A clock designed to work for 10 millennia is being built – but what is the point of it?

Graeme A Forbes asks David Chalmers, Michaela McSweeny and Darren Bradley 'Are we in a Simulation?' in this magazine feature for a popular audience.

This article examines nanotechnology within the context of the public interest. It notes that though nanotechnology research and development investment totalled US$9.6 billion in 2005, the public presently understands neither the implications nor how it might be best governed. The article maps a range of nanotechnology dialogue activities under way within the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Australia. It explores the various approaches to articulating public interest matters and notes a shift in the way in which these governments, (...) on the whole, appear to be attempting to manage nanotechnology “risks.” It argues that open and transparent policy deliberations and extensive public discourse will be pivotal to protecting the public interest, gaining public trust and acceptance of nanotechnologies. The article concludes that though governing emerging technologies in the public interest is not a new concept, nanotechnology does present additional challenges that must be addressed by the guardians of the public interest. (shrink)

Dunbar, the character from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, tries to extend his life by making it boring. I use Dunbar’s case to pose a challenge to those who think our phenomenology gives us reason to defend time’s passage as a metaphysical view. I argue that the reason phenomenology gives for us to defend time’s passage cannot be that our brains detect time’s passage, unless we take Dunbar’s metaphysics more seriously than it deserves. Instead we must resort to the ordinary practice (...) of trying to make sense of things in order to reach such a metaphysically substantive view. (shrink)

I aim to sketch a view of a methodology for metaphysics, suggested by Hookway’s reading of C. S. Peirce, that allows one to hold realist metaphysical views (i.e. ones that avoid anti-realism, or idealism) about some questions, but avoids merely verbal disputes, and ‘unwieldy realism’. It is named for Peirce’s ‘Critical Commonsensism’, and uses pragmatic transcendental arguments to defend realism about non-optional basic commitments, e.g. to generality, agency, normativity, modality, change, concrete substances, and other minds. It is critical because we (...) are entitled to hope that the presuppositions of our most basic non-optional commitments obtain, and commonsensical because we begin with our current practices and proceed with anti-sceptical fallibilism. I consider a number of objections to the proposed methodology, including concerns associated with our identification of presuppositions, with the basic non-optional commitments they are presuppositions of, and the community who are so committed. These questions, I will claim, are open to empirical and anthropological investigation, but can begin with careful observation of human practices of action, inquiry, explanation, and justification. I will defend the view we end up with as realist, rather than anti-realist or quasi-realist, and argue that, given holism of confirmation, we are plausibly justified in believing (rather than merely hoping) a number of metaphysical theses that have stood the test of time. (shrink)

There is little doubt that the development and commercialisation of nanotechnologies is challenging traditional state-based regulatory regimes. Yet governments currently appear to be taking a non-interventionist approach to directly regulating this emerging technology. This paper argues that a large regulatory toolbox is available for governing this small technology and that as nanotechnologies evolve, many regulatory advances are likely to occur outside of government. It notes the scientific uncertainties facing us as we contemplate nanotechnology regulatory matters and then examines the notion (...) of regulation itself, suggesting new ways to frame our understanding of both regulation and the regulatory tools relevant to nanotechnologies. By drawing upon three different conceptual lenses of regulation, the paper articulates a wide range of potential regulatory tools at hand. It also focuses particularly on the ways various tools are currently being used or perhaps may be employed in the future. The strengths and weaknesses characterising these tools is examined as well as the different actors involved. The paper concludes that we will increasingly face debate over what is likely to work most effectively in regulating nano technologies, the legitimacy of these different potential approaches, and the speed at which these different regimes may be employed. (shrink)

The Growing-Block view of time has some problems with the past. It is committed to the existence of the past, but needs to say something about the difference between the past and present. I argue that we should resist Correia and Rosenkranz’ response to Braddon-Mitchell’s argument that the Growing-Block leads to scepticism about whether we are present. I consider an approach, similar to Peter Forrest, and show it is not so counter-intuitive as Braddon-Mitchell suggests and further show that it requires (...) no ‘semantic and metaphysical gymnastics’, as Chris Heathwood has suggested. In doing these things I make the problem of the past on the Growing-Block view a problem in its history, not its present. (shrink)

