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57915.315094
We say we believe that all children can learn, but few of us really believe it.” Lisa Delpit Teachers are expected to believe in the potential of every student in front of them. To believe otherwise is to give up on a central premise of the educational mission, that students can be taught. However, the people who come into the classroom have different levels of knowledge, skills, and motivations. To deny that what the student brings to the classroom matters to their potential progress is to deny empirical reality. Teachers face a tension between cultivating high expectations for student success and recognizing the limitations that a student and their circumstances impose.
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140008.315298
Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. Resenting somebody for having insulted your friend gets it wrong when your friend well understood that the remark was a joke. On the other hand, if your friend is not familiar with the given cultural context and hence couldn’t quite grasp the subtly sexist nature of the joke, your resentment might not only be appropriate but also help her navigate the new social context. Hoping that your meeting with your supervisor will be productive might motivate you to prepare better but will be inappropriate if all your previous meetings were failures.
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140036.315307
Besides disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is to split your donations across all of the charities that are recommended by theories in which you have positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to your credence in the theories that recommend it. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already widely used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars, it is not supported by any account of handling decisions under moral uncertainty that has been proposed thus far in the literature. This paper develops a new bargaining-based approach that honors the proportionality intuition. We also show how this approach has several advantages over the best alternative proposals.
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140110.315317
Contractual inflationists claim that contractual relationships are a source of noninstrumental value in our lives, to be engaged with for their own sake. Some inflationists take this to be the value of “personal detachment.” I argue that though personal detachment can indeed be valuable, that value is not plausibly considered noninstru-mental. Even on the most charitable reading of personal detachment—its potential to emancipate us from traditional social relations—these inflationists overlook that it may just as much lead to domination as traditional society does, only this time, due to alienation under market conditions. To salvage our intuitive sense of the emancipatory potential of contract, we can consider the detachment it makes possible to be a form of technology, casting the value of contract in a “merely” instrumental role. I conclude that if we are to reinvigorate the politics of the appeal to personal detachment in contract theory, we have to deflate its value.
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140213.315326
Commemorative artefacts purportedly speak—they communicate messages to their audience, even if no words are uttered. Sometimes, such artefacts purportedly communicate demeaning or pejorative messages about some members of society. The characteristics of such speech are, however, under-examined. I present an account of the paradigmatic characteristics of the speech of commemorative artefacts (or, “commemorative artefactual speech”), as a distinct form of political speech. According to my account, commemorative artefactual speech paradigmatically involves the use of an artefact by an authorised member of a group to declare the importance of remembering a subject, in virtue of some feature of the subject. Then, I outline a variety of ways that commemorative artefactual speech can go awry. Such speech can be unauthorised, involve unfair exclusion or incorrect identification, be aesthetically inadequate, invoke clandestine explanations, and be directed at inappropriate subjects. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my account for resisting problematic commemorative artefactual speech.
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140330.315336
Refutation and Imagination Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, Raymond Geuss, David Graeber, and Bernard Williams, have recognised the importance of these imaginative resources in shaping methodological reflections. These thinkers are concerned that limiting the relevance of history to normative theorising exposes ahistoricist thinkers to imaginative failures. I argue that this is best construed as a concern about the epistemic reliability of their evaluative judgments. Imaginative failures can introduce biases that unjustifiably restrict the range of solutions to practical collective problems they contemplate. Historical research serves a normative function that is unavailable to the methodologically ahistoricist approach by preventing such failures.
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181937.315341
What is the point of inquiry? Some say that the aim of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer; others, that the aim is to attain justified belief, epistemic improvement, or some other coveted epistemic status. Still others eschew “aim” talk altogether, and instead formulate norms governing inquiry. However, virtually all extant work on inquiry has agreed on at least this much: the aims or norms of inquiry can be specified in terms of the epistemic states of the inquirer (i.e., the agent conducting the inquiry). This paper argues that this conception of inquiry struggles to account for some central features of what is arguably the most successful form of inquiry in the modern era: scientific inquiry. We show that scientific inquiry is governed by several distinctive norms that are difficult to explain if inquiry is all about achieving epistemic benefits for the inquirer. Instead, many inquiries aim to confer epistemic benefits on others. This “inclusive” conception of inquiry has important advantages and implications.
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195011.315347
As an alternative to the long history of interpreting Artificial Intelligence as the attempt to rationalize and mechanize human ingenuity, thereby transcending nature and its perceived limits, this article proposes an interpretation of the conceptual foundations of Environmental Intelligence as the effort to develop digital technology and data-intensive algorithmic systems to sustain and enhance life on this planet. Thus articulated, EI provides a framework to challenge and redefine the philosophical premises of AI in ways that can explicitly spur the responsible and sustainable development of computational technologies towards public interest goals.
