"In this wonderfully engaging and informative collection we hear the voice of a different Paul Bowles. Writing on a wide range of subjects--jazz, film music, classical music, popular music, ethnic music--he is direct, opinionated, incisive, analytical, humorous, and passionate."—Millicent Dillon, author of You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles.

Should the idea of economic man-the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus-determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding "no." Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may "crowd out" ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the (...) employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends. (shrink)

Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that most women employees at the (...) firm are administrative assistants—motivate moral encroachment. I then describe weaknesses of moral encroachment. Finally I explain how we can countenance the moral properties of such beliefs without endorsing moral encroachment, and I argue that the moral status of such beliefs cannot be evaluated independently from the understanding in which they are embedded. (shrink)

In order to perform certain actions – such as incarcerating a person or revoking parental rights – the state must establish certain facts to a particular standard of proof. These standards – such as preponderance of evidence and beyond reasonable doubt – are often interpreted as likelihoods or epistemic confidences. Many theorists construe them numerically; beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often construed as 90 to 95% confidence in the guilt of the defendant. -/- A family of influential cases suggests (...) standards of proof should not be interpreted numerically. These ‘proof paradoxes’ illustrate that purely statistical evidence can warrant high credence in a disputed fact without satisfying the relevant legal standard. In this essay I evaluate three influential attempts to explain why merely statistical evidence cannot satisfy legal standards. (shrink)

Many theorists hold that outright verdicts based on bare statistical evidence are unwarranted. Bare statistical evidence may support high credence, on these views, but does not support outright belief or legal verdicts of culpability. The vignettes that constitute the lottery paradox and the proof paradox are marshalled to support this claim. Some theorists argue, furthermore, that examples of profiling also indicate that bare statistical evidence is insufficient for warranting outright verdicts.I examine Pritchard's and Buchak's treatments of these three kinds of (...) case. Pritchard argues that his safety condition explains the insufficiency of bare statistical evidence for outright verdicts in each of the three cases, while Buchak argues that her treatment of the distinction between credence and belief explains this. In these discussions the three kinds of cases – lottery, proof paradox, and profiling – are treated alike. The cases are taken to exhibit the same epistemic features. I identity significant overlooked epistemic differences amongst these three cases; these differences cast doubt on Pritchard's explanation of the insufficiency of bare statistical evidence for outright verdicts. Finally, I raise the question of whether we should aim for a unified explanation of the three paradoxes. (shrink)

In the early 1960s, American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn contributed to a “crisis of rationality” with his hypothesis that science develops by means of paradigm shifts. He challenged the positivist concept of cumulative and continuous scientific progress. According to Kuhn, the relation between two succeeding scientific traditions ‘separated by a scientific revolution’ is characterized by conceptual incommensurability that constrains the interpretation of science as a cumulative, steadily progressing enterprise. Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy was heavily criticized by German-American biologist Ernst Mayr (...) as unapplicable to the history of biology. Mayr, one of the most outstanding evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and a “co-architect” of the so-called Modern Synthesis (contemporary Darwinism), published extensively on the history and philosophy of biology as he thought that theoretical biology cannot progress without proper philosophy of science. Being convinced of the progressive development of Darwinism, Mayr pointed out that Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolutions does not reflect conceptual changes in evolutionary biology. Here we summarize Mayr’s critiques of Kuhn and, based on our own research, take Mayr’s side in the controversy between two great thinkers. (shrink)

According to a common conception of legal proof, satisfying a legal burden requires establishing a claim to a numerical threshold. Beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often glossed as 90% or 95% likelihood given the evidence. Preponderance of evidence is interpreted as meaning at least 50% likelihood given the evidence. In light of problems with the common conception, I propose a new ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for legal standards of proof. Relevant alternative accounts of knowledge state that a person knows a (...) proposition when their evidence rules out all relevant error possibilities. I adapt this framework to model three legal standards of proof—the preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and beyond reasonable doubt standards. I describe virtues of this framework. I argue that, by eschewing numerical thresholds, the relevant alternatives framework avoids problems inherent to rival models. I conclude by articulating aspects of legal normativity and practice illuminated by the relevant alternatives framework. (shrink)

