate. Defenses, such as invoking global amplitudes, fail to resolve these flaws. Additionally, observer-centric proofs of the Born rule neglect objective statistics, weakening their empirical grounding. This analysis underscores the need to reconsider branching mechanisms to secure a robust foundation for Everettian probabilities.
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272606.075672
Imagine living in a society where most people (at least in the privileged classes) regularly participate in perpetuating a moral atrocity—slavery, say, or factory farming; any practice you’re deeply appalled by will do. …
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462045.075679
The present review discusses the literature on how and when social category information and individuating information influence people’s implicit judgments of other individuals who belong to existing (i.e., known) social groups. After providing some foundational information, we discuss several key principles that emerge from this literature: (a) individuating information moderates stereotype-based biases in implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) person perception, (b) individuating information usually exerts small to no effects on attitude-based biases in implicit person perception, (c) individuating information influences explicit (i.e., directly measured) person perception more than implicit person perception, (d) social category information affects implicit person perception more than it affects explicit person perception, and (e) the ability of other variables to moderate the effects of individuating information on stereotype- and attitude-based biases in implicit person perception varies. Within the discussion of each of these key points, relevant research questions that remain unaddressed in the literature are presented. Finally, we discuss both theoretical and practical implications of the principles discussed in this review.
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475722.075688
Synthetic media generators, such as DALL-E, and synthetic media artifacts, such as deepfakes, undermine our fundamental epistemic standards and practices. Yet, the nature of their epistemic threat remains elusive. After all, fictional or distorted representations of reality are as old as photography. We argue that the novel epistemic threat of synthetic media is that, for the first time, synthetic media tools afford ordinary computer users the practicable possibility to cheaply and effortlessly create and widely share fictional worlds indistinguishable from the real world or credible representations of it. We further argue that a synthetic media artifact is epistemically malignant in a given media context for a person acquainted with the context when the person is misled to confuse the version of the world depicted in it with the real world in an epistemically or morally significant way.
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601948.075697
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluate five potentially important criticisms of political meritocracy related to the coherence of merit as an ideal, the demographic objection, rent-seeking, political inequality, and social peace. We also consider the key ways in which existing electoral democracies create spaces for institutionally meritocratic forms. Finally, we highlight the importance of exploring institutional innovations that allow democracies to effectively incorporate expertise without, at the same time, becoming vulnerable to the criticisms of political meritocracy that we discuss.
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755193.075705
In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.
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755215.075713
As just mentioned, the Knowledge Account is a very influential view of ignorance. Recently, however, it has come under attack. Pritchard (2021a, 2021b) has offered several counterexamples that suggest ignorance has a normative dimension, which the Knowledge Account cannot easily capture (see also Meylan , 2024). Let us point out that we present these counterexamples because one of our objectives in this article is to consolidate the (possibly refutable) intuitions underlying them, using empirical data. So, here are Pritchard’s three counterexamples: First, in Pritchard’s view, it is quite unfitting to attribute ignorance of a fact to individuals when this fact cannot possibly be known. For instance, it does not sound fully appropriate to claim that “prehistorians are ignorant of whether Homo sapiens sapiens were tying their hair up.” We would rather say that they simply do not know this, or that they simply have no belief about this.
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755243.075722
Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people’s concepts at a later time than the intervention without participant’s knowledge, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise planet and dinosaur in online participants to match experts’ concepts. We successfully revised planet but not dinosaur, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on.
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833676.07573
The concept of infinity has long occupied a central place at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy. This paper explores the multifaceted concept of infinity, beginning with its mathematical foundations, distinguishing between potential and actual infinity and outlining the revolutionary insights of Cantorian set theory. The paper then explores paradoxes such as Hilbert’s Hotel, the St. Petersburg Paradox, and Thomson’s Lamp, each of which reveals tensions between mathematical formalism and basic human intuition. Adopting a philosophical approach, the paper analyzes how five major frameworks—Platonism, formalism, constructivism, structuralism, and intuitionism—each grapple with the metaphysical and epistemological implications of infinity. While each framework provides unique insights, none fully resolves the many paradoxes inherent in infinite mathematical objects. Ultimately, this paper argues that infinity serves not as a problem to be conclusively solved, but as a generative lens through which to ask deeper questions about the nature of mathematics, knowledge, and reality itself.