[Graeme Forbes] In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon', are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon or (...) an immortal gorgon', are invalid. Since 'a gorgon' and 'a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon' are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems.) /// [Jennifer Saul] This paper discusses the question of which verbs are intensional transitives. In particular, I ask which verbs Forbes should take to be intensional transitives. I argue that it is very difficult to arrive at a clear and plausible understanding of what an intensional transitive is-making it difficult to answer these questions. I end by briefly raising some questions about the usefulness of the category of intensional transitives. (shrink)

Time appears to us to pass. Some philosophers think that we should account for these experiences by appeal to change in what there unrestrictedly is . I argue that such an appeal can only be the beginning of an account of passage. To show this, I consider a minimal type of view—a purely topological view—that attempts to account for experiences as of passage by an appeal to ontological change and topological features of the present. I argue that, if ontological change (...) is needed to account for our experiences as of passage, then there are other features of our experiences as of passage that a purely topological view does not have the resources to explain. These features include the implacability of time’s passage, the orderliness of time’s passage, and the impossibility of a having a past that was never present. (shrink)

This philosopher’s introduction to the nature of time could radically alter how you see your past and imagine your future.

The meanings of words seem to change over time. But while there is a growing body of literature in linguistics and philosophy about meaning change, there has been little discussion about the metaphysical underpinnings of meaning change. The central aim of this paper is to push this discussion forward by surveying the terrain and advocating for a particular metaphysical picture. In so doing, we hope to clarify various aspects of the nature of meaning change, as well as prompt future philosophical (...) investigation into this topic. More specifically, this paper has two parts. The first, broadly exploratory, part surveys various metaphysical accounts of meaning change. The goal here is to lay out the terrain, thereby highlighting some key choice points. Then, in the second part, after critiquing Prosser’s (Philosophy Phenomenol Res 100(3):657–676, 2020) exdurantism about ‘mental files’, we sketch and defend the enduring senses view of meaning change. (shrink)

Popular culture can play a significant role in shaping the acceptance of evolving technologies, with nanotechnology likely to be a case in point. The most popular fiction work to date in this arena has been Michael Crichton's techno-thriller Prey, which fuses together nanotechnology science with science fiction. Within the context of Prey, this article examines the role that scientists and popular culture play in educating society, and one another, about emerging technologies. In di ferentiating fact from fiction, the article reflects (...) on how such distinctions may be important in proactive public dialogue projects. The article concludes that popular culture will be a key factor in informing citizen beliefs about the coming nano-age. Accordingly, governments, in conjunction with the scientific community, will need to be proactive in distinguishing science fact from science fiction for the benefit of their citizens. (shrink)

The ‘When Am I?’ problem, introduced by Bourne 2002, 2006, and Braddon-Mitchell 2004, creates a problem for thinking that the past is just like the present, and responses by Forrest 2004 and Forbes 2016, in which activities and processes are distinctive of the present, suggest that the past is settled. This chapter argues that the ‘When am I?’ problem arises because it takes tense metaphysically seriously but not aspect. The solution of invoking processes and activities takes aspect as seriously as (...) tense. A two-dimensional (2D) framework explains the relationship between completed processes (associated with perfective aspect) and ongoing processes (associated with progressive aspect), also explaining cases where facts about the past seem to have changed retrospectively, and cases, building on Forbes and Wildman (2022), where meanings of words have changed over time. It allows that what’s true has changed while accepting that the past is intrinsically settled. (shrink)

Growing-Block theorists hold that past and present things are real, while future things do not yet exist. This generates a puzzle: how can Growing-Block theorists explain the fact that some sentences about the future appear to be true? Briggs and Forbes develop a modal ersatzist framework, on which the concrete actual world is associated with a branching-time structure of ersatz possible worlds. They then show how this branching structure might be used to determine the truth values of future contingents. They (...) point out three different ways of interpreting the logical connectives, which give rise to three different logics of the open future: one supervaluationist, one corresponding to Lukasiewicz's strong Kleene logic, and one intuitionist. (shrink)

