I clarify and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agents – agents who frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical grounds and I (...) show how it illuminates and unifies a range of psychological phenomena, including confabulation and rationalisation, positive illusions, and identity-protective cognition. (shrink)

Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must (...) only be mental manipulations. Combining these two insights, the paper builds an account (URM) of understanding as a certain representational capacity—specifically, understanding x involves possessing a representation of x that could be manipulated in useful ways. By tying understanding to representation, the account correctly identifies that understanding is a fundamentally cognitive achievement. However, by also demanding that which representations count as understanding-conferring be determined by their practical effects, URM captures the insight that understanding is vitally connected to practice. URM is fully general, and can apply equally well to understanding states of affairs, understanding events, and even understanding people and works of art. The ultimate test of URM is its applicability in actual scientific and philosophical discourse. To that end the paper discusses the importance of understanding in the philosophy of science, psychology, and computer science. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi's criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those (...) Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth. (shrink)

Objective reasons are given by the facts. Subjective reasons are given by one’s perspective on the facts. Subjective reasons, not objective reasons, determine what it is rational to do. In this paper, I argue against a prominent account of subjective reasons. The problem with that account, I suggest, is that it makes what one has subjective reason to do, and hence what it is rational to do, turn on matters outside or independent of one’s perspective. After explaining and establishing this (...) point, I offer a novel account of subjective reasons which avoids the problem. (shrink)

Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...) representational architecture with organism-relative contents that functions in the service of pragmatic success, not veridical representation. Finally, I argue that internal representation so understood is either impervious to the three anti-representationalist challenges I outline or can actively embrace them. (shrink)

A normative reason for a person to? is a consideration which favours?ing. A motivating reason is a reason for which or on the basis of which a person?s. This paper explores a connection between normative and motivating reasons. More specifically, it explores the idea that there are second-order normative reasons to? for or on the basis of certain first-order normative reasons. In this paper, I challenge the view that there are second-order reasons so understood. I then show that prominent views (...) in contemporary epistemology are committed to the existence of second-order reasons, specifically, views about the epistemic norms governing practical reasoning and about the role of higher-order evidence. If there are no second-order reasons, those views are mistaken. (shrink)

What does the aesthetic ask of us? What claims do the aesthetic features of the objects and events in our environment make on us? My answer in this paper is: that depends. Aesthetic reasons can only justify feelings – they cannot demand them. A corollary of this is that there are no aesthetic obligations to feel, only permissions. However, I argue, aesthetic reasons can demand actions – they do not merely justify them. A corollary of this is that there are (...) aesthetic obligations to act, not only permissions. So, I conclude, the aesthetic asks little of us as patients and much of as agents. (shrink)

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought (...) to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it. (shrink)

A critical survey of recent work in epistemology on higher-order evidence. It discusses the nature of higher-order evidence, some puzzles it raises, responses to those puzzles, and problems facing them. It concludes by indicating connections between debates concerning higher-order evidence in epistemology and parallel debates in ethics and aesthetics.

In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart, while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.

Invited contribution to The Aim of Belief, a special issue of Teorema, guest-edited by J. Zalabardo.

What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that understanding is a matter of compressing information about the understood so that it can be mentally useful. On this account, understanding amounts to having a representational kernel and the ability to use it to generate the information one needs regarding the target phenomenon. I argue that this ambitious new account (...) can accommodate much of the data that has motivated theories of understanding in philosophy of science, and can also be generally applicable in epistemology and daily life as well. (shrink)

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. (...) The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle. (shrink)