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840046.075738
I was delighted that Good Thoughts passed 5,000 (mostly free) subscribers a few months ago: that’s at least 4,800 more people interested in moral philosophy than I was expecting! (And it continues to grow at ~100 new subscribers each month, with no sign of a cap as yet.) …
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869335.075745
Have the points in Stephen Senn’s guest post fully come across? Responding to comments from diverse directions has given Senn a lot of work, for which I’m very grateful. But I say we should not leave off the topic just yet. …
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1122071.075753
Scientific understanding typically involves multiple specialists performing interdependent tasks. According to several social-epistemological accounts, this suggests that scientific communities are collective epistemic subjects. We argue instead that the data does not warrant the postulation of a collective subject. Our position, rather, is fictionalist: we argue that the use of sentences attributing understanding to scientific communities amounts to loose talk which is best construed as indicating how social environments associated with a scientific community promote individual scientists' understanding.
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1122122.075761
In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between knowledge that talk and knowledge how talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that knowledge that belongs to the former, whereas knowledge how belongs to the latter.
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1224651.075769
What makes a group an epistemic and moral agent? In this article, I argue the answer is: its decision-making procedures. The article begins by describing and motivating three popular positions in theories of group agency: functionalism, summativism, and organizationism. It explains how these three positions play out within Jessica Brown’s recent book Groups As Epistemic and Moral Agents. I explain how a focus on decision-making procedures can clarify and unify Brown’s account. Ultimately, the article proposes ‘proceduralism’ about group agency: we should figure out whether a group is an epistemic and moral agent by asking what decision-making procedures it has; group decision- making procedures are necessary and sufficient for group agency; and the group decision-making procedures explain group agency.
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1278942.075777
Simple games in partition function form are used to model voting situations where a coalition being winning or losing might depend on the way players outside that coalition organize themselves. Such a game is called a plurality voting game if in every partition there is at least one winning coalition. In the present paper, we introduce an equal impact power index for this class of voting games and provide an axiomatic characterization. This power index is based on equal weight for every partition, equal weight for every winning coalition in a partition, and equal weight for each player in a winning coalition. Since some of the axioms we develop are conditioned on the power impact of losing coalitions becoming winning in a partition, our characterization heavily depends on a new result showing the existence of such elementary transitions between plurality voting games in terms of single embedded winning coalitions. The axioms restrict then the impact of such elementary transitions on the power of different types of players.
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1327570.075784
The target article highlights research known to have promoted unjustified politicized claims. It also points out that, although researcher political biases might account for this, there are often alternative explanations. It then discusses areas of research in which those alternative explanations are unlikely, so that the best explanation is political bias. The target article is fundamentally correct. Nonetheless, we argue that political bias is a characteristic of the claims made in research articles rather than primarily a characteristic of scientists. Inasmuch as some claim is not wrong simply by virtue of supporting an ideological narrative, to detect politically biased research, we identify four questions to be answered. Test 0 is necessary but not sufficient to infer political bias. If Test 0 is passed, then at least one of Tests 1, 2, or 3 must also be passed. Test 0: Does the study vindicate some political narrative? Test 1: Did they misinterpret or misrepresent their results in ways that unjusti fiably advance a particular politicized narrative? Test 2: Do the authors systematically ignore papers and studies inconsistent with their ideology-af firming conclusions? Test 3: Did they leap to ideology-affirming conclusions based on weak data? We close with recommendations for preventing politically biased conclusions.
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1352738.075793
In this contribution I will start in Section 2 by introducing epistemic competence. I will stress that like Bussmann, I regard it as fundamental that people in a democratic society possess epistemic competence and that it would be important to teach epistemic competence at school. In Section 3 I show that even for countries where the epidemiological situation is roughly the same or very similar such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there are often very different recommendations concerning vaccinations. In Section 4 I will identify and discuss five rational reasons that can alone or in combination lead to different vaccine recommendations. Finally, section 5 will reflect on epistemic competence and vaccine recommendations. In particular, I will point out that different vaccine recommendations are an example where students can develop epistemic competence. Further, I will stress that different vaccine recommendations are an example where epistemic competence among the general population is desirable; if it is not present, this can lead to science scepticism and mistrust about science.
