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3759.961255
Very short summary: This is a two-part essay on the crisis of contemporary liberalism. I argue that this crisis reflects the growing influence of a conception of the political as a praxis that is beyond human rationality and reason. …
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4909.9615
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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231145.961514
▼ AbStrACt Since the early days of its professionalization, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the history of science has been seen as a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, only one aspect of this triadic nexus, the relations between the history of science and the natural sciences, has been extensively discussed. The other aspect, the relations between the history of science and the humanities, has been less commented upon. With this paper I hope to make a small step towards redressing this imbalance, by discussing the relationships between the history of science and two other humanistic disciplines that have been historically and institutionally associated with it: the philosophy of science and general history. I argue that both of these relationships are marked by the characteristics of an unrequited friendship: on the one hand, historians of science have ignored, for the most part, calls for collaboration from their philosopher colleagues; and, on the other hand, historians specializing in other branches of history have been rather indifferent, again for the most part, to the efforts of historians of science to understand science as a historical phenomenon.
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271163.961526
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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422830.961536
For Raz, “the fundamental point about authority [is that] it removes the decision from one person to another.” It is a good question why you should allow someone else to decide for you what you are to do. One plausible response is to observe that, under the right conditions, by allowing someone else to decide for you, you are more likely to do what you ought to do anyway than if you decide what to do for yourself. That, in a nutshell, is the diagnosis of and solution to the problem of authority that Raz offers us. I agree that Raz raises an important question, and I shall not dispute his answer. I do maintain that there is a narrower and perhaps less tractable problem with “authority” that Raz misses— a problem about obedience. My aim is to bring this concern into clearer focus.
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460602.961546
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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474279.961566
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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600505.961578
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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753750.961594
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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753800.961607
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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867892.96162
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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927940.961632
Most recent theorists take social norms to arise from certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we argue that social norms are instead grounded in a social norming process: an (often non-verbal) social communication process that institutes or ‘makes’ the norm. We present different versions of a process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by taking social norms to arise through ‘expressive acts’, just as some laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes. Social norms should be distinguished from social pressures, which often co-exist with social norms but are caused by attitudes.
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935293.961645
I’m so frustrated by low-decoupling academics who refuse to acknowledge basic evaluative facts (like that, all else equal, it’s better to have smarter, healthier children) because they’re terrified of what they—mistakenly!—imagine to be the implications. …
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951413.961655
I suggest a unified account of conditional oughts and of contrastive reasons. The core of the account is an explanation of facts about conditional oughts in terms of facts about contrastive reasons, and a reduction of contrastive reasons to non-contrastive reasons. In rejecting contrastivism about reasons, the account is consistent with orthodoxy about reasons. Moreover, it extends a standard view of how oughts and reasons are related to one another, and it makes sense of important and explanatorily recalcitrant phenomena. To the extent to which the account involves an explanation of facts about conditional oughts, it does not directly compete with semantic analyses of statements about conditional oughts. However, as I indicate in passing, the account coheres well with an important type of such analyses, while it is inconsistent with others.
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1005238.961665
There is large consensus across clinical research that feelings of worthlessness (FOW) are one of the highest risk factors for a patient’s depression becoming suicidal. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this empirical relationship from a phenomenological perspective. I propose that there are purely reactive and pervasive forms of FOW. Subsequently, I present a phenomenological demonstration for how and why it is pervasive FOW that pose a direct suicidal threat. I then outline criteria, contingent upon empirical verification, by which clinicians can more confidently identify when a patient’s FOW place them at high risk of suicide.
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1120570.961675
Several anecdotal claims about the relationship between philosophical discourse and the subject of autism have been forwarded in recent years. This paper seeks to verify or debunk these descriptive claims by carefully examining the philosophical literature on autism. We conduct a comprehensive scoping review to answer the question, what do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism? This empirical work confirms that the philosophy of autism is underdeveloped as a subfield of philosophy. Moreover, the way that philosophers engage with autism is often unreflective and uncritical.
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1120594.961686
Hyperscanning has been increasingly used to quantify the quality of social relationships by tracking the neural correlates of interpersonal interactions. This paper critically examines the use of hyperscanning to track the neural correlates of psychotherapeutic change, e.g., the patient-therapist relationship. First, we motivate our project by diagnosing a lack of complex models in this domain and, looking for the causes of this issue, we highlight the epistemic blindspots of current methodologies that prioritize neural synchrony as a marker of therapeutic success. Drawing on empirical studies and theoretical frameworks, we identify an asymmetry between the neural and behavioral conceptual toolkits, with the latter remaining underdeveloped. We argue that this imbalance stems from two key issues: the underdetermined qualitative interpretation of brain data and the neglect of strong reciprocity in neuroscientific second-person paradigms. In light of our critical analysis, we suggest that further research should address the complexity of reciprocal, dynamic interactions in therapeutic contexts. Specifically, drawing on enactivism, we highlight that the autonomy of interactions is one of the factors that undermines the synchrony paradigm. This approach emphasizes the co-construction of meaning and shared experiences through embodied, reciprocal interactions, offering a more integrative understanding of therapeutic change that accounts for neural correlates of the emergent and dynamic nature of social cognition.
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1132291.961695
A confession: at any given moment, I am liable to know the amount of money in my savings account, my uber rating, my Wordle scores from the last five days, and my h-index on Google scholar. For at least three months after publication, and probably more like six, I would be able to tell you the goodreads rating of my latest book. …
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1223208.961703
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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1277499.961713
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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1326127.961721
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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1351295.961732
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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1440663.96174
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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1440683.961748
Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses
questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing
traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those
methods include survey experiments that examine laypeople’s
intuitions about legal-philosophical thought experiments and concepts
of legal significance (e.g., causation, intent, reasonableness). Other
times, experimental jurisprudence focuses on the cognitive processes
underlying legal reasoning. This entry reviews representative work in
experimental jurisprudence and discusses major objections and
critiques.
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1488578.961757
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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1519686.961766
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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1555404.961776
Greetings from Kyoto, Japan! Here’s an excerpt from Unbeatable’s last chapter. [from Chapter 6: Four Candid Conversations]
This is the dialogue chapter, where I argue against a wide variety of fictional archetypes. …
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1607354.961785
Guess I’m A Rationalist Now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. …
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1639785.961792
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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1720496.961802
The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). …