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

What is aesthetic appreciation? In this paper, I approach this question in an indirection fashion. First, I introduce the Kantian notion of moral worthy action and an influential analysis of it. Next, I generalise that analysis from the moral to the aesthetic domain, and from actions to affects. Aesthetic appreciation, I suggest, consists in an aesthetically worthy affective response. After unpacking the proposal, I show that it has non-trivial implications while cohering with a number of existing insights concerning the nature (...) of appreciation and the constraints to which it is subject. In closing, I note some limitations on the analogy between aesthetic appreciation and morally worthy action. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of “historical-structural-injustice”, constituted by the “structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes”. Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining (...) a significant focus on the historical. While Nuti’s work is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of structural injustice to date, this paper argues that an exclusive concentration on historical-structural-injustices neglects some aspects and some acts of wrongdoing that call out for present-day redress. What is needed, therefore, is a pluralist theory that can accept the pressing force in the present of historical-structural-injustices, whilst also making room for past-regarding duties that either do not fit, or are not best conceptualized in terms of, this approach, without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of historic injustice. (shrink)

An influential proposal is that knowledge involves safe belief. A belief is safe, in the relevant sense, just in case it is true in nearby metaphysically possible worlds. In this paper, I introduce a distinct but complementary notion of safety, understood in terms of epistemically possible worlds. The main aim, in doing so, is to add to the epistemologist’s tool-kit. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, I use it to advance and assess substantive proposals concerning knowledge and justification.

Everyone wants to be healthy, but many of us decline to act in healthy ways. Should these choices have any bearing on the ethics of clinical practice and health policy? How may personal responsibility for health be manipulated in health policy debates.

Call the view that it is possible to acquire aesthetic knowledge via testimony, optimism, and its denial, pessimism. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for pessimism. It works by turning attention away from the basis of the relevant belief, namely, testimony, and toward what that belief in turn provides a basis for, namely, other attitudes. In short, I argue that an aesthetic belief acquired via testimony cannot provide a rational basis for further attitudes, such as admiration, and that (...) the best explanation for this is that the relevant belief is not itself rational. If a belief is not rational, it is not knowledge. So, optimism is false. After addressing a number of objections to the argument, I consider briefly its bearing on the debate concerning thick evaluative concepts. While the aim is to argue that pessimism holds, not to explain why it holds, I provide an indication in closing of what that explanation might be. (shrink)

The history of international relations is characterized by widespread injustice. What implications does this have for those living in the present? Should contemporary states pay reparations to the descendants of the victims of historic wrongdoing? Many writers have dismissed the moral urgency of rectificatory justice in a domestic context, as a result of their forward-looking accounts of distributive justice. Rectifying International Injustice argues that historical international injustice raises a series of distinct theoretical problems, as a result of the popularity of (...) backward-looking accounts of distributive justice in an international context. It lays out three morally relevant forms of connection with the past, based in ideas of benefit, entitlement and responsibility. Those living in the present may have obligations to pay compensation insofar as they are benefiting, and others are suffering, as a result of the effects of historic injustice. They may be in possession of property which does not rightly belong to them, but to which others have inherited entitlements. Finally, they may be members of political communities which bear collective responsibility for an ongoing failure to rectify historic injustice. Rectifying International Injustice considers each of these three linkages with the past in detail. It examines the complicated relationship between rectificatory justice and distributive justice, assesses the appropriateness of judging the past by contemporary moral standards, and argues that many of those who resist cosmopolitan demands for the global redistribution of resources have failed to appreciate the extent to which past wrongdoing undermines the legitimacy of contemporary resource holdings. (shrink)