In an earlier defense of the view that the fundamental logical properties of logical truth and logical consequence obtain or fail to obtain only relative to contexts, I focused on a variation of Kaplan’s own modal logic of indexicals. In this paper, I state a semantics and sketch a system of proof for a first-order logic of demonstratives, and sketch proofs of soundness and completeness. (I omit details for readability.) That these results obtain for the first-order logic of demonstratives shows (...) that the significance of demonstratives for logic exceeds their behavior as rigid designators in counterfactual reasoning, or reasoning about alternative possibilities. Furthermore, the results in this paper help address one common objection to the view that logical truth and consequence obtain only relative to contexts. According to this objection, the view entails that logical consequence is not formal. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to determine whether and to what extent Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation is variable relative. In an influential review, Strevens has accused Woodward’s account of a damaging form of variable relativity, according to which obviously false causal claims can be made true by choosing a depleted variable set. Following McCain, I show that Strevens’ objection doesn’t succeed. However, Woodward also wants to avoid another kind of variable relativity, according to which it can be true (...) that X is a cause of Y in one set of background conditions, but false in another. I show that Woodward’s account is problematically overpermissive, unless there are restrictions on the values that certain variables can take. I formulate a modified account that makes these restrictions explicit, then use it to argue that Woodward’s attempt to avoid relativity to background conditions is misguided. On the best interpretation of the interventionist theory, causal claims are assessed relative to a particular kind of variable set. Thus, I conclude that the theory should be understood as variable relative, in a specific, unproblematic sense. (shrink)

The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...) are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves—regardless of action—can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns epistemic risks we confront as social epistemic agents. I aim to motivate the relevant alternatives framework as a fruitful approach to the epistemology of risk. I first articulate a ‘relevant alternatives’ model of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and action. I then employ the relevant alternatives framework to undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Finally, I argue the relevant alternatives framework illuminates epistemic phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and crying wolf, and I draw on the framework to diagnose the undue skepticism endemic to rape accusations. (shrink)

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were transformed (...) into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a large amount of support for the idea that causal claims can be sensitive to normative considerations. Previous work has focused on the concept of actual causation, defending the claim that whether or not some token event c is a cause of another token event e is influenced by both statistical and prescriptive norms. I focus on the policy debate surrounding alternative energies, and use the causal modelling framework to show that in this context, people’s normative (...) commitments don’t just affect the causal claims they are willing to endorse, but also their understanding of the causal structure. In the context of the alternative energy debate, normative considerations affect our understanding of the causal structure by influencing our judgements about which variables should be held fixed, and therefore which variables should be relegated to the background of a causal model. In cases of extreme disagreement, normative commitments can also affect which causal structure we think should be instantiated. Thus, focusing on a new context has revealed a previously unexplored sense in which normative factors are incorporated into causal reasoning. (shrink)

Understanding enjoys a special kind of value, one not held by lesser epistemic states such as knowledge and true belief. I explain the value of understanding via a seemingly unrelated topic, the implausibility of veritism. Veritism holds that true belief is the sole ultimate epistemic good and all other epistemic goods derive their value from the epistemic value of true belief. Veritism entails that if you have a true belief that p, you have all the epistemic good qua p. Veritism (...) is a plausible and widely held view; I argue that it is untenable. I argue that integration among beliefs possesses epistemic value independent from the good of true belief, and so has value veritism cannot account for. I argue further that this integration among beliefs comprises the distinctive epistemic value of understanding. (shrink)

We consider two reasons why firms should be owned and run democratically by their workers. The first concerns accountability : Because the employment relationship involves the exercise of power, its governance should on democratic grounds be accountable to those most directly affected. The second concerns efficiency : The democratic firm uses a lower level of inputs per unit of output than the analogous capitalist firm.

Building on recent work by Delia Graff Fara and Ora Matushansky on appellative constructions like ‘Mirka called Roger handsome’, I argue that if Millianism about proper names is true, then the quantifier ‘something’ in ‘Mirka called Roger something’ is best understood as a kind of substitutional quantifier. Any adequate semantics for such quantifiers must explain both the logical behavior of ‘Mirka called Roger something’ and the acceptability of ‘so’-anaphora in ‘Mirka called Roger something, and everyone so called is handsome’. Millianism (...) about proper names is inconsistent with such quantifiers being standard non-substitutional second-order quantifiers. But this is not the only option for Millianism: I provide two different propositional semantics for substitutional quantification, each of which is adequate in the sense above, given Millianism. One of these is based on Tobias Rosefeldt’s work on non-nominal quantification, and I identify in what way Rosefeldt’s semantics is substitutional. (shrink)

