Volume 55, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 198-199.

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and metho- dological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the treatment of conflict in public disputes, the dynamics of argumentation, and the play of acts defined analytically as ‘test’ and ‘compromise’. At each level, we compare this approach to Deweyan (...) pragmatism. (shrink)

Ross P. Cameron argues that the flow of time is a genuine feature of reality. He suggests that the best version of the A-Theory is a version of the Moving Spotlight view, according to which past and future beings are real, but there is nonetheless an objectively privileged present. Cameron argues that the Moving Spotlight theory should be viewed as having more in common with Presentism than with the B-Theory. Furthermore, it provides the best account of truthmakers (...) for claims about what was or will be the case. Cameron goes on to defend an account of the open future, and argues that this is a better account than that available to the Growing Block theory. (shrink)

This book provides a framework for thinking about foundational philosophical questions surrounding machine learning as an approach to artificial intelligence. Specifically, it links recent breakthroughs in deep learning to classical empiricist philosophy of mind. In recent assessments of deep learning's current capabilities and future potential, prominent scientists have cited historical figures from the perennial philosophical debate between nativism and empiricism, which primarily concerns the origins of abstract knowledge. These empiricists were generally faculty psychologists; that is, they argued that the active (...) engagement of general psychological faculties-such as perception, memory, imagination, attention, and empathy-enables rational agents to extract abstract knowledge from sensory experience. This book explains a number of recent attempts to model roles attributed to these faculties in deep neural network based artificial agents by appeal to the faculty psychology of philosophers such as Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), John Locke David Hume, William James, and Sophie de Grouchy. It illustrates the utility of this interdisciplinary connection by showing how it can provide benefits to both philosophy and computer science: computer scientists can continue to mine the history of philosophy for ideas and aspirational targets to hit on the way to more robustly rational artificial agents, and philosophers can see how some of the historical empiricists' most ambitious speculations can be realized in specific computational systems. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms (...) just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

There is a concern that as a result of COVID-19 there will be a shortage of ventilators for patients requiring respiratory support. This concern has resulted in significant debate about whether it is appropriate to withdraw ventilation from one patient in order to provide it to another patient who may benefit more. The current advice available to doctors appears to be inconsistent, with some suggesting withdrawal of treatment is more serious than withholding, while others suggest that this distinction (...) should not be made. We argue that there is no ethically relevant difference between withdrawing and withholding treatment and that suggesting otherwise may have problematic consequences. If doctors are discouraged from withdrawing treatment, concern about a future shortage may make them reluctant to provide ventilation to patients who are unlikely to have a successful outcome. This may result in underutilisation of available resources. A national policy is urgently required to provide doctors with guidance about how patients should be prioritised to ensure the maximum benefit is derived from limited resources. (shrink)

Is the world internally connected by a web of necessary connections or is everything loose and independent? Followers of David Hume accept the latter by upholding Hume’s Dictum, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. Roughly put, anything can coexist with anything else, and anything can fail to coexist with anything else. Hume put it like this: “There is no object which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves.” Since Hume’s (...) day, Hume’s Dictum has played a major role in philosophy, especially in contemporary metaphysics. In ruling out necessary connections, Hume’s Dictum implies that causal relations and the laws of nature are contingent. It makes other demands on our metaphysics of science as well; for example, it places restrictions on our metaphysics of counterfactuals, dispositions, and explanation. The principle has applications in other areas too. Hume’s Dictum places constraints on our theories of abstract objects and moral properties. For example, Hume’s Dictum rules out the view that moral properties are distinct from, but necessarily connected to, non-moral properties. While Hume’s Dictum is a prominent principle in metaphysics, few Humeans have defended the principle at length. It is assumed more often than it is argued for. As a result, Hume’s Dictum no longer enjoys the reputation it once did. It’s common to hear complaints about the lack of arguments in support of Hume’s Dictum. Moreover, philosophers are increasingly willing to defend views that are at odds with Hume’s Dictum. A striking example of this is the recent explosion of interest in views that take causal relations and the laws of nature to be necessary. Humeans can no longer afford to be complacent. An extended defense of Hume’s Dictum is called for, and that’s what this dissertation aims to offer. This dissertation has three parts. In the first part, I lay out some preliminaries and offer a precise formulation of Hume’s Dictum. In the second part, I develop three arguments in favor of Hume’s Dictum. In the final part, I defend Hume’s Dictum against objections. (shrink)

The last 5 years have seen a series of remarkable achievements in deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence research, and some modellers have argued that their performance compares favourably to human cognition. Critics, however, have argued that processing in deep neural networks is unlike human cognition for four reasons: they are (i) data-hungry, (ii) brittle, and (iii) inscrutable black boxes that merely (iv) reward-hack rather than learn real solutions to problems. This article rebuts these criticisms by exposing comparative bias within them, in the (...) process extracting some more general lessons that may also be useful for future debates. (shrink)

In footnote 56 of his Naming and Necessity, Kripke offers a ‘proof’ of the essentiality of origin. On its most literal reading the argument is clearly flawed, as was made clear by Nathan Salmon. Salmon attempts to save the literal reading of the argument, but I argue that the new argument is flawed as well, and that it can’t be what Kripke intended. I offer an alternative reconstruction of Kripke’s argument, but I show that this suffers from a more (...) subtle fault. (shrink)