The problems of access—retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammar —and disambiguation—choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input—are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disambiguation, and the processing of garden‐path sentences. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to combine models which account for these results to build a general, uniform model of access and disambiguation at the lexical, idiomatic, and syntactic levels. (...) For example, psycholinguistic theories of lexical access and idiom access and parsing theories of syntactic rule access have almost no commonality in methodology or coverage of psycholinguistic data. This article presents a single probabilistic algorithm which models both the access and disambiguation of linguistic knowledge. The algorithm is based on a parallel parser which ranks constructions for access, and interpretations for disambiguation, by their conditional probability. Low‐ranked constructions and interpretations are pruned through beam‐search; this pruning accounts, among other things, for the garden‐path effect. I show that this motivated probabilistic treatment accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results, arguing for a more uniform representation of linguistic knowledge and for the use of probabilistically‐enriched grammars and interpreters as models of human knowledge of and processing of language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How can imagination generate knowledge when its contents are voluntarily determined? Several philosophers have recently answered this question by pointing to the constraints that underpin imagination when it plays knowledge-generating roles. Nevertheless, little has been said about the nature of these constraints. In this paper, I argue that the constraints that underpin sensory imagination come from the structure of causal probabilistic generative models, a construct that has been highly influential in recent cognitive science and machine learning. I highlight several (...) attractions of this account, and I favourably contrast it with Peter Langland-Hassan’s account of sensory imagination in terms of the forward models exploited in sensorimotor control. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that, in a number of publications in the early 1950s, Margaret Macdonald argues that art does not admit of definition, that art is—in the sense associated with Wittgenstein—a family resemblance concept, and that definitions of art are best understood as confused or poorly expressed contributions to art criticism. This package of views is most typically associated with a famous paper by Morris Weitz from 1956. I demonstrate that Macdonald advanced that package prior to Weitz, indeed, (...) prior to any other philosopher of art of the period. Despite this, Macdonald’s contribution is nowhere to be found in the subsequent literature on the definition of art. In closing, I raise the prospect that Macdonald was in fact the primary influence on the development of Weitz’s critique of the definitional project. (shrink)

One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicativeconditionals that does better (...) than some of its cousins in explaining thebehaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objectionsoffered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worldsaccounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections canbe met by the account outlined. (shrink)

I outline a version of idealism that borrows from Humean Supervenience. The resulting theory is immune to what is often considered to be the most powerful anti-idealist argument, the gist of which is that the idealist can’t supply truthmakers (or an adequate supervenience base) for commonly accepted truths about the physical world. That charge has no purchase on Humean idealism.

A large body of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience draws on Bayesian statistics to model information processing within the brain. Many theorists have noted that this research seems to be in tension with a large body of experimental results purportedly documenting systematic deviations from Bayesian updating in human belief formation. In response, proponents of the Bayesian brain hypothesis contend that Bayesian models can accommodate such results by making suitable assumptions about model parameters. To make progress in this debate, I (...) argue that it is fruitful to focus not on specific experimental results but rather on what I call the ‘sources of epistemic irrationality’ in human cognition. I identify four such sources and I explore whether and, if so, how Bayesian models can be reconciled with them: processing costs, evolutionary suboptimality, motivated cognition, and error management. 1 Introduction 2 The Bayesian Brain 3 The Problem of Epistemic Irrationality 3.1 Bayesian inference and rationality 3.2 Intuitive Bayesian inference 4 Sources of Epistemic Irrationality 4.1 Processing costs 4.2 Evolutionary suboptimality 4.3 Motivational influences 4.4 Error management 5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Four experiments investigate the folk concept of “understanding,” in particular when and why it is deployed differently from the concept of knowledge. We argue for the positions that people have higher demands with respect to explanatory depth when it comes to attributing understanding, and that this is true, in part, because understanding attributions play a functional role in identifying experts who should be heeded with respect to the general field in question. These claims are supported by our findings that people (...) differentially withhold attributions of understanding when the object of attribution has minimal explanatory information. We also show that this tendency significantly correlates with people’s willingness to defer to others as potential experts. This work bears on a pressing issue in epistemology concerning the place and value of understanding. Our results also provide reason against positing a simple equation of knowledge and understanding. We contend that, because deference plays a crucial role in many aspects of everyday reasoning, the fact that we use understanding attributions to demarcate experts reveals a potential mechanism for achieving our epistemic aims in many domains. (shrink)

Chenyang Li argues, in an article originally published in Hypatia, that the ethics of care and Confucian ethics constitute similar approaches to ethics. The present paper takes issue with this claim. It is more accurate to view Confucian ethics as a kind of virtue ethics, rather than as a kind of care ethics. In the process of criticizing Li's claim, the distinctiveness of care ethics is defended, against attempts to assimilate it to virtue ethics.