This essay presents a unified account of safety, sensitivity, and severe testing. S’s belief is safe iff, roughly, S could not easily have falsely believed p, and S’s belief is sensitive iff were p false S would not believe p. These two conditions are typically viewed as rivals but, we argue, they instead play symbiotic roles. Safety and sensitivity are both valuable epistemic conditions, and the relevant alternatives framework provides the scaffolding for their mutually supportive roles. The relevant alternatives condition (...) holds that a belief is warranted only if the evidence rules out relevant error possibilities. The safety condition helps categorise relevant from irrelevant possibilities. The sensitivity condition captures ‘ruling out’. Safety, sensitivity, and the relevant alternatives condition are typically presented as conditions on warranted belief or knowledge. But these properties, once generalised, help characterise other epistemic phenomena, including warranted inference, legal verdicts, scientific claims, reaching conclusions, addressing questions, warranted assertion, and the epistemic force of corroborating evidence. We introduce and explain Mayo’s severe testing account of statistical inference. A hypothesis is severely tested to the extent it passes tests that probably would have found errors, were they present. We argue Mayo’s account is fruitfully understood using the resulting relevant alternatives framework. Recasting Mayo’s condition using the conceptual framework of contemporary epistemology helps forge fruitful connections between two research areas—philosophy of statistics and the analysis of knowledge—not currently in sufficient dialogue. The resulting union benefits both research areas. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the choice of trust conceptualisations in the context of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) can have a significant impact on the understanding and implementations of a user’s private data protection. Narrow instrumental interpretations of trust as a mere precondition for technology acceptance may obscure important moral issues such as malleability of user’s privacy decisions, and power imbalances between suppliers and consumers of technology. A shift of focus in policy proposals from trust to the trustworthiness of technology (...) can be the first step on the way to addressing these moral concerns. It is argued that complexity of IoT systems, comprised of technological artefacts and institutional data-collecting entities, warrants the moral value of distrust as a prima facie assumption for technological design and regulatory measures. Such a conceptual perspective highlights importance of technological measures that can minimise reliance on trust in consumer IoTs and regulatory measures aimed to improve transparency of IoT architectures. (shrink)

In der vorliegenden Arbeit soll ein in der analytischen Philosophie aufgestelltes Programm zur Explikation der kausalen Begrifflichkeit kritisch untersucht werden. Seine kritische Analyse mag im Hinblick auf die Rolle von Interesse sein, welche die kausalen Begriffe in einer allgemeinen Theorie der wissenschaftlichen Erklärung zu spielen haben. Diese Analyse könnte außerdem m.E. zur Bestimmung des Ausgangspunktes einer positiven Behandlung der mit den kausalen Begriffen zusammenhängenden Sinnfragen beitragen.

This paper addresses the issue of stipulation in three cases of implicit definitions. It argues that the alleged implicit definitions do not have a purely stipulative status. Stipulation of the vehicles of the implicit definitions in question should end up with true postulates. However, those postulates should not be taken to be true only in virtue of stipulation since they have extra commitments. Horwich’s worry emerges in all three kinds of implicit definitions under consideration, since the existence of meanings so (...) that the alleged postulates are true depends on extra requirements that should be fulfilled. Moreover, if Ramseyfication method is applied to the three kinds of implicit definition, they are split up into two components from which the first one is broadly factual while the second one is purely stipulative. The paper argues that their definitional task in each case should be assigned to their second component i.e. their Carnap-conditional. (shrink)

We address the issue of the normativity of representation and how Grush might address it for emulations as constituting representations. We then proceed to several more detailed issues concerning the learning of emulations, a possible empirical counterexample to Grush's model, and the choice of Kalman filters as the form of model-based control.

An annotated bibliography of legal epistemology.

Tarot cards are a rich and fascinating art form. They are also an excellent tool for inquiry. I show why tarot has value, regardless of the user’s beliefs about magic. And I explain how novice or skeptical tarot users can appreciate (and create) that value by focusing on the card’s images, rather than consulting texts or expert guides. This is because, on a naturalistic conception, tarot’s zetetic value—that is, its value to inquiry—stems from its artistic properties.