We see unique opportunities to advance emotional research by studying an overlooked environmental problem. The biodiversity crisis is caused by land use, in particular by reducing and damaging habitats, such as deforestation for cattle grazing. Biodiversity processes are proximate and personally moving, like when a person is causing or experiencing changes to livelihood-providing ecosystems, and we suggest this affect-rich context is useful for studying social and psychological processes. In contrast, much research on far-away populations thinking about climate change effects involves (...) more abstract and distant cognitions. We also suggest biodiversity-related emotions have consequential outcomes for health and behavior, and provide advice for shaping research programs on specific populations and wildlife interactions. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...) a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

Gender dysphoria is a clinically significant incongruence between expressed gender and assigned gender, with rapidly growing prevalence among children. The UK High Court recently conducted a judicial review regarding the service provision at a youth-focussed gender identity clinic in Tavistock. The high court adjudged it ‘highly unlikely’ that under-13s, and ‘doubtful’ that 14–15 years old, can be competent to consent to puberty blocker therapy for GD. They based their reasoning on the limited evidence regarding efficacy, the likelihood of progressing to (...) cross-sex hormone therapy and the ‘life-changing consequences’ of puberty blockers. In this article, I offer two concurrent arguments to dispute their reasoning. First, I argue that minors can be competent to consent to puberty blockers for GD, because the decision to undergo puberty blocker therapy is no more complex or far-reaching than other medical decisions that we accept a child should be able to make. Second, I argue that—irrespective of competence—such legal restriction for all children fundamentally contradicts the central ethical tenet of child healthcare: best interests. For these two reasons, the high court should not restrict access to puberty blockers for competent GD children. (shrink)

Systems thinking has emerged as a means of conceptualizing and addressing complex public health problems, thereby challenging more commonplace understanding of problems and corresponding solutions as straightforward explanations of cause and effect. Systems thinking tries to address the complexity of problems through qualitative and quantitative modeling based on a variety of systems theories, each with their own assumptions and, more importantly, implicit and unexamined values. To date, however, there has been little engagement between systems scientists and those working (...) in bioethics and public health ethics. The goal of this paper is to begin to consider what it might mean to combine systems thinking with public health ethics to solve public health challenges. We argue that there is a role for ethics in systems thinking in public health as a means of elucidating implicit assumptions and facilitating ethics debate and dialogue with key stakeholders. (shrink)

Critics of animal modeling have advanced a variety of arguments against the validity of the practice. The point of one such form of argument is to establish that animal modeling is pointless and therefore immoral. In this article, critical arguments of this form are divided into three types, the pseudoscience argument, the disanalogy argument, and the predictive validity argument. I contend that none of these criticisms currently succeed, nor are they likely to. However, the connection between validity and morality is (...) important, suggesting that critical efforts would be instructive if they addressed it in a more nuanced way. (shrink)

Our prominent definitions of cognition are too vague and lack empirical grounding. They have not kept up with recent developments, and cannot bear the weight placed on them across many different debates. I here articulate and defend a more adequate theory. On this theory, behaviors under the control of cognition tend to display a cluster of characteristic properties, a cluster which tends to be absent from behaviors produced by non-cognitive processes. This cluster is reverse-engineered from the empirical tests that (...) comparative psychologists use to determine whether a behavior was generated by a cognitive or a non-cognitive process. Cognition should be understood as the natural kind of psychological process that non-accidentally exhibits the properties assessed by these tests (as well as others we have not yet discovered). Finally, I review two plausible neural accounts of cognition's underlying mechanisms?one based in localization of function to particular brain regions and another based in the more recent distributed networks approach to neuroscience?which would explain why these properties non-accidentally cluster. While this notion of cognition may be useful for a number of debates, I here focus on its application to a recent crisis over the distinction between cognition and association in comparative psychology. (shrink)

Standard models in quantitative linguistics assume that word usage follows a fixed frequency distribution, often Zipf's law or a close relative. This view, however, does not capture the near daily variations in topics of conversation, nor the short-term dynamics of language change. In order to understand the dynamics of human language use, we present a corpus of daily word frequency variation scraped from online news sources every 20 min for more than 2 years. We construct a simple time-varying model (...) with a latent state, which is observed via word frequency counts. We use Bayesian techniques to infer the parameters of this model for 20,000 words, allowing us to convert complex word-frequency trajectories into low-dimensional parameters in word usage. By analyzing the inferred parameters of this model, we quantify the relative mobility and drift of words on a day-to-day basis, while accounting for sampling error. We quantify this variation and show evidence against “rich-get-richer” models of word use, which have been previously hypothesized to explain statistical patterns in language. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in (...) this debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements. (shrink)

I argue that using a traditional biological account of parenthood causes problems for determining who counts as a parent for the purposes of filial obligations in alternative family structures. I then argue that a better way to understand parenthood is as a role. People who fill the role of parents are parents, regardless of their biological ties to a child. Next, I argue that children can have more than two parents and so can have filial obligations to more (...) than two people. I then demonstrate that understanding parenthood as a role allows us to correctly account for who should be a parent in cases of adoption, surrogacy, and extended families. In the final section I discuss three related worries about allowing a child to have more than two parents. (shrink)

Metaphysicians eager to engage with substantive, thoughtful, and provocative issues will be happy with John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View. The book represents not only a sustained defence of a specific metaphysical theory, but also of a specific way of doing metaphysics. Put ontology first, Heil urges us, in order to remember that the original fascination of metaphysics wasn’t the question ‘what must the world be like in order to correspond neatly to our use of language?’, but rather (...) the altogether more fundamental ‘what must the world be like?’. (shrink)