Subjects appear to take only evidential considerations to provide reason or justification for believing. That is to say that subjects do not take practical considerations—the kind of considerations which might speak in favour of or justify an action or decision—to speak in favour of or justify believing. This is puzzling; after all, practical considerations often seem far more important than matters of truth and falsity. In this paper, I suggest that one cannot explain this, as many have tried, merely by (...) appeal to the idea that belief aims only at the truth. I appeal instead to the idea that the aim of belief is to provide only practical reasons which might form the basis on which to act and to make decisions, an aim which is in turn dictated by the aim of action. This, I argue, explains why subjects take only evidential considerations to favour of or justify believing. Surprisingly, then, it turns out that it is practical reason itself which demands that there be no practical reasons for belief. (shrink)

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic "intent" about the characters, spaces, and events of film. Discussing contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely contribution to the study of film and philosophy will provoke debate among audiences and (...) filmmakers alike. FILMOSOPHY ® is a registered U.S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history theory and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed it or its author. (shrink)

Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the (...) specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition. (shrink)

Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that the conjunction (...) of claims and rests on a fallacy of equivocation. The FEP can be interpreted in two ways: as a claim about how it is possible to redescribe the existence of self-organising systems, and as a claim about how such systems maintain their existence. Although the Descriptive FEP plausibly does identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems, it has no important implications for our understanding of how the brain works. Although the Explanatory FEP would have such implications if it were true, it does not identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems. I consider various ways of responding to this conclusion, and I explore its implications for the role and importance of the FEP in cognitive science and philosophy. (shrink)

Law and the legal system through which law is effected are very powerful, yet the power of the law has always been limited by the laws of nature, upon which the law has now direct grip. Human law now faces an unprecedented challenge, the emergence of a second limit on its grip, a new “species” of intelligent agents (AI machines) that can perform cognitive tasks that until recently only humans could. What happens, as a matter of law, when another species (...) interacts with us, can be integrated into human minds and bodies, makes “real-world” decisions—not through human proxies, but directly—and does all this “intelligently”, with what one could call autonomous agency or even a “mind” of its own? The article starts from the clear premise that control cannot be exercised directly on AI machines through human law. That control can only be effected through laws that apply to humans. This has several regulatory implications. The article’s first discusses what, in any attempt to regulate AI machines, the law can achieve. Having identified what the law can do, the article then canvases what the law should aim to achieve overall. The article encapsulate its analysis in a list of both doctrinal and normative principles that should underpin any regulation aimed at AI machines. Finally, the article compares three transnational options to implement the proposed regulatory approach. (shrink)

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box (...) on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways. (shrink)

This paper has both theoretical and practical ambitions. The theoretical ambitions are to explore what would constitute both effective and ethical treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder.1 However, the practical ambition is perhaps more important: we argue that a dominant form of Applied Behavior Analysis, which is widely taken to be far-and-away the best “treatment”2 for ASD, manifests systematic violations of the fundamental tenets of bioethics. Moreover, the supposed benefits of the treatment not only fail to mitigate these violations, but they (...) often exacerbate them. Warnings of the perils of ABA are not original to us—autism advocates have been ringing this... (shrink)

A reconstruction of F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy of language based on a detailed reading of §73 of Schelling's lectures on the Philosophy of Art.