The Republic’s noble lie is widely read as an endorsement of political difference that opposes the democratic ideals of its Athenian setting. Once the text’s exclusionary political realities and rhetorical structure are attended to, however, the passages no longer appear as the template for an essentialist politics or the act of political deception they are typically taken to be. What they do is lay bare the ‘artifice’ (mēchanē) by which regimes – including classical Athens – produce membership status as a (...) ‘natural’ category. Plato presents the regulatory fiction that one’s political ‘kind’ (genos) expresses a pre-given status as an open secret. Given the privileged awareness he affords the reader, the noble lie may be fruitfully read as revealing – not concealing – that the ‘natural’ distinctions of an exclusionary citizenship politics are the effects of willful political power. This narrative strategy takes on specific significance in the context of the blood-based membership politics of Athens, which had its own noble lie. Accordingly, Plato’s text is shown to provoke insights into questions of democratic difference usually assumed beyond its purview. The Republic is read as exposing the workings of an essentialist politics it is typically thought instead to originate and prescribe. (shrink)

Conciliatory views of peer disagreement hold that when an agent encounters peer disagreement she should conciliate by adjusting her doxastic attitude towards that of her peer. In this paper I distinguish different ways conciliation can be understood and argue that the way conciliationism is typically understood violates the principle of commutativity of evidence. Commutativity of evidence holds that the order in which evidence is acquired should not influence what it is reasonable to believe based on that evidence. I argue that (...) when an agent encounters more than one peer, and applies the process of conciliation serially, the order she encounters the peers influences the resulting credence. I argue this is a problem for conciliatory views of disagreement, and suggest some responses available to advocates of conciliation. (shrink)

Robust virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is true belief obtained through cognitive ability. In this essay I explain that robust virtue epistemology faces a dilemma, and the viability of the theory depends on an adequate understanding of the ‘through’ relation. Greco interprets this ‘through’ relation as one of causal explanation; the success is through the agent’s abilities iff the abilities play a sufficiently salient role in a causal explanation of why she possesses a true belief. In this paper I argue (...) that Greco’s account of the ‘through’ relation is inadequate. I describe kinds of counterexample and explain why salience is the wrong kind of property to track epistemically relevant conditions or to capture the nature of knowledge. Advocates of robust virtue epistemology should develop an alternative account of the ‘through’ relation. I also argue that virtue epistemology should employ an environment-relative interpretation of epistemic virtue. (shrink)

The teleological approach to an epistemic concept investigates it by asking questions such as ‘what is the purpose of the concept?’, ‘What role has it played in the past?’, or ‘If we imagine a society without the concept, why would they feel the need to invent it?’ The idea behind the teleological approach is that examining the function of the concept illuminates the contours of the concept itself. This approach is a relatively new development in epistemology, and as yet there (...) are few works examining it. This paper aims to fill this gap and engender further understanding of the teleological method. I first contrast the teleological method with more orthodox approaches in epistemology. I then draw a three-way taxonomy of different kinds of teleological approach and provide an example of each kind. The teleological approach is often presented as antithetical to the more orthodox approaches in epistemology, and so in competition with them. I demur. I argue that the methods can be fruitfully combined in epistemological theorising; in the final section I suggest specific ways the teleological approach can be incorporated alongside more orthodox methods in a general methodological reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

Self-sovereign identity solutions implemented on the basis of blockchain technology are seen as alternatives to existing digital identification systems, or even as a foundation of standards for the new global infrastructures for identity management systems. It is argued that ‘self-sovereignty' in this context can be understood as the concept of individual control over identity relevant private data, capacity to choose where such data is stored, and the ability to provide it to those who need to validate it. It is also (...) argued that while it might be appealing to operationalise the concept of ‘self-sovereignty’ in a narrow technical sense, depreciation of moral semantics obscures key challenges and long-term repercussions. Closer attention to the normative substance of the ‘sovereignty’ concept helps to highlight a range of ethical issues pertaining to the changing nature of human identity in the context of ubiquitous private data collection. (shrink)

My essay ‘Attunement: On the Cognitive Virtues of Attention’ is the lead essay in a symposium. Adam Carter and Sandy Goldberg each respond to the ‘Attunement’ essay. This is my rejoinder. -/- (i.) Carter argues that resources from virtue reliabilism can explain the source of attention normativity. He modifies this virtue reliabilist AAA-framework to apply to attentional normativity. I raise concerns about Carter’s project. I suggest that true belief and proper attentional habits are not relevantly similar. -/- (ii.) Goldberg claims (...) that social roles underwrite kinds of attentional normativity that are not well-captured by virtue theory. I critically assess this claim. (shrink)