A considerable literature exists regard-ing the moral obligation to keep one's promises. Several authors have focused on the exceptional circumstances which may or should excuse this moral duty. Less frequently discussed is the question of how this general moral obligation and its possible exceptions play out in the context of negotiable written promises to pay money, i.e., so-called "commercial paper."This paper focuses on the application of the legal rules governing commercial paper, and on the ethical implications involved in the application (...) of those rules. More specifically, it asks whether the assertion of the technical doctrine known as "holder in due course," and the denial of that status in some cases, promotes ethical behavior in the marketplace. By examining the circumstances of one case, involving a substantial investment and a large bank, I hope to shed some light on how the legal and ethical rules do in fact "intersect.". (shrink)

The functionalist approach to kinds has suffered recently due to its association with law-based approaches to induction and explanation. Philosophers of science increasingly view nomological approaches as inappropriate for the special sciences like psychology and biology, which has led to a surge of interest in approaches to natural kinds that are more obviously compatible with mechanistic and model-based methods, especially homeostatic property cluster theory. But can the functionalist approach to kinds be weaned off its dependency on laws? Dan Weiskopf (...) has recently offered a reboot of the functionalist program by replacing its nomological commitments with a model-based approach more closely derived from practice in psychology. Roughly, Weiskopf holds that the natural kinds of psychology will be the functional properties that feature in many empirically successful cognitive models, and that those properties need not be localized to parts of an underlying mechanism. I here skeptically examine the three modeling practices that Weiskopf thinks introduce such non-localizable properties: fictionalization, reification, and functional abstraction. In each case, I argue that recognizing functional properties introduced by these practices as autonomous kinds comes at clear cost to those explanations’ counterfactual explanatory power. At each step, a tempting functionalist response is parochialism: to hold that the false or omitted counterfactuals fall outside the modeler’s explanatory aims, and so should not be counted against functional kinds. I conclude by noting the dangers this attitude poses to scientific disagreement, inviting functionalists to better articulate how the individuation conditions for functional kinds might outstrip the perspective of a single modeler. (shrink)

The appearance of Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy provides the opportunity to deepen our understanding of Alain Badiou's groundbreaking work on the obsessive Austrian. Both thinkers mix high style with logical rigor and are recognized for having proposed radically different directions for philosophy.For decades, Wittgenstein has been seen as the great exemplar of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy. Badiou has repeatedly accused Wittgenstein of initiating a century of sophistic language games that have done little for philosophy other than isolate its discourse and drain (...) it of relevance. Arguably, this was Wittgenstein's aim all along. Yet Badiou has recently undertaken a more serious consideration of Wittgenstein's .. (shrink)

In order to prevent the rapid spread of COVID-19, governments have placed significant restrictions on liberty, including preventing all non-essential travel. These restrictions were justified on the basis the health system may be overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases and in order to prevent deaths. Governments are now considering how they may de-escalate these restrictions. This article argues that an appropriate approach may be to lift the general lockdown but implement selective isolation of the elderly. While this discriminates against the elderly, there (...) is a morally relevant difference—the elderly are far more likely to require hospitalisation and die than the rest of the population. If the aim is to ensure the health system is not overwhelmed and to reduce the death rate, preventing the elderly from contracting the virus may be an effective means of achieving this. The alternative is to continue to keep everyone in lockdown. It is argued that this is levelling down equality and is unethical. It suggests that in order for the elderly to avoid contracting the virus, the whole population should have their liberty deprived, even though the same result could be achieved by only restricting the liberty of the elderly. Similar arguments may also be applied to all groups at increased risk of COVID-19, such as men and those with comorbidities, the obese and people from ethnic minorities or socially deprived groups. This utilitarian concern must be balanced against other considerations, such as equality and justice, and the benefits gained from discriminating in these ways must be proportionately greater than the negative consequences of doing so. Such selective discrimination will be most justified when the liberty restriction to a group promotes the well-being of that group (apart from its wider social benefits). (shrink)

In her target article, Jennifer McMahon argues that we understand art not by explicitly interpreting “raw percepts,” but rather by engaging with our implicit tendencies to interpret complex stimuli in terms of culturally-engrained preconceptions and narratives. These attributions of order require a shared conceptual and cultural background, and thus one might worry that in denying access to raw percepts, the view dulls art’s critical edge. Against this worry, McMahon argues that art can continue to create and innovate by inviting us (...) to critically reflect upon the very preconceptions on which our engagement with it necessarily depends. In this commentary, I place these attributions of order in historical and empirical context. In addition, I discuss a lingering, related mystery — the possibility of the occasionally punctuated character of artistic evolution, in which prevailing aesthetic conventions are replaced with almost entirely new ones. I suggest that such radical breaks with the past are possible even given the concept-ladeness of perception, but are only likely to succeed when they tap into a culturally-invariant bedrock of more basic attributions of order. (shrink)