In this article, we consider two independently appealing theories—the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience—and argue that at least one is false. The Growing-Block view is a theory about the nature of time. It says that past and present things exist, while future things do not, and the passage of time consists in new things coming into existence. Humean Supervenience is a theory about the nature of entities like laws, nomological possibility, counterfactuals, dispositions, causation, and chance. It says that none of (...) these entities are fundamental, since if they were, this would entail the existence of irreducible necessary connections between matters of fact. Instead, these entities supervene on a fundamental, non-nomological ‘Humean mosaic’ of property instances at spacetime points. We will further explain and motivate the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience in Sects. 2 and 3, but first, we turn to our master argument. (shrink)

Heidegger’s phenomenology is not focused on concepts but on the self-showing of phenomena. In Being and Time, section 44, it is not only everyday objects that show themselves – a true statement about a room lets the room show itself, but in addition the event of truth is an uncovering, Entdecken, that also shows itself. Truth is a phenomenon for the phenomenologist. Thus this article replies to Tugendhat and other critics who claim that Heidegger has not measured up to the (...) standards imposed by their concept of truth. It also supports replies made to Tugendhat by Dahlstrom and others. Later sections of the paper show why Heidegger was right to broaden the discussion beyond statements, to encompass the truth of conduct, of things, of the world and of Dasein. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics. (...) He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and (...) events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’— laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be a problem for the Growing-Block view. We begin with the framework given in Briggs and Forbes (in The real truth about the unreal future. Oxford studies in metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012 ), and, taking laws as primitive, we show that the Growing-Block view has the resources to provide an account of possibility, and a natural semantics for non-backtracking causal counterfactuals. We show (...) how objective chances might ground a more fine-grained concept of feasibility, and furnished a places in the structure where causation and dispositions might fit. The Growing-Block view, thus understood, provides the resources to explain the close link between modality and tense, so that it predicts modal change as time passes. This account lets us capture not only what the future might hold for us, and also what might have been. (shrink)

Habermas's theory of social evolution has been subjected to critique by environmentally motivated sociologists. They argue that his decision to recast social theory in terms of an extended, if selective analogy with biology leads him into a set of practical positions that are irreconcilable with Green politics and inconsistent with the goals of traditional critical theory. This article argues that these criticisms are based on an inaccurate assessment of the role of evolutionary concepts in Habermas's thought. By drawing out the (...) similarities between Habermas and Kant on the question of the relationship between history and natural history, it is possible to see that Habermas's use of evolutionary metaphors plays a regulative rather than a constitutive role in his thinking on society. This strategy does not save Habermas's position, but shows instead that it may be vulnerable to an immanent critique that pulls out the real underlying antagonisms in his system. (shrink)

What is time? When no-one asks you, you know, but when you read the recent literature in philosophy of time, you don’t know. Out of Time, by Sam Baron, Kristie Miller and Jonathan Tallant, and Dynamic Realism, by Tina Röck, present very different accounts of time. They differ methodologically, with a focus on experimental philosophy, in the form of the Sydney Time Studies, and live hypotheses in the theoretical physics of quantum gravity on the one hand, and phenomenology combined with (...) process philosophy on the other. And they arrive at different conclusions. Nonetheless, I will try to show, they present complementary approaches to time in a number of ways. (shrink)

How Covid-19 can solve the climate crisis.

In this particularly well written volume Graeme Hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation (conceptual analysis) by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities.

