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45160.408657
Using the fiber bundle framework, this work investigates the conceptual and mathematical foundations of reference frames in General Relativity by contrasting two paradigms. The View from Nowhere interprets frame representations as perspectives on an invariant equivalence class, while the View from Everywhere posits each frame representation as constituting reality itself. This conception of reality is termed ”Relality.” The paper critically examines the philosophical and practical implications of these views, with a focus on reconciling theory with experimental practice. Central to the discussion is the challenge of providing a perspicuous characterisation of ontology. The View from Nowhere aligns with the so-called ‘sophisticated approach on symmetries’ and it complicates the empirical grounding of theoretical constructs. In contrast, the View from Everywhere offers a relational ontology that avoids the abstraction of equivalence classes.
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across the room — these are all familiar examples of a type of change Aquinas refers to as local motion (motus localis). Changes of this type are of particular importance to Aquinas, especially in the context of his broadly Aristotelian physics. This is not perhaps, surprising, given that Aquinas takes local motion to be a type of change that all bodies can undergo, as well as the only type that heavenly bodies can undergo. What is more, because local motion is intimately connected both to spatial location (ubi) and to place (locus), Aquinas thinks that any complete physics must provide an account of each of these things as well.
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of which might even cause disastrous failures, meaningless sacrifices, or irreparable losses. Obviously, we cannot rewind time and change the past, but the idea of redemption suggests a possibility of salvaging bad episodes in our life. Despite the religious connotation, redemptive narratives are prevalent in secular movies, novels, and even real-life stories. While some philosophers in the literature on well-being mention or briefly discuss the idea of redemption, none of them has attempted to provide a systematic account of it. This by no means indicates that redemption has nothing philosophically interesting to theorize about. What does it mean to redeem the past in secular settings, and why does redemption even matter without the religious underpinnings?
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508557.408773
Bet On It reader Tanmay Khale sent me a critique of Open Borders that I hadn’t heard before. Reprinted with permission. I’ll post my reply in the coming weeks. Dear Prof. Caplan,
I have a quick question regarding your arguments in favor of open borders, and particularly the influence of adverse selection. …
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736798.408784
Eugenic arguments are not a thing of the past. In 2016 prominent geneticist Michael Lynch published an article in Genetics arguing that human physical and mental performance is currently and will continue to decline at a rate of 1% per generation, if nothing is done to stop it. This estimate is not based on measurements of physical and mental performance, but on an argument from mutational load: medical interventions are relaxing selection on the human population which will lead to a buildup of deleterious mutations, dragging down human fitness. No policy recommendations were made, but the implication of the argument is clear. In this paper I show that the simple argument from relaxation of selection to fitness declines is invalid. When the argument is made valid it is not clear that there are any significant consequences to human population health.
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763122.408795
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Editor in Chief: Let’s start with some fan mail. Readers have asked about the recent cluster of essays touching, in one way or another, on religion. Can you talk about where they came from? …
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852108.408805
Perhaps the main question in the field of philosophy of chemistry has been whether chemistry reduces to quantum mechanics. The reason for this state of affairs is the simple fact that if chemistry does indeed reduce to quantum mechanics, then chemistry can be regarded as a subbranch of quantum physics with no relevant philosophical questions. Moreover, the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics was regarded as a paradigmatic case of successful reduction in the time that logical positivism was the accepted view of the nature of science. Needless to say, the pioneers of the philosophy of chemistry have generally argued that chemistry does not in fact reduce to quantum mechanics and that it has its own interesting philosophical problems that are worthy of pursuing (Van Brakel, 2000).
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852128.408826
In this brief article I respond to Seifert’s recent views on the periodic law and the periodic table in connection with the views of philosophers regarding laws of nature. I argue that the author makes some factual as well as conceptual errors which are in conflict with some generally held views regarding the periodic law and the periodic table.
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852147.408838
The article contrasts the way that laws are regarded by some philosophers of science with the way that they are regarded by scientists and science educators. After a brief review of the Humean and necessitarian views of scienfic laws, I highlight difference between scientists who regard laws as being merely descriptive and philosophers who generally regard them as being explanatory and, in some cases, as being necessary. I also discuss the views of two prominent philosophers of science who deny any role for scienfic laws. I conclude that science educators should be wary of adopng the necessitarian view of scienfic laws.