. As Gregory Peterson's book Minding God illustrates, an ongoing encounter between theology and the cognitive sciences can provide rich insights to both disciplines. Similarly, reflection on recent advances in pain research can prove to be fertile ground in which further theological insights might take root. Pain researchers remind us that pain is both a sensory and an emotional experience. The emotional component of pain is critically important for the clinical management of people in pain, as it serves a communicative (...) function-human connection occurs more readily through the expression of and response to emotion than through the sterile exchange of "objective" descriptions of sensory phenomena. But emotion, pain and communication also figure prominently in Christian theology. For example, doctrines of incarnation and eschatology raise questions about suffering, healing, and hope as well as about the nature of the divine-human relationship. In addition, there seems to be scientific evidence for (admittedly subtle) gender differences in the perception of and response to pain. Several feminist theologians have noted that a habitual theological emphasis on God's rationality tends to reinforce masculine images of God and demeans the validity of emotion in the divine-human relationship. Potential theological implications of the emotional and communicative aspects of pain and how this might affect women's religious experience-with a particular focus on Teresa of Avila-are explored. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholarship in the history of science has explored the emergence and development of sciences in which fields serve as privileged sites of knowledge production. Much of this work has focused on the field sciences’ formative period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and it is the definitions of the field, fieldwork, and field science emerging from the study of this period that have come to dominate the historical literature. Those definitions cannot, however, account for (...) transformations that have taken place across many field sciences since the mid-twentieth century. Examining a diverse set of disciplines and contexts, the contributions to this Focus section reveal the specific conceptual and material contours of fields, fieldwork, and field sciences during this more recent period and suggest a number of unanswered questions and topics for future research. -/- . (shrink)

The discipline of philosophy has been critiqued from both within and outside itself. One brand of external critique is associated with Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the view that human cognition is partially structured by pervasive and automatic mappings between conceptual domains. Most notably, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claimed that many central philosophical concepts and arguments rely on an unacknowledged metaphorical substructure, and that this structure has sometimes led philosophy astray. The purpose of this paper is to argue that Lakoff and (...) Johnson's critique is anticipated by the work of post‐Tractarian Wittgenstein and his student, Margaret MacDonald. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein outlines a method for identifying and resolving philosophical puzzles generated by misused grammatical analogies, although his discussion lacks a precise characterization of exactly how and why such analogies lead to trouble. In a 1938 paper, MacDonald offers such a characterization, which I outline and then connect back to Wittgenstein. In addition to this interpretive work, I supplement Wittgenstein and MacDonald's diagnosis using evidence from CMT which suggests that linguistic metaphors and analogies often originate in or are motivated by more fundamental analogical mappings in cognition. The supplemented account carries implications for how philosophical arguments ought to be formulated and critiqued. (shrink)

For Emily Dickinson, perhaps no more so than for the rest of us, there was a powerful discrepancy between what was "inner than the Bone"1 and what could be acknowledged. To the extent that her poems are a response to that discrepancy—are, on one hand, a defiant attempt to deny that the discrepancy poses a problem and, on the other, an admission of defeat at the problem's enormity—they have much to teach us about the way in which language articulates (...) our life. There is indeed a sense in which these poems test the limits of what we might reveal if we tried and also of what, despite our exertions, will not give itself over to utterance. The question of the visibility of interior experience is one that will concern me in this essay, for it lies at the heart of what Dickinson makes present to us. In "The Dream of Communication," Geoffrey Hartman writes: "Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or feels itself as not presentable."2 On both counts one thinks of Dickinson, for her poems disassemble the body in order to penetrate to the places where the feelings lie as if hidden, and they tell us that bodies are not barriers the way we sometimes think they are. Despite the staggering sophistication with which we discuss complex issues, like Dickinson we have few words, if any, for what happens inside us. Perhaps this is because we have been taught to conceive of ourselves as perfectly inexplicable or, if explicable, then requiring the aid of someone else to scrutinize what we are explicating to validate it. We have been taught that we cannot see for ourselves—this despite the current emphasis on our proprioceptive functions. But Dickinson tells us that we can see. More important, she tells us how to name what we see. · 1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson , n. 321.· 2. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor, ed. Reuben Brower et al. , p. 173. Sharon Cameron, associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is currently preparing a theoretical study of the lyric and is examining the relationship between obsession and lyrical structures. The present essay is part of her Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. (shrink)

Here I describe a game that I use in my logic classes once we begin derivations. The game can help improve class dynamics, help struggling students recognizes they are not alone, open lines of communication between students, and help students of all levels prepare for exams. The game can provide struggling students with more practice with the fundamental rules of a logical system while also challenging students who excel at derivations. If students are struggling with particular rules or strategies (...) in the system, the game can be tailored to address them. I explain how the game has evolved since I started using it, highlighting the pedagogical benefits of the changes I have made, and I provide examples of the handouts I distribute and a “checklist” to use before, during, and after the game. (shrink)

When a person at risk of having a child with a genetic illness or disease wishes to have an unaffected child, this can involve difficult choices. If the pregnancy is established by sexual intercourse, the fetus can be tested early in pregnancy, and if affected a decision can be made to abort in the hope that a future pregnancy with an unaffected fetus ensures. Alternatively, preimplantation genetic diagnosis can be used after in vitro fertilisation to select and implant an unaffected (...) embryo that hopefully will proceed to term and produce a healthy baby. We are aware that many individuals at risk regard the latter as ethically more acceptable than the former, and examine whether there is an ethical difference between these options. We conclude that PGD and implantation of an unaffected embryo is a more acceptable choice ethically than prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion for the following reasons: Choice after PGD is seen as ethically neutral because a positive result balances a negative result simultaneously . While there is usually the intention to establish a healthy pregnancy after an abortion, this is not simultaneous; A woman sees abortion as a personal physical violation of her integrity, and as the pregnancy proceeds she increasingly identifies with and gives ethical status to the embryo/fetus as it develops in utero and not in the laboratory; Many people see aborting a fetus as “killing”, whereas in the case of PGD the spare embryos are “allowed to die”. We argue that this difference of opinion gives further weight to our conclusion, but note that this has been addressed and debated at length by others. (shrink)