First-order evidence is evidence which bears on whether a proposition is true. Higher-order evidence is evidence which bears on whether a person is able to assess her evidence for or against a proposition. A widespread view is that higher-order evidence makes a difference to whether it is rational for a person to believe a proposition. In this paper, I consider in what way higher-order evidence might do this. More specifically, I consider whether and how higher-order evidence plays a role in (...) determining what it is rational to believe distinct from that which first-order evidence plays. To do this, I turn to the theory of reasons, and try to situate higher-order evidence within it. The only place I find for it there, distinct from that which first-order evidence already occupies, is as a practical reason, that is, as a reason for desire or action. One might take this to show either that the theory of reasons is inadequate as it stands or that higher-order evidence makes no distinctive difference to what it is rational to believe. I tentatively endorse the second option. (shrink)

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of (...) discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. -/- The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. (shrink)

Inductive generalization, where people go beyond the data provided, is a basic cognitive capability, and it underpins theoretical accounts of learning, categorization, and decision making. To complete the inductive leap needed for generalization, people must make a key ‘‘sampling’’ assumption about how the available data were generated. Previous models have considered two extreme possibilities, known as strong and weak sampling. In strong sampling, data are assumed to have been deliberately generated as positive examples of a concept, whereas in weak sampling, (...) data are assumed to have been generated without any restrictions. We develop a more general account of sampling that allows for an intermediate mixture of these two extremes, and we test its usefulness. In two experiments, we show that most people complete simple one-dimensional generalization tasks in a way that is consistent with their believing in some mixture of strong and weak sampling, but that there are large individual differences in the relative emphasis different people give to each type of sampling. We also show experimentally that the relative emphasis of the mixture is influenced by the structure of the available information. We discuss the psychological meaning of mixing strong and weak sampling, and possible extensions of our modeling approach to richer problems of inductive generalization. (shrink)

Malapportionment—electoral districts with divergent ratios of people to representation—was ruled to be unconstitutional in a widely venerated series of cases before the Warren Court. Those cases held that a principle of political equality, ‘one person, one vote’, is required by the Constitution. But what is the content of that principle? Many Justices and commentators declare that it is vague, empty, circular, or meaningless. This creates a murder mystery. Malapportionment was killed; but by what, exactly? This Article seeks an answer by (...) focusing on the Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote: it is a broad (rather than narrow) principle of rough (rather than exact) equality. As such, one person, one vote requires an equal number of people per district and an equal number of votes per voter; and it requires a roughly equal number of people per district. These commitments are attractive in isolation. But, this Article shows, they are objectionable in conjunction: they entail that one person, one vote is too permissive, as it only requires a roughly equal number of votes per voter. If your vote is roughly equal to mine when your district is fractionally more populous than mine, your vote is also roughly equal to mine when I can cast fractionally more votes than you. -/- Since this problem follows inexorably from the Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote, there are two possible solutions. First, one person, one vote could be broad a principle of exact equality; administrability may then justify underenforcing the principle in distributing voters to districts, but not in distributing votes to voters. Second, one person, one vote could include a narrow principle requiring rough equality in apportionment, as well as a distinct principle requiring exactly equal votes per voter. These solutions have important constitutional implications—including for resolving the population baseline at issue in malapportionment, which remains uncertain after Evenwel v. Abbott. But neither provides an easy way out. Each makes one person, one vote either too restrictive or too permissive. -/- This puzzle brings to light why the operative principle in a venerated series of cases is deeply unclear and unsettled. But it has a special significance beyond that. One person, one vote lies at the heart of America’s constitutional democracy, which is already under considerable threat. On the one hand, if the content of the principle is too restrictive (or too uncertain), then objections to its constitutionality are considerably strengthened. On the other hand, if it is too permissive, then one person, one vote provides little constraint on Vice-President J.D. Vance’s recent proposal to give extra votes to parents, as well as myriad similar policies and procedures that would erode voters’ equality at the ballot box. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has recently proposed a new analysis of knowledge. I examine that analysis and show that it fails. More specifically, I show that it faces a problem all too familiar from the post-Gettier literature, namely, that it is delivers the wrong verdict in fake barn cases.

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. While (...) there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against my reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical and epistemological views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation. (shrink)