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195057.315352
Disruptive technologies are a key theme in economics, the philosophy of technology, and situated cognition - yet these debates remain largely disconnected. This paper addresses four core questions that cut across them: (i) What, precisely, are disruptive technologies “disrupting” across the different contexts in which the literature situates them? (ii) Why do technological disruptions play such prominent roles, in multiple domains, concerning the development of our species, cultures, and personal lives? (iii) Are technological disruptions inherently beneficial or harmful, and how are potential benefits and harms brought about? (iv) What strategies are available for adaptation to disruptive technologies, and how accessible are they for different groups and individuals? To unify current debates and provide a conceptual and normative foundation for future research, we draw on niche construction theory. We argue that disruptive technologies are technological niche disruptions (TENDs) that occur at various spatiotemporal scales. TENDs pressure social groups and individuals to adapt. As the abilities and resources that adaptation requires are often unevenly distributed, so are the harms and benefits TENDs produce. TENDs, therefore, both reflect and sustain existing inequalities.
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321313.315358
Scott Aaronson’s Brief Foreword:
Harvey Lederman is a distinguished analytic philosopher who moved from Princeton to UT Austin a few years ago. Since his arrival, he’s become one of my best friends among the UT professoriate. …
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349436.315363
In this chapter, I re!ect on my career to date and my current thinking on the core topics of this volume: values, pluralism, and pragmatism in science and philosophy of science. Since I am, I hope, merely in the middle rather than the end of my career, this is not a retrospective but a mediospective, if you will, though I will begin with retrospective re!ections and end with prospective ones. Happily, there are many opportunities to reference and engage with the excellent contributions to this volume in the course of things, to discuss what I have learned from my generous colleagues as well as indicate the very few places where our views differ.
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467421.315377
Learning not to be so embarrassed by my ignorance and failures. Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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602603.315383
[This continues an earlier essay, Book Review: Paradise Lost by John Milton.] 1. Adam asks Raphael, and you would too, admit it, about the sex lives of angels:
Love not the heavenly spirits, and how their love Express they, by looks only, or do they mix Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch? …
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602604.315388
PEA Soup is pleased to announce the forthcoming discussion from Free & Equal, on Elise Sugarman’s “Supposed Corpses and Correspondence” with a précis from Gabriel Mendlow. The discussion will take place from August 6th to 8th. …
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748209.315395
The term algorithmic fairness is used to assess whether
machine learning algorithms operate fairly. To get a sense of when
algorithmic fairness is at issue, imagine a data scientist is provided
with data about past instances of some phenomenon: successful
employees, inmates who when released from prison go on to reoffend,
loan recipients who repay their loans, people who click on an
advertisement, etc. and is tasked with developing an algorithm that
will predict other instances of these phenomena. While an algorithm
can be successful or unsuccessful at its task to varying degrees, it
is unclear what makes such an algorithm fair or unfair.
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786996.315401
Did you know that Lawvere did classified work on arms control in the 1960s, back when he was writing his thesis? Did you know that the French government offered him a job in military intelligence? The following paper should be interesting to applied category theorists—for a couple of different reasons:
• Bill Lawvere, The category of probabilistic mappings with applications to stochastic processes, statistics, and pattern recognition, Spring 1962, featuring Lawvere’s abstract and author commentary from 2020, reformatted for Lawvere Archive Posthumous Publications by Tobias Fritz, July 14, 2025. …
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807120.315406
Picture a playground on a sunny day, bustling with excited children. One falls and scratches her knee. Cries of distress draw the concern of a new friend. A few breaths later, she’s back on her feet with a big grin, ready for the next adventure. …
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824217.315411
Social authorities claim that we are obliged to obey their commands and they also claim the right to enforce them should we refuse. Many liberals (amongst others) insist that these claims hold water only when those subject to such an authority have agreed to obey it. Thus, according to classical liberals, people are subject to the authority of the state only if they have (in some sense) consented to its rule. Grounds for scepticism about a consent-based theory of political authority are no less familiar. Though ‘consent’ can mean different things, it is often observed that there is no form of consent which could both (a) validate political authority and (b) plausibly be attributed to most of the population of either past or present states.
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826135.315417
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce the July Ethics article discussion on “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body” by Katie Zhou (MIT). The précis is from Cressida Heyes (University of Alberta). …
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939560.315423
It is uncontroversial that humanistic thought and scientific inquiry have been entangled throughout a very long arc of intellectual history. Beyond this, however, significant challenges await anyone hoping to understand let alone articulate the nature of these entanglements. Since ‘science’ and ‘humanism’ are labels that are commonly applied to traditions of theorizing and practice that predate the 18th and 19th century introduction and use of these terms in their modern senses, respectively, and since both of these traditions have evolved and speciated a great deal from antiquity to the present, any attempt to untangle the many complex relationships between them amounts to a formidable task.