Causal essentialists hold that a property essentially bears its causal and nomic relations. Further, as many causal essentialists have noted, the main motivations for causal essentialism also motivate holding that properties are individuated in terms of their causal and nomic relations. This amounts to a kind of identity of indiscernibles thesis; properties that are indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations are identical. This can be compared with the more well-known identity of indiscernibles thesis, according to which (...) particulars that are qualitatively indiscernible are identical. Robert Adams has developed a well-known objection to this thesis by considering a series of possibilities involving nearly qualitatively indiscernible particulars that naturally leads to a possibility involving qualitatively indiscernible particulars. I argue that we can construct parallel cases involving a series of possibilities involving properties that are nearly indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations that naturally lead to possibilities involving properties that are indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations. The same features that make Adams’ argument forceful also carry over to my cases, giving us a powerful objection to the causal essentialist identity of indiscernibles thesis. (shrink)

In this short paper, I critically examine Veli Mitova’s proposal that social-identity groups can have collective epistemic reasons. My primary focus is the role of privileged access in her account of how collective reasons become epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. I argue that there is a potentially worrying structural asymmetry in her account of two different types of cases. More specifically, the mechanisms at play in cases of “doxastic reasons” seem fundamentally different from those at play in cases of (...) “epistemic-conduct reasons”. The upshot is a need for further explanation of what unifies these dimensions of the account. (shrink)

Whether designing animals, insects, or plants, Nature draws upon symmetry and periodicity to play a fundamental role in defining the body plan. When implemented with the proper chemical mechanisms, these principles guide our bodies from single-celled embryos to bilaterally symmetric creatures with intricate periodic structures, such as the spine and rib cage. The properties of symmetry and periodicity also appear to be fundamental to visual perception. We will show that this is no coincidence, but is a consequence of the fact (...) that these properties are generated by the same underlying phenomenon, standing wave patterns formed from harmonic resonances. The symmetry in life forms arises from chemical harmonic resonances, whereas the symmetry in visual perception arises from harmonic resonances in the visual system. We will show that harmonic resonances have very interesting properties for the representation of geometrical form that make them eminently suitable for encoding geometric form for body plans as well as for visual perception. In particular, we will show that by being simultaneously invariant to perspective transformation and robust to deformation, such resonant representations have fundamental advantages over more traditional techniques. (shrink)

For Abelard, the notion of “intention” (intentio, attentio) plays a central and important role in his cognitive and ethical theories. Is there any philosophical connection between its uses in these contexts? In recent publications, Constant Mews has argued that the cognitive and ethical senses of “intention” are related (namely, the cognitive sense evolves into the ethical sense), and that Abelard is repeatedly led to focus on intentions throughout his career due to the influence of Heloise. Here I evaluate Mews’s arguments (...) by examining and comparing the cognitive and ethical senses of the term. Although the basis for Mews’s claim seems to be false, I argue that there is nonetheless an important philosophical relationship between cognitive and ethical intentiones in Abelard’s thought, there cognition of which leads to a new and more precise understanding of his ethical theory of intention. (shrink)

