Context: A central motivation behind various embodied, extended, and enactive (4E) approaches to cognition is to ground our understanding of minds and cognition within the biological structures that give rise to life. Because of this, their advocates often claim a natural kinship with dynamical and developmental systems theories. However, these accounts also explicitly or implicitly privilege individual organisms in ways that contrast with many of the insights of systems and developmental systems approaches to biology. Problem: The prioritization of individual organisms (...) within 4E approaches to cognition contrasts with the default entangled structure of biological systems associated with cognitive agency. We provide means for 4E cognitive science to move beyond an individual-centred view of cognitive agency. Method: We first identify and problematize individual-centredness within various predominant 4E approaches by comparison with biological research and developmental systems theory. Subsequently, we offer conceptual resources from the field of ecological research for understanding cognitive agency beyond the predominant focus on individual organisms. Results: Cognitive agency may be understood without privileging individual organisms by reading nonequilibrium maintenance in terms of a dynamic differentiation instead of individual organismic autonomy. This form of organizational structure corresponds to the notion of sympoiesis from ecological research. Implications: Approaching cognitive agency without privileging individual organisms should be invaluable to advocates of 4E cognition seeking to ground notions of cognition and mind within contemporary biological research. Constructivist content: We seek to expand upon existing constructivist perspectives on the organizing principles of cognitive agency, such as sensorimotor embodiment and autopoiesis, arguing that meta-organismic cognitive agents (including humans) embody distributed relations beyond the privileging of individual organisms. Key words: 4E cognition, autopoiesis, cognitive agency, developmental systems theory, enactivism, extended mind thesis, holobionts, sympoeisis. (shrink)

We delineate the distinctness of sympoiesis from adaptive notions of autopoiesis and explain why we see it as helpful to the exploration and explanation of agentive and adaptive cognitive systems.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Moving Boundary, a Plastic Core: A Contribution to the Third Wave of Extended-Mind Research” by Timotej Prosen. Abstract: We explore both some novel claims made by Prosen’s account of plastic cores and some overlaps between his and other accounts of third-wave extended mind. In the first instance we discuss whether the Markov blanket formalism should be regarded as incompatible with a third-wave extended view. Secondly, we discuss whether Prosen’s proposal of a plastic core (...) quite meets the radical departure of the third wave from organism-centeredness - or whether Prosen’s contribution might be more aptly considered as a compromise between second- and third-wave extended mind. (shrink)

If biotechnology can be used to "upgrade" humans physically and mentally, should it be done? And if so, to what extent? How will biotechnology affect societal cohesion, and can the development be controlled? Or is this a Pandora's box that should remain closed? These are just a few of the many questions that arise as a result of the increasing ability of technology to change biology and, eventually, transform human living conditions. This development has created a new horizon of a (...) posthuman future that will influence contemporary life and politics in a number of ways. The book gathers researchers within the fields of biotechnology, medicine, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Among the contributors are Francis Fukuyama, Julian Savulescu, Maxwell Mehlman, Lone Frank and Chris Hables Gray. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: A move to sympoiesis entails a conceptual overhaul of autopoiesis, a key facet of the enactive approach to cognition. In this commentary, I invite more systematic thinking about the concept of autopoiesis and enactivist commitments to it, given the inconsistencies regarding individuality raised in the target article.

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: I concur with Dengsø and Kirchhoff that if we are to ground cognition more deeply in contemporary biology, we need to focus on the organism-environment relationship as the unit of biological explanation most relevant to cognitive science. This entails questioning the individualistic bias that has pervaded 4E cognitive science. However, can we overcome that bias while (...) retaining a commitment to the importance of phenomenological descriptions for 4E cognitive science? Perhaps we can, but probably not if we continue to rely on classical Western phenomenology. Certain strands of Buddhist thought might be more compatible with sympoiesis. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: I provide two reasons for thinking the conclusion drawn from the argument’s premises is too strong. Briefly, (a) the benefits of having consistent commitments between enactivism and developmental systems theory are only clear when treating both as philosophies of nature rather than empirical research programs, and (b) the target article demonstrates that enactivism is capable of (...) explanatory pluralism. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: Dengsø and Kirchhoff offer a revised dynamic conception of the individual in place of the bounded cognitive agent of classical cognitive science. However, this may not be sufficiently robust to ground the enquiries into individual and cultural differences that remain vital in the proposed “deterritorialized cognitive science.” It also needs to make contact with rich traditions (...) of 4E research on socially distributed cognition, which are neglected in Dengsø and Kirchhoff’s critique. It is just because individualization is a fragile process, and because boundaries are hard-won achievements, that anti-individualists who highlight the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and dynamism of cognitive ecologies must reconfigure rather than eliminate or efface the individual. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: Dengsø and Kirchhoff’s inspiring proposal to drop the individual-centeredness of autopoiesis in favor of a view based on sympoiesis and developmental systems theory (DST) has two problems: (a) It is not clear that the points they raise as arguments against individual-centered 4E cognition are incompatible with those views and many of them are already included in (...) Ezequiel Di Paolo’s account of enaction. (b) They give no clear account of how 4E cognition will account for agency as purposive behavior once it discards its current, individual-centered, accounts of it. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: I examine the authors’ concept of relational cognition, showing that it has two possible readings, both more “cartesian” than the authors suppose. Whence the authors’ “anti-cartesianism,” then? I suggest it is due to an understanding of cognition that allows cognition to operate at very long timescales, and provide an argument to resist such an understanding.