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

Filling the need for an accessible, carefully structured introductory text in symbolic logic, Modern Logic has many features designed to improve students' comprehension of the subject, including a proof system that is the same as the award-winning computer program MacLogic, and a special appendix that shows how to use MacLogic as a teaching aid. There are graded exercises at the end of each chapter--more than 900 in all--with selected answers at the end of the book. Unlike competing texts, Modern Logic (...) gives equal weight to semantics and proof theory and explains their relationship, and develops in detail techniques for symbolizing natural language in first-order logic. After a general introduction featuring the notion of logical form, the book offers sections on classical sentential logic, monadic predicate logic, and full first-order logic with identity. A concluding section deals with extensions of and alternatives to classical logic, including modal logic, intuitionistic logic, and fuzzy logic. For students of philosophy, mathematics, computer science, or linguistics, Modern Logic provides a thorough understanding of basic concepts and a sound basis for more advanced work. (shrink)

Was Silvanus Phillips Thompson primarily a physicist, electrical engineer, biographer, or teacher? His obituarists could not agree. I argue Thompson was in fact a polymathic generalist who, as a philanthropic Quaker, worked not to promote his own expertise but rather to ensure the public was swiftly informed of the most important techno-scientific research and applications of his contemporaries. I illustrate this in a comparison of Thompson and his longer-lived friend Oliver Lodge: working in closely-related areas, they had contrasting profiles and (...) commitments. After inspecting Thompson's work as textbook author and bibliophile, I resolve his apparently paradoxical status as both radical critic and figurehead of multiple institutions. Finally, to flesh out his friends' representation of him as a “many-sided crystal,” I analyse Thompson's multi-facetted posthumous reputation, especially in reviews of the Life and Letters written by his widow Jane and daughter Helen exactly 100 years ago. (shrink)

What Makes Time Special? by Craig Callender, Oxford University Press, 2017. xx + 344 pp.

In a recent article in Analysis, Graeme Hunter and William Seager (1981) attempt to rescue counterpart theory (CT) from some objections of Hazen 1979. They see these objections as arising from ‘uncritical use of the translation scheme originally proposed by Lewis’, and intend to meet them by refraining from use of that scheme. But they do not offer a new scheme; they say ‘…it is no more necessary to have one to capture the sense of modal idiom than it (...) is to capture the sense of quantificational idiom…Appeal to truth value is the single most important criterion of correct translation’ (Hunter and Seager 1981:72). Thus, where the scheme of Lewis (1968) translates a truth by a falsehood or conversely, Hunter and Seager simply produce a sentence which they claim to be a better translation, without articulating any structural principles they employ to arrive at their candidate. A friend of CT should not be happy with this procedure. Let Lm be first-order modal language and Lc be the language of counterpart theory. Sentences of Lc are intended to interpret or elucidate the meanings of Lm-sentences in the strong sense that they should be the outputs of an adequate theory of meaning, which we can formulate as a model theory, for Lm, written in Lc plus set theory. The interest of CT resides in its potential to provide an alternative approach to the model theory of modal logic, and from the clauses of any such alternative model theory we should be able to read off a translation scheme for Lm into Lc, just as we can in the standard case. If CT’s motivation is sound, which Hunter and Seager do not dispute, yet there is no translation scheme and so no counterpart-theoretic model theory, one might suspect some defect in the original language Lm. And in fact, Hunter and Seager find certain Lm-sentences multiply ambiguous with respect to Lc; but if a counterpart-theoretic model theory is possible, to say.. (shrink)

In this provocative work, noted social and economic theorist Graeme D. Snooks exposes fatal flaws in the foundations of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Further, he develops a remarkable replacement theory of evolution. The new 'dynamic-strategy' theory views life as a strategic pursuit in which organisms adopt dynamic strategies to survive and prosper. This theory reveals the organism as empowered, rather than as the plaything of gods, genes, or blind chance. And it provides a powerful new basis for humanism.

Keith Donnellan has advanced an interpretation of Kripke's well-known "Puzzle About Belief" according to which the puzzle concerns the true nature of beliefs. In this paper I argue that the puzzle merely concerns problems that others can have in "reporting" a confused individual's beliefs. I conclude that a new-Fregean account of belief- ascription is best- equipped to solve the puzzle.