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945114.315429
Critics of ambivalence see it as something of inherent disvalue: a sign of poorly functioning agency. Instead, this chapter challenges this assumption, outlining the potential benefits of ambivalence for well-functioning agency, using criteria of rationality, agential effectiveness, autonomy, and authenticity. Furthermore, by exploring the interplay between philosophical debates on ambivalence and psychological research on suicide, the chapter shows how insights from each field can inform the other. For example, it follows that fostering ambivalence, rather than eliminating it, can sometimes support more effective suicide interventions, while ambivalence alone should not be seen as a marker of deficient agency and thus as justification for paternalistic measures.
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1056901.315439
Accuracy plays an important role in the deployment of machine learning algorithms. But accuracy is not the only epistemic property that matters. For instance, it is well-known that algorithms may perform accurately during their training phase but experience a significant drop in performance when deployed in real-world conditions. To address this gap, people have turned to the concept of algorithmic robustness. Roughly, robustness refers to an algorithm’s ability to maintain its performance across a range of real-world and hypothetical conditions. In this paper, we develop a rigorous account of algorithmic robustness grounded in Robert Nozick’s counterfactual sensitivity and adherence conditions for knowledge. By bridging insights from epistemology and machine learning, we offer a novel conceptualization of robustness that captures key instances of algorithmic brittleness while advancing discussions on reliable AI deployment. We also show how a sensitivity-based account of robustness provides notable advantages over related approaches to algorithmic brittleness, including causal and safety-based ones.
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1169376.315445
Pedants complain that the word “literally” is more often misused than used correctly. “This post will literally blow your mind! Your brain will literally explode!” “Literally?” they exclaim. “Then I had better stop reading.”
But the pedants are not pedantic enough. …
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1226126.31545
1. Should the state get out of the marriage business? Would it be better, if “personal relationships are regulated, the vulnerable are protected, and justice is furthered, all without the state recognition of marriage or any similar alternative”? …
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1233620.315455
What is health? This book addresses this fundamental question by narrowing the focus to contemporary medicine, specifically Western biomedicine or mainstream medicine. This chapter and the next one introduce the strategy: to understand what health is, we need to analyze health concepts. The health concepts we will discuss and evaluate throughout the book are the statements found in regulatory documents of the medical and healthcare community, or the operational definitions found in research protocols and scientific articles. We will see throughout the book that each concept of health is a theoretical tool designed to serve specific goals.
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1349097.315461
Machine learning is rapidly transforming how society and humans are quantified. Shared amongst some machine learning applications in the social and human sciences is the tendency to conflate concepts with their operationalization through particular tests or measurements. Existing scholarship reduces these equations of concept and operationalization to disciplinary naivety or negligence. This paper takes a close look at equations of concept and operationalization in machine learning predictions of poverty metrics. It develops two arguments. First, I demonstrate that conflations of concept and operationalization in machine learning poverty prediction cannot be reduced to naivety or negligence but can serve a strategic function. Second, I propose to understand this function in the context of philosophical and historical research on operationalism in the social sciences.
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1397122.315483
When thinking about online speech, it’s tempting to start with questions like: What’s new here? Do online speech environments enable new types of speech acts, new semantic phenomena, new expressive effects? In other words, how has the shift to online speech fundamentally changed how we use language to communicate, coordinate, obfuscate, rouse, empower, disempower, insult, etc.? What hidden truths might online speech reveal about the nature of meaning and communication more broadly?
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1459410.315492
Joseph Heath presents his market failures approach to business ethics as a happy medium between cynicism and the idealism of traditional moral theories such as Kantian ethics, which Heath believes to be incompatible with important forms of competition. The market failures approach defends some real ethical limits in business, beyond following the law, but it condones certain deviations from the norms of everyday morality in the interest of economic efficiency. On this view, a certain level of sleaziness in business is permissible and inevitable, even if it is regrettable. This article argues that Kantian ethics provides a better account of the ethics of competition than the market failures approach does. Kantian ethics is in fact compatible with competition, both on the market and in the workplace. On some key issues, notably including the issue of truthfulness and disclosure, Kantian ethics permits competitive strategies that the market failures theory forbids. Moreover, when Kantian ethics deems the reasoning behind a competitive strategy morally acceptable, it endorses the strategy without any ethical reservations. There is no reason to regard justified business practices as regrettable or sleazy.
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1485307.315497
Now that you’ve watched and/or read the Matthew Adelstein-Mike Huemer conversation on the ethics of insect suffering, I hope you’re ready to hear my reaction. I’m going to post this in two parts. In part 1, I dissect Adelstein and Huemer’s exchange with each other. …
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1485308.315503
A decade ago, Effective Altruism got an early taste of bad PR when someone at an EA Global conference was widely reported as enthusing that EA was “the last social movement the world would ever need,” or words to that effect. …