This article examines the supposedly incomprehensibility of schizophrenic delusions. According to the contemporary classificatory systems (DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10), some delusions typically found in schizophrenia are considered bizarre and incomprehensible. The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of understanding that deems these delusions incomprehensible and to see if it is possible to comprehend these delusions if we apply another notion of understanding. First, I discuss the contemporary schizophrenia definitions and their inherent problems, and I argue that the notion (...) of incomprehensibility in these definitions rests heavily on Jaspers’ notions of understanding and empathy. Secondly, I discuss two Wittgensteinian attempts to comprehend bizarre delusions: (a) Campbell’s proposal to conceive delusions as framework propositions and (b) Sass’s suggestion to interpret delusions in the light of solipsism. Finally, I discuss the phenomenological conception of schizophrenia, which conceives delusion formation as resulting from alterations of the structure of experiencing and from underlying self-disorders. I argue that although a psychological understanding that seeks to grasp meaning in terms of motivations, desires, and other more straightforward psychological connections between mental states is impossible in schizophrenia, we can in fact have a philosophical understanding of the schizophrenic world and of the emergence of delusions typically found in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Cognitive scaffolding is typically conceptualized in terms of environmental design which serves to offload, facilitate, or enhance the cognitive capacities of interacting agents. Recent contributions to the literature on scaffolding have noted that environmental design might likewise scaffold cognition in ways that undermine the interests of interactant agents—giving rise to notions of problematic or hostile scaffolding. Given the pervasiveness of social and technological scaffolding in contemporary life, the importance of understanding and assessing its effects can hardly be overstated. At the (...) same time, however, the very pervasiveness of scaffolding raises a challenge to the current criteria for evaluating its effects by comparison with agents’ interests. This is because human agents and their interests alike are themselves the results of various forms of social and technological scaffolding. This paper explores the relationship between scaffolding and the formation of agents along with their interests, as well as the implications of this relationship for evaluating scaffolding as being hostile, neutral, or beneficial. I will argue that the formative aspect of scaffolding imparts a degree of uncertainty to evaluations of scaffolding based on agents’ interests. I will then demonstrate the relevance of the formative aspect of scaffolding in evaluating and assessing the potentially pernicious effects of contemporary social and technological scaffolding focusing on the examples of servitization marketing models and social and vocational digital infrastructures. (shrink)

Many degree programs in science and engineering aim at enabling their students to perform interdisciplinary problem solving. In this paper we present three types of expertise that are involved in different ways in interdisciplinary problem solving. In doing so we shall first characterise two important epistemological challenges commonly faced in interdisciplinary problem solving, namely the communication challenge that arises from the use of different concepts within different scientific domains, and the integration challenge that arises from the differences between domain-specific epistemological (...) standards. Next, drawing on recent work on expertise developed within science studies, we characterize the interactional expertise that is a precondition for scientists to communicate across scientific domains, and the integrational expertise that is a precondition for scientists to be able to integrate cognitive resources originating in different domains. Finally, we shall analyse how different types of interdisciplinary problem solving sets different requirements for interactional and integrational expertise and discuss the implications for science and engineering programs in higher education. (shrink)