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852166.40885
In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long- standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
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852191.408861
It has been argued that inductive underdetermination entails that machine learning algorithms must be value-laden. This paper offers a more precise account of what it would mean for a “machine learning algorithm” to be “value-laden,” and, building on this, argues that a general argument from underdetermination does not warrant this conclusion.
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909837.408871
In philosophy, the empirical success of a science is often explained by the fact that it has managed to discover some law(s) of nature. This line of thought has not been thoroughly explored with respect to chemistry. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by showing how we could think about laws in chemistry. Specifically, it briefly presents how laws of nature are understood in philosophy of science. It then discusses two case studies from chemistry—the periodic table and chemical reactions—and explains how general ideas about law-hood can be applied to these cases. Lastly, it presents research questions and philosophical problems that arise by considering chemistry from the perspective of laws. This analysis illustrates that there is value in thinking about laws in chemistry.
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909865.408881
It has been over 60 years since Ernst Mayr famously argued for the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. In the following decades, Mayr’s proximate-ultimate distinction was well received within evolutionary biology and widely regarded as a major contribution to the philosophy of biology. Despite its enormous influence, there has been a persistent controversy on the distinction. It has been argued that the distinction is untenable. In addition, there have been complaints about the pragmatic value of the distinction in biological research. Some even suggest that the distinction should better be abandoned. In contrast, Mayr had consistently maintained the significance of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology. There are also other attempts to defend the distinction. The paper examines the debate by taking an integrated History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) approach and argues for a functional approach to causal concepts in scientific practice.
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909881.408893
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.
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909897.408906
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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909913.40892
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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909929.408933
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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909945.408945
In this transparently organized and argued book, Bird defends two main theses: that the aim of science is production of (scienti c) knowledge, and that even moderate empiricism is an incorrect account of the epistemology of science. The two theses are directly logically related by his account of evidence. Evidence, he maintains, is whatever can be used as a sound inferential basis for knowledge; and, at least in contemporary science that relies on sophisticated instruments, automated analysis, and distributed processing across specialist authors, this basis seldom if ever includes reports of anyone’s sense perceptions.
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Reproduction, after all, is a good yardstick for biological success. Organisms succeed when they leave more of their descendants in future generations. It is not, however, the only measure. Lineage persistence is another. On such a metric, the four extant species of horseshoe crabs are remarkably successful, having crawled around since the Ordovician. Though there are noticeable di erences, these two measures have a great deal in common. Both are about the continuation of lineages. This may be the lineage constituted by one’s o spring (and their o spring, and their o spring, and so on) in a breeding population. Or the lineage at stake might be the ‘meta-populational lineage’ of interbreeding organisms sticking it out over the generations.
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909977.40897
For many years any mention of consciousness in the context of quantum physics was generally restricted to those popular accounts that might be found on the ‘New Age’ or ‘Spiritual’ bookshelves. Certainly, in ‘mainstream’ philosophy of physics, the concept was regarded as de nitely non grata, following Putnam’s ([1961]) and Shimony’s ([1963]) famous set of critiques of the ‘consciousness causes collapse’ solution to the measurement problem in the early 1960s. Recently, however, consciousness has begun to tiptoe back into the limelight, as both explanans and explanandum. Here Shan Gao has collected seventeen contributions from prominent philosophers and physicists (including one Nobel Prize winner), which o er a disparate set of accounts of the role it might play. Following a helpful introductory orientation, these essays are grouped into three sections: ‘Consciousness and Wave Function Collapse’, ‘Consciousness in Quantum Theories’, and ‘Quantum Approaches to Consciousness’, although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness in the placement of some of the papers both within and between these divisions.
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Khalidi favours a mildly revisionist outlook within a non-essentialist yet realist framework—we won’t wholly abandon many concepts inherited from folk psychology, for example. He also a rms a form of nonreductionism about human cognitive kinds in which a distinction in individuation practices explains and justi es many-to-many structure–function mappings: cognitive kinds are externalistically individuated, while neural kinds are not (or ‘not usually’; p. 22, note 13). But the main purpose of the book is to put Khalidi’s causal-nexus account of natural kinds to work in cognitive science as it revises its ontology, in response to neuroscience or whatever else. In what follows I hope to convey my overall assessment that Khalidi’s book is informative, challenging, and awed in philosophically interesting ways.