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1442106.0758
What are the conditions under which an agent is morally responsible
for some action that they have performed? Put another way, and
acknowledging that this rephrasing might be contentious, what are the
conditions under which it would be appropriate to praise or blame the
agent for something they have done? (Strawson 1962; Wallace 1998;
Coates & Tognazzini 2013). An account of moral responsibility
supplies answers to these questions. (See the entry on
“Moral Responsibility” ). Most theorists agree that moral responsibility requires satisfying at
least two core conditions. The first is a control condition;
the agent must have the right sort of control over what they do
(Dennett 1984; Fischer & Ravizza 1998; Shepherd 2014).
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1490021.075807
Very short summary: This essay argues that local governance is less prone to succumb to populism because, compared to national politics, citizens are more empowered and monitoring of elected officials is easier. …
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1521129.075813
Let’s say we want to identify effective strategies for multi-agent games like the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma or more complex environments (like the kind of environments in Melting Pot). Then tournaments are a natural approach: let people submit strategies, and then play all these strategies against each other in a round-robin tournament. …
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1525829.075821
Scientific data without uncertainty estimates are increasingly seen as incomplete. Recent discussions in the philosophy of data, however, have given little attention to the nature of uncertainty estimation. We begin to redress this gap by, first, discussing the concepts and practices of uncertainty estimation in metrology and showing how they can be adapted for scientific data more broadly; and second, advancing five philosophical theses about uncertainty estimates for data: they are substantive epistemic products; they are fallible; they can be iteratively improved; they should be judged in terms of their adequacy-for-purpose; and these estimates, in turn, are essential for judging data adequacy. We illustrate these five theses using the example of the GISTEMP global temperature dataset. Our discussion introduces a novel adequacy-for-purpose view of uncertainty estimation, addresses a weakness in a recent philosophical account of data, and provides a new perspective on the “safety” versus “precision” debate in metrology.
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1641228.075829
In the “information age”, the world’s knowledge is at everybody’s fingertips: all one needs is a device connected to the internet. As information becomes more accessible than ever, optimists expected a corresponding rise in scientific education and knowledge—with the passing of time, superstitions and misconceptions that fly in the face of scientific consensus would be destined to disappear. Yet, as we know all too well, this reassuring prophecy did not come true. Scientifically disproven misconceptions are still alive and well, and continue to be fairly widespread among digital citizens.
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1641308.075837
This paper investigates the status of inference to the best explanation (IBE), in contrast to inference to the only explanation (IOE) against the background of Woodward's what-if-things- had-been-different (w) account of explanation. It argues that IBE is not a defensible form of inference. By contrast IOE is defensible and objections to its use (e.g., on the basis of claims about underdetermination) are exaggerated. Although some accounts of explanation in conjunction support IBE, the w-account does not. It is also argued that we should think of explanation as an independent goal of scientific investigation that is valuable in its own right and not because it is a means to discovering truths via IBE. The correct picture of the connection between explanation and truth is simply that successful explanation requires a true or effectively correct explanans. However, we cannot establish that an explanans has this feature by appealing to its potential explanatory power-- that it would if true explain well. Instead, evidence that is independent of potential explanatory power is required. This is what IOE provides.
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1866263.075844
Among those who employ the notions of common belief and common knowledge in explanations of coordinated action, a dominant view is that these notions are roughly on explanatory par—that the two do not di!er significantly in respect of the robustness or depth with which they can account for coordination, or for the achievement of coordination equilibrium in a group. I argue that this view is mistaken. Common knowledge enables a depth of explanation that mere common belief cannot match. Genuine coordination requires mutual sensitivity, and common knowledge can ground the nonaccidental character of this sensitivity in a way that mere common belief—even justified and true common belief—cannot. In defending this thesis, I draw on and extend a line of thinking familiar in epistemology at the individual level to the group level.
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1872504.075852
Are doubt and suspension of judgment similar attitudes? In the burgeoning literature on suspension of judgment, the notion of doubt is curiously absent. This paper aims to argue for the plausibility of an identity claim, which I term the “No-Difference View.” This view suggests that there is no substantial difference between being in doubt and suspending judgment. The argument will draw on historical and systematic considerations that support the No-Difference View as a plausible view within the logical space of positions.