Good academic practice is more than the avoidance of clear-cut cheating. It also involves navigation of the gray zones between cheating and good practice. The existing literature has left students’ understanding of gray zone practices largely unexplored. To begin filling in this gap, we present results from a questionnaire study involving N = 1639 undergraduate students from seven European countries representing all major disciplines. We show that large numbers of these students are unable to identify gray area issues and lack (...) sensitivity to the context dependence of these. We also show that a considerable proportion of students have a poor understanding of concepts like plagiarism and falsification, not only in gray zone scenarios, but also in cases of relatively clear-cut cheating. Our results are similar across the faculties and countries of study, and even for students who have attended academic integrity training. We discuss the implications of this for academic integrity training. (shrink)

Research in psychopathology is booming in an unprecedented way, at least, in terms of increasing number of publications. Yet, a few questions arise: Does quantity also give us quality? Are the collected data generally of sound quality? How are data typically collected in psychopathology? Are the applied methods of data collection appropriate for this particular field of study? This article explores three different methods of data collection in psychopathology, namely self-rating scales, structured interviews, and semi-structured, phenomenological interviews. To identify the (...) most adequate methodological approach, we first establish the nature of the object of psychopathology and then we critically assess each method’s appropriateness to this field of study. We emphasize fundamental issues that make self-rating scales and structured interviews unfit for the task of adequately examining psychopathology. By contrast, we propose that a semi-structured, phenomenological interview presents a more appropriate method. Finally, we describe two types of semi-structured, phenomenological interviews that can be applied to assess and explore psychopathology, respectively. (shrink)

This open access book looks at how a democracy can devolve into a post-factual state. The media is being flooded by populist narratives, fake news, conspiracy theories and make-believe. Misinformation is turning into a challenge for all of us, whether politicians, journalists, or citizens. In the age of information, attention is a prime asset and may be converted into money, power, and influence – sometimes at the cost of facts. The point is to obtain exposure on the air and in (...) print media, and to generate traffic on social media platforms. With information in abundance and attention scarce, the competition is ever fiercer with truth all too often becoming the first victim. Reality Lost: Markets of Attention, Misinformation and Manipulation is an analysis by philosophers Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard of the nuts and bolts of the information market, the attention economy and media eco-system which may pave way to postfactual democracy. Here misleading narratives become the basis for political opinion formation, debate, and legislation. To curb this development and the threat it poses to democratic deliberation, political self-determination and freedom, it is necessary that we first grasp the mechanisms and structural conditions that cause it. (shrink)

Beck uses the term `subpolitics' to refer to forms of politics outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states. From the perspective of the theory of reflexive modernization, the proliferation of subpolitics indicates a weakening of the `iron cage' of bureaucratic, state-oriented politics. We argue that subpolitics does indeed challenge conventional notions of politics. It mobilizes sources of societal influence that transcend the formal political system. In particular, subpolitics correlates with the command over positive or negative (...) sanctions and the capacity for uncertainty absorption. This can be illustrated in the areas of scientific expertise, corporate decision-making and political consumption. Those cases show that the political system cannot monopolize the means of societal influence. For a political system that regards itself as the centre of society, this must be irritating. For sociology, however, it provides the opportunity to part with such an inappropriate account of the role of politics in modern society. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the (...) overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

Theories of new materialism have gained increasing traction in the social and human sciences in recent decades, as thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett have reinvigorated the philosophical interest in topics such as the agency of nonhuman matter, the relational nature of existence and the limitations of anthropocentric forms of inquiry. However, these theories have faced criticism from post-Marxist critical theorists, who argue that theories of new materialism blunt social and capitalist critique and promote obscurity by flattening (...) the world to a single ontological plane. In this article, I argue that these critiques rely on mischaracterizations of new materialist scholarship and that theories of new materialism can in fact help us re-examine – not reject, as their critics suggest – the role of critique, responsibility and human politics in the context of the Anthropocene and its unfolding ecological crises. (shrink)

It may soon be possible to generate human organs inside of human-pig chimeras via a process called interspecies blastocyst complementation. This paper discusses what arguably the central ethical concern is raised by this potential source of transplantable organs: that farming human-pig chimeras for their organs risks perpetrating a serious moral wrong because the moral status of human-pig chimeras is uncertain, and potentially significant. Those who raise this concern usually take it to be unique to the creation of chimeric animals with (...) ‘humanised’ brains. In this paper, we show how that the same style of argument can be used to critique current uses of non-chimeric pigs in agriculture. This reveals an important tension between two common moral views: that farming human-pig chimeras for their organs is ethically concerning, and that farming non-chimeric pigs for food or research is ethically benign. At least one of these views stands in need of revision. (shrink)

Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm has sparked intense debate about the role of narratives in rhetorical scholarship. The theory has subsequently been followed up by numerous criticisms and revisions. This article argues that especially the latter can benefit from a complementary phenomenological perspective that Fisher himself placed within the original paradigm. Through the Heideggerian concepts of building and dwelling, rhetoric within the narrative paradigm may be seen as a primary means for engaging with both individual and communal goals and exigencies, providing (...) a more nuanced account for how people care for and act on the narratives in their lives. (shrink)

AI researchers have developed sophisticated language models capable of generating paragraphs of 'synthetic text' on topics specified by the user. While AI text generation has legitimate benefits, it could also be misused, potentially to grave effect. For example, AI text generators could be used to automate the production of convincing fake news, or to inundate social media platforms with machine-generated disinformation. This paper argues that AI text generators should be conceptualised as a dual-use technology, outlines some relevant lessons from earlier (...) debates on dual-use life sciences research, and calls for closer collaboration between ethicists and the machine learning community to address AI language models’ dual-use implications. (shrink)

Después de discutir diversas hipótesis acerca de la especificidad de la poesía, se reivindican sus posibilidades relativas a la expresión de lo paradójico. Ello se ejemplifica en cuatro poemas del libro La línea del tiempo de Luis Fernando Macías. Y a partir de la estructura paradójica del tiempo se realizan algunas consideraciones relativas a la condición paradójica de la existencia y a los orígenes del conflicto trágico.

In this comparative study, we examine experiential disruptions of embodiment and affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia. We suggest that using phenomenological resources to explore these experiences may help us better understand what it’s like to live with these conditions, and that such an understanding may have significant therapeutic value. Additionally, we suggest that this sort of phenomenologically-informed comparative analysis can shed light on the importance of embodiment and affectivity for the constitution of a sense of self and interpersonal relatedness (...) in normal conditions. (shrink)

This paper argues that a consideration of the problem of providing truthmakers for negative truths undermines truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists are presented with an uncomfortable dilemma. Either they must take up the challenge of providing truthmakers for negative truths, or else they must explain why negative truths are exceptions to the principle that every truth must have a truthmaker. The first horn is unattractive since the prospects of providing truthmakers for negative truths do not look good neither absences, nor totality (...) states of affairs, nor Graham Priest and J.C. Beall’s ‘polarities’ (Beall, 2000; Priest, 2000) are up to the job. The second horn, meanwhile, is problematic because restricting the truthmaker principle to atomic truths, or weakening it to the thesis that truth supervenes on being, undercuts truthmaker theory’s original motivation. The paper ends by arguing that truthmaker theory is, in any case, an under-motivated doctrine because the groundedness of truth can be explained without appeal to the truthmaker principle. This leaves us free to give the ommonsensical and deflationary explanation of negative truths that common-sense suggests. (shrink)

In this paper we make a proposal for reforming biomedical research that is aimed to align re-search more closely with the so-called fair-share principle according to which the proportions of global resources as-signed to different diseases should agree with the ratios of human suffering associated with those diseases.

The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to be neuro­computational adaptations crafted by natural selection to help us get ahead as collabora­tors. But with societal transformation, these feelings can become a poor match for a new reality. (...) Reprogramming oneself can be challenging; Hunger’s protagonist must suffer months of emotional and physical pain before he adapts. His journey, and Hamsun’s mod­ernist project, can be illuminated by recent research on status management and morality as cooperation. As literature, Hunger could fulfill several adaptive functions by mapping mor­als for urban pro-sociality at a time of great disruption. Similar moral adaptation could become necessary in our present era, too. (shrink)

The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that directed them to rape their enemies’ women. Courtly love sacralized female consent, yet critics have struggled to make sense of which purposes courtliness served. This (...) evolutionary reading of Tristrams saga reveals how courtly love not only functioned as an ideological bridge be­tween mating regimes, but also embodied proto-WEIRD psychology, the impersonal pro­sociality of the new mobile, educated, and transculturally inclusive European individual-as described by Henrich (2020). This ethos would evolve to become the morality of modernity. How it was disseminated exemplifies how fiction can help communities find provisional solutions to problems that cannot be solved definitely. (shrink)

In this paper we make a proposal for reforming biomedical research that is aimed to align re-search more closely with the so-called fair-share principle according to which the proportions of global resources as-signed to different diseases should agree with the ratios of human suffering associated with those diseases.

Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can (...) a person’s thoughts about absent, abstract or counterfactual states of affairs also be accounted for in such terms? We argue such a question will seem pressing so long as one fails to appreciate how richly resourceful the human ecological niche is in terms of the affordances it provides. The explanatory work that is supposedly done by mental representations in a philosophical analysis of cognition, can instead be done by looking outside of the head to the environment structured by sociomaterial practices, and the affordances it makes available. Once one recognizes how much of the human ecological niche has become structured by activities of talking and writing, this should take away at least some of the motivation for understanding linguistic thinking in terms of content-bearing internal representations. We’ll argue that people can think about absent, abstract or counterfactual because of their skills for engaging with what we will call “enlanguaged affordances”. We make use of the phenomenological analysis of speech in Merleau-Ponty to show how the multiple affordances an individual is ready to engage with in a particular situation will typically include enlanguaged affordances. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘structural irrationality’ covers a diverse range of combinations of attitudes, including (inter alia) contradictory beliefs, contradictory intentions, means–end incoherence, akratic incoherence, and cyclical preferences. This paper offers a novel, unified account of when a pattern of attitudes qualifies as structurally irrational. It begins by setting up the core of the view I will be defending: a set of attitudes is irrational if and only if it is impossible for those attitudes to be jointly successful. I show that (...) this view can account for a wide range of paradigmatically irrational combinations of attitudes. I then refine the account to make it sufficiently subjective. I argue that a set of attitudes is irrational only if the impossibility of their joint success is (i) logically transparent, (ii) subjectively inferable, and (iii) not justifiably denied. (shrink)

The task of being oneself lies at the heart of human existence and entails the possibility of not being oneself. In the case of schizophrenia, this possibility may come to the fore in a disturbing way. Patients often report that they feel alienated from themselves. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that schizophrenia sometimes has been described with the heideggerian notion of inauthenticity. The aim of this paper is to explore if this description is adequate. We discuss two phenomenological accounts of (...) schizophrenia: Binswanger’s account of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity and Blankenburg’s account of schizophrenia as a loss of common sense, which seems construable as a loss of inauthenticity. We argue that the accounts are highlighting aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, viz. schizophrenic autism. Moreover, we argue that Binswanger’s description of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity is inadequate and we discuss experiences of self-alienation in schizophrenia. (shrink)

This study explores how and why simulation training facilitates professional learning by investigating how simulators and simulations are used and conceptualized in two professional domains, nursing and maritime navigation, and offer a reconceptualization. Our aim is to move beyond past theorizing of simulators and simulations that has mainly centered on representational issues like validity, fidelity, and authenticity. Instead, we approach simulators as epistemic objects and simulations as epistemic practices. These concepts offer a lens to examine the situated and sociomaterial practices (...) that make simulators into simulations and simulations into entry points to the epistemic culture of a profession. As a result, we pinpoint three central mechanisms for transforming the simulation experience into an event that facilitates the enrollment of students into their future profession. The first mechanism involves the instructional practice of “filling in” aspects of the work context that might be missing in the simulator. The second mechanism, sometimes labeled the “as-if” mode of simulations, manifests through the participants’ ongoing commitment to treat the simulation as-if it was a real professional encounter. The third relates to how simulation-based learning activities afford a crucial pedagogical orientation towards defining what constitutes exemplary professional practice in specific training situations. (shrink)

This impressive volume of essays that includes contributions from Herbert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, Mike Wheeler, Dan Zahavi, and Shaun Gallagher reflects an emerging trend in cognitive science, and explores this new approach to cognitive science informed by Heidegger's thoughts on human existence.

The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, which has been endorsed by hundreds of influential academic ethicists, calls for establishing a vegan economy by banning what it refers to as all unnecessary animal suffering, including fishing. It does so by appeal to the moral principle of equal consideration of comparable interests. I argue that this principle is misapplied by discounting morally relevant cognitive capacities of self-conscious and volitional personhood as distinguished from merely sentient non-personhood. I describe it as a kind of (...) anthropomorphizing moralism which I call anthropomoralism, defined as the tendency to project morally relevant characteristics of personhood onto merely sentient non-persons by discounting their existing differences with actual persons. I show that this attitude can lend support to the resurgent attempt to treat fetal