Anthony Brueckner has argued that claims about underdetermination of evidence are suppressed in closure-based scepticism (“The Structure of the Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54:4, 1994). He also argues that these claims about underdetermination themselves lead to a paradoxical sceptical argument—the underdetermination argument—which is more fundamental than the closure argument. If Brueckner is right, the status quo focus of some predominant anti-sceptical strategies may be misguided. In this paper I focus specifically on the relationship between these two arguments. (...) I provide support for Brueckner’s claim that the underdetermination argument is the more fundamental sceptical argument. I do so by responding to a challenge to this claim put forward by Stewart Cohen (“Two Kinds of Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58:1, 1998). Cohen invokes an alternative epistemic principle which he thinks can be used to challenge Brueckner. Cohen’s principle raises interesting questions about the relationship between evidential considerations and explanatory considerations in the context of scepticism about our knowledge of the external world. I explore these questions in my defence of Brueckner. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 1-17 [Access article in PDF] The Influence of Folk Meteorology in the Anaximander Fragment Cameron Shelley * Introduction No scholars doubt that the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially the Milesians, were concerned with meteorology. Their works abound with accounts of wind, rain, thunder, lightning, meteorites, waterspouts, whirlwinds, and so on. Through examination of the fragments of the pre-Socratics, we can trace this (...) interest in meteorology from each philosopher to his predecessors right back to Anaxi-mander. 1 Thales might at first seem to be the most obvious candidate as the man who introduced meteorology into philosophy, but Kirk et al. argue persuasively that Thales was more interested in near-eastern mythology. 2 Thus, we must take Anaximander, Thales's protégé, to be the philosopher who made meteorology a topic of philosophical interest.This situation leaves us with an obvious question: where did Anaximander come by his interest and ideas about meteorology if not from Thales? Modern scholarship unanimously points to the Greek mythological tradition of Anaxi-mander's time as recorded primarily by Homer and Hesiod. Gilbert confidently asserts that any inquiry into the origin of Greek meteorology must begin with the stories recorded by these poets, and modern scholars generally echo this opinion. 3 Kahn notes that in classical Athens the Milesian-style, non-mythological accounts of meteorology were treated as direct challenges to the Olympic religion, [End Page 1] as demonstrated by Aristophanes in The Clouds. 4 But to conclude on this basis that Anaximander himself saw his project as the construction of theories by the removal of deities from myths is to mistake the result for the cause. Kirk et al. simply point to Kahn's account and speculate that Anaximander was influenced by Greek legends about Phaethon and Deucalion. 5 None of these scholars consider alternative possible sources of Anaximander's meteorological ideas, so that support for mythology as the source derives largely from the lack of a rival. But there is an alternative, namely, folk meteorology.Folk meteorology may be described as the body of folk wisdom concerning the nature and prediction of weather patterns. It typically comes in the form of pithy statements or jingles such as "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in morning, shepherd's warning." 6 Folk meteorology has been almost completely neglected even by folklore scholars, so it is not surprising that it has escaped the attention of philosophers and classical scholars as well. However, an examination of folk beliefs about meteorology reveals significant similarities with some of the philosophical beliefs attributed to Anaximander, most notably, and surprisingly, regarding the concept of justice (dikê) implicit in Anaximander's famous fragment.The purpose of this paper is to construct and defend a case for the influence of folk meteorology on Anaximander, particularly on the concept of justice in the Anaximander fragment. The case begins on familiar ground, with the fragment itself and arguments against attempts to trace influences on it to non-meteorological sources, and continues with some evidence of the universality of folk meteorology across cultures and the character of balance as a folk-meteorological concept, which is then applied to the Anaximander fragment as a means of explicating what Anaximander meant there by justice. The suitability of balance for this purpose is taken as evidence that Anaximander was influenced by folk meteorology. Thus, this inquiry identifies a plausible origin of one of Anaximander's central philosophical ideas, an origin which has so far remained completely unexplored by scholars of ancient Greek philosophy. The Fragment of Anaximander Anaximander is famous among Greek scholars for the central role he gave to the concept of justice (dikê) in his natural philosophy. The one fragment of his writings, quoted by Simplicius in his Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (24.18-21), records Anaximander's view on the effect of justice in the physical world: [End Page 2] The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution... (shrink)

In this essay, I provide a forward-looking naturalized theory of mental content designed to accommodate predictive processing approaches to the mind, which are growing in popularity in philosophy and cognitive science. The view is introduced by relating it to one of the most popular backward-looking teleosemantic theories of mental content, Fred Dretske’s informational teleosemantics. It is argued that such backward-looking views (which locate the grounds of mental content in the agent’s evolutionary or learning history) face a persistent tension between ascribing (...) determinate contents and allowing for the possibility of misrepresentation. A way to address this tension is proposed by grounding content attributions in the agent’s own ability to detect when it has represented the world incorrectly through the assessment of prediction errors—which in turn allows the organism to more successfully represent those contents in the future. This opens up space for misrepresentation, but that space is constrained by the forward-directed epistemic capacities that the agent uses to evaluate and shape its own representational strategies. The payoff of the theory is illustrated by showing how it can be applied to interpretive disagreements over content ascriptions amongst scientists in comparative psychology and ethology. This theory thus provides a framework in which to make content attributions to representations posited by an exciting new family of predictive approaches to cognition, and in so doing addresses persistent tensions with the previous generation of naturalized theories of content. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Black and White:A Note on Ancient NicknamesAlan CameronDistinguishing homonyms is a problem in any society, and it is not perhaps surprising that the same simple devices recur over long periods of time and in different parts of the ancient (and modern) world.P. Amh. LXII.6–7 lists two Ptolemaic soldiers called Apollonios, distinguishing them as μέλας and. Some years ago Frank M. Snowden suggested that the first of the pair was (...) actually black–skinned.1 A. M. Devine raised two different objections to this hypothesis.2 First, he finds "little hard evidence to suggest that general colour–terms like μέλας by themselves carried any specific racial connotations in antiquity." Yet it depends what is meant by hard evidence. There is certainly some evidence, for which reference may now be made to Lloyd A. Thompson's useful book Romans and Blacks (1989). But "racial connotations" are not really the point at issue. The question is rather, did the writer intend to indicate the color of the first Apollonios' skin?Personal descriptions in Egyptian documents do in fact very frequently specify skin color as an identifying characteristic. But they normally use a more subtle vocabulary than just black/white:.3 I do not recall seeing plain μέλας and used for this purpose. If skin color were the explanation here, we should have to assume that two men described bluntly as black and white one after another on the same document stood at opposite ends of the spectrum in skin color. That this should happen in the case of men who were in addition homonyms would surely be an improbable coincidence. The explanation must [End Page 113] lie in their homonymy. Second, Devine proposed a satisfying alternative, an exact parallel where explanation in terms of skin color is excluded: Alexander's two Macedonian marshals called Cleitus, again distinguished as μέλας and.4Devine went on to suggest that the black/white antithesis "was doubtless a commonplace... in Hellenistic armies." There is no need to restrict the practice to the military—or indeed to the Hellenistic world. I can add another three or four examples, from a much wider social, chronological, and geographical range. First another Hellenistic case. Diogenes Laertius names two Epicurean philosophers from Alexandria called Ptolemaios who were also distinguished in this way: δύο τε Πτο (10.25).5 It is suggestive that no explanation of the nicknames was felt necessary. Next an example from Ostrogothic Italy. Anicius Acilius Aginantius Faustus cos. A.D. 483 and Anicius Probus Faustus cos. 490 were distinguished as Albus and Niger respectively.6 Third, the consuls of 61 and 53 B.C., cousins who both bore the names M. Valerius Messala, were distinguished as Niger and Rufus respectively.7 Last, those who have seen the recent film Donnie Brasco may recall two capi in the Bonanno crime family, Alphonse "Sonny" Indelicato and Dominick "Sonny" Napolitano, distinguished as "Sonny Red" and "Sonny Black."8Roman cognomina were often based on physical peculiarities (Ahala, Ahenobarbus, Balbus, Cincinnatus, Crus, Dentatus, Nasica, Paetus, to quote the merest handful), and Niger and Rufus appear often enough as regular cognomina.9 The earliest Rufi were no doubt so called because of their red hair,10 but then the name was passed down to descendants regardless of hair color, as a fixed part of their nomenclature. The phenomenon under discussion is something different, perhaps picked up by the Romans from Hellenistic practice. [End Page 114]In most cases, these homonyms could have been and doubtless often were distinguished satisfactorily enough by the use of a father's name or ethnic or (for the Romans) full nomenclature. But in many contexts this must have seemed too formal. The color–nicknames were an informal device. Like (for example) νέος or iunior,11 they had the limited function of distinguishing people in a specific, often informal context. Like νέος and iunior again, they were not a formal or permanent element in a man's nomenclature and should not be so treated in modern works of reference.For example, after the death of Black Cleitus, White Cleitus was presumably known as just Cleitus. The two Fausti were by no means exact homonyms. It was only in contexts where they were styled simply... (shrink)