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910011.408995
Baxter, J. [2023]: ‘Kolja Ehrenstein’s Causal Pluralism in the Life Sciences’, BJPS Review of Books, 2023 The last century of philosophical work has seen a proliferation of competing causal theories: regularity theory, probabilistic causality, counterfactual analyses, interventionism, process theory. It’s common to nd authors expressing the attitude that there is no single, universal theory of causation. Yet, these authors often mean di erent things by the term ‘pluralism’. With this book, Ehrenstein aims to achieve greater clarity and rigor concerning claims of causal pluralism in the philosophy of science literature. Ehrenstein is sceptical of numerous claims of pluralism about causality in the life sciences. He argues that some causal distinctions, such as Mayr’s ultimate and proximate cause, are inherently incoherent and do not amount to a meaningful pluralism. Other claims to pluralism, such as Elliot Sober and Stuart Glennan’s analyses of causal relevance and causal production, are not helpful in resolving the disputes they were purported to address. Still other proposed causal concepts, notably the concepts of permissive and instructive causes, are not genuine cases of causal pluralism.
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910029.409008
There is a story told over history and philosophy of biology camp res of a terror that once roamed these parts and scared biologists and philosophers alike: the essence monster. This was an ironic name, since if things have essences, monsters are the things that don’t, so the philosophers especially appreciated the paradox. However, like a good number of camp re stories, it is a fairy tale, mostly useful for scaring younglings. The essence monster is supposed to have killed progress in biology until Darwin freed us from the misperception that it was real. After that, the essence monster was itself killed o by the knights of the modern synthesis, until Michael Devitt revived it. Or so the new story goes. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear over a camp re.
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910048.40902
Heyes returns us to arguments about the nature and extent of heritable specialization (henceforth, domain speci city) in the cognitive phenotype synthesized in the 1990s by Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 9–16). Evolutionary Psychology integrates evidence about developmental canalization, selective de cits and dissociations, neural localization, inheritance, encapsulation of so-called system 1 from system 2 processes, learning theory, and evolutionary modelling, and argues that domain speci city is the result of genetic evolution. Of course, domain speci city associated with any or all of these ‘markers’ does not entail genetic evolution. However, Evolutionary Psychology links these considerations to the poverty of stimulus argument for innateness to provide an inference to the best explanation that genetic evolution explains domain speci city.
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910090.409032
Mathematics is the “language of nature,” a privileged mode of expression in science. We think it latches onto something essential about the physical universe, and we seek theories that reduce phenomena to mathematical laws. Yet, this attitude could not arise from the philosophies dominant before the early modern period. In orthodox Aristotelianism, mathematical categories are too impoverished to capture the causal structure of the world. In the revived Platonism of its opponents, the natural world is too corrupt to exemplify mathematical perfection. Modern mathematical science required a novel tertium quid, due to Pietro Catena.
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1181156.409042
In many traditions, God is claimed to be everywhere. In this paper I introduce and defend a novel account of what this might mean. Recent literal accounts of omnipresence draw on discussions about the general nature of location in metaphysics, and my approach continues this theme. I first suggest there are independent reasons to develop a new primitive location relation – exact co-location – which is a generalisation of the relation of exact location. I then use this relation to articulate a version of divine omnipresence which avoids several of the challenges which arise for a literal interpretation of God being everywhere. The resulting view says that God is exactly co-located with every thing and every place, and therefore literally present everywhere, without bearing precisely the same relationship to things and space that we do.
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1181177.409054
There are many and varied claims made about divine presence in different religious traditions. The idea that God is omnipresent, i.e. everywhere, is the subject of this Handbook and is a staple of western theism and several other systems of belief. This chapter focuses on a different claim that’s made about where God is located, namely the rather puzzling assertion that Jesus Christ becomes present in a particular way in the Eucharistic celebration.
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1252599.409065
We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. Constitutivism explains away disagreement and at best explains the emergence of new values, not genuine change. Therefore, Thomsonian constitutivism is not a good fix for realist problems with explaining value disagreement, and value change.
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1252636.409083
Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.
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1429009.409097
Sleeping Beauty, the renowned Bayesian reasoner, has enrolled in an experiment at the Experimental Philosophy Lab. On Sunday evening, she is put to sleep. On Monday, the experimenters awaken her. After a short chat, the experimenters tell her that it is Monday. She is then put to sleep again, and her memories of everything that happened on Monday are erased. The experimenters then toss a coin. If and only if the coin lands tails, the experimenters awaken her again on Tuesday. Beauty is told all this on Sunday. When she awakens on Monday – unsure of what day it is – what should her credence be that the coin toss on Monday lands heads?