The story of Atlantis, inspiration of more than 20,000 books, rests entirely on an elaborate Platonic myth , allegedly based on a private, oral tradition deriving from Solon. Solon himself is supposed to have heard the story in Egypt; a priest obligingly translated it for him from hieroglyphic inscriptions in a temple in Sais. It might be added that Plato is less concerned with Atlantis than with her rival and conqueror, the Athens of that antediluvian age 9600 B.C. That (...) Plato himself made the whole story up is indeed virtually demonstrable. This is not the place for such a demonstration , but it is at any rate possible to eliminate completely one of the crucial props on which belief has always leaned. (shrink)

In seeking for an understanding of ethical practices in health care situations, our challenge is always both to recognize and respond to the call of individuals in need. In attuning ourselves to the call of the vulnerable other an ethical moment arises. Asking ‘how are you?’ in health care practice is our very first possibility to learn how a particular person finds herself or himself in this particular situation. Here, ‘how are you?’ shows itself as an ethical question that opens (...) up a relational space that calls forth a response. It is a way to understand the situated moments in which we are already that enables us to act respectfully. Our ethical frameworks assist us in trying to decide what is the right thing to do given a set of circumstances. Yet there is a prior step that already calls us to ethical attention; this is when we ask ‘how are you?’, which transforms a seemingly small interaction into an ethical moment. ‘How are you?’ is a question that turns us back to who we are as health care professionals and calls us to be more deeply attentive to the moment. When we sincerely ask ‘how are you?’ we enact our ethical commitments to one another. (shrink)

This doctoral dissertation is a study of Nietzsche's views on morality in order to assess his contribution to moral philosophy. Towards this end, it examines Nietzsche's understanding of morality as well as the scope of his attack. I then offer a reading of Nietzsche's critique of morality, arguing that he rejects morality insofar as it functions within society to preserve the 'herd' at the expense of 'higher types' whose flourishing resides elsewhere. In short, I claim that Nietzsche rejects morality insofar (...) as it proves inimical to the flourishing of these 'higher types'. I also claim that Nietzsche is more than a mere critic of morality, and that his fundamental 'ethical' preoccupation with exemplary individuals is what motives his critique, and forms the basis of his affirmative ethic of human flourishing. Moreover, I contend that Nietzsche defends his positive morality by presenting the character of Zarathustra , and later himself as exemplars of human excellence who must rely on their ability to convince others performatively, rather than by means of discourse, or argumentation. Ultimately, I conclude that Nietzsche's ethics does not fit comfortably within the moral tradition as he is an opponent of deontological ethics, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics despite certain affinities with the latter. This fact does not detract from the rich contribution that Nietzsche makes to moral philosophy as bode critic and champion of an affirmative ethic. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa’s account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can’t be true. We (...) then embark on a rescue mission on behalf of Sosa and work towards a weakened account of full aptness. The key idea is to countenance a distinction between negligible and non-negligible types of risk and to develop an account of full aptness according to which even performances that are endangered by risk can be fully apt, so long as the risk is of a negligible type. While this alternative account of full aptness solves the problem we developed for Sosa earlier on, there is also bad news for Sosa. When applied to epistemology, the envisaged treatment of barn façade cases as cases in which the agent falls short of fully apt belief will no longer work. We show that, as a result, Sosa faces a new version of a familiar dilemma for virtue epistemology. Either he construes full aptness as strong enough to get barn façade cases right in which case his view will run right into the problem we develop. Or else he construes full aptness as weak enough to avoid this problem but then he will not be able to deal with barn façade cases in the way envisaged. (shrink)

Allan Hazlett has recently developed an alternative to the most popular form of anti-realism about epistemic normativity, epistemic expressivism. He calls it “convention-relativism about epistemic discourse”. The view deserves more attention. In this paper, I give it attention in the form of an objection. Specifically, my objection turns on a distinction between inescapable and categorical norms. While I agree with Hazlett that convention-relativism is consistent with inescapable epistemic norms, I argue that it is not consistent with categorical epistemic norms. (...) I then argue that Hazlett's account of a controversial upshot of convention-relativism – namely, that epistemic discourse is not “normative” – should, but does not, adequately address the question of whether epistemic norms are categorical. This leads to a more general discussion of anti-realism in epistemology. (shrink)

Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers’ line-drawing exercise is called into question.

A research project by the Schools of Theology and Psychology of Australia’s Charles Sturt University surveyed a large sample of Salvation Army officers. This article considers survey responses to two questions relating to end-of-life care: the use of pain medications that may shorten life, and the cessation of fluid and food intake. The results of the analyses are evaluated in terms of Michael Banner’s proposal that moral theology should more assiduously converse with ‘patient ethnographic study’, which the survey instantiates (...) to some extent. Banner’s proposal and the results of the survey are contrasted to Peter Singer’s analytical moral philosophical dictums on end-of-life care. The results are also compared to a metastudy by Andrea Rodríguez-Prat and Evert van Leeuwen of 14 ethnographic studies of those who wish to hasten death at the end of life. We conclude that respondents exemplify a form of moral reasoning that is embedded within Christian spirituality; counters the assumptions of Singer’s approach; contrasts the diminishment of ‘meaning’ at the end of life, as seen in Rodríguez-Prat and van Leeuwen; and deserves further respectful ethnographic study. (shrink)

Blameless norm violation in young children is an underexplored phenomenon in epistemology. An understanding of it is important for accounting for the full range of normative standings at issue in debates about epistemic norms, and the internalism-externalism debate generally. More specifically, it is important for proponents of factive epistemic norms. I examine this phenomenon and put forward a positive proposal. I claim that we should think of the normative dimension of certain actions and attitudes of young children in terms (...) of a kind of “prospective agency”. I argue that the most sophisticated account of exculpatory defenses in epistemology – due to Clayton Littlejohn – does not provide an adequate model for exculpatory defenses of prospective agents. The aim is not primarily to challenge Littlejohn. Rather, I engage with his framework as a way of setting up my positive proposal. I call it the “heuristic model”. (shrink)

Prosopography is the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period. With the advent of computer technology it is now possible to gather and store such information in increasingly sophisticated and searchable databases, which can bring a new dimension to traditional historical research. The book surveys the transition in prosopographical research from more traditional methods to the new technology, and discusses the central role of the British Academy, as well as that of French, German and Austrian (...) academic institutions, in developing prosopographical research on the Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and now Anglo-Saxon and other periods. The book demonstrates mutual benefits and complementarity in such studies between the use of new technology and the highest standards of traditional scholarship, and in doing so it sets forth new perspectives and methodologies for future work. (shrink)

This book is about our practice of criticizing one another for epistemic failings. We clearly evaluate and critique one another for forming unjustified beliefs, harboring biases, and pursuing faulty methods of inquiry. But what is the nature of this criticism? Does it ever rise to the level of blame? The question is puzzling because there are competing sources of pressure in our intuitions about “epistemic blame,” ones not easy to reconcile. The more blame-like a response is, the less at (...) home in the epistemic domain it seems—but the more at home in the epistemic domain a response is, the less blame-like it seems. These competing sources of pressure constitute a puzzle about epistemic blame. The most promising solution to this puzzle focuses on the interpersonal side of epistemic normativity. Members of an epistemic community stand in an “epistemic relationship,” and epistemic blame is a way of modifying this relationship. Understanding epistemic blame as a distinctive kind of relationship modification locates a response that is both robustly blame-like, and entirely at home in the epistemic domain. Epistemic relationships can also illuminate a unique set of issues in the “ethics of epistemic blame,” ones that mirror corresponding issues in the ethics of moral blame. The book examines the scope of appropriate epistemic blame, standing to epistemically blame, and the value of epistemic blame in our social and political lives. Throughout the investigation, a better understanding of the parallels and points of interaction between the epistemic and other normative domains emerges. -/- **Front matter, ToC, and Introduction uploaded here**. (shrink)

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models exposed to large quantities of human language display sensitivity to the implied knowledge states of characters in written passages. In pre‐registered analyses, we present a linguistic version of the False Belief Task (...) to both human participants and a large language model, GPT‐3. Both are sensitive to others' beliefs, but while the language model significantly exceeds chance behavior, it does not perform as well as the humans nor does it explain the full extent of their behavior—despite being exposed to more language than a human would in a lifetime. This suggests that while statistical learning from language exposure may in part explain how humans develop the ability to reason about the mental states of others, other mechanisms are also responsible. (shrink)

Schopenhauer argues, strikingly, that it would have been better if life had not come into existence. In this essay I consider this pessimistic judgment from a philosophical perspective. I take on the following three tasks. First, I consider whether such judgments, apparently products of temperament rather than reason, can be the subject of productive philosophical analysis. I argue that they can be, since, importantly, we can separate arguments for such judgments that establish them as plausible from those that do not. (...) Second, I evaluate Schopenhauer’s arguments for pessimism. I argue that although we must reject Schopenhauer’s main argument for pessimism, he has another, more plausible argument for pessimism that hitherto has been neglected by scholars. Finally, I argue that although pessimism can be established as the correct judgment about life in some possible worlds, in our world the question of pessimism or optimism cannot be definitively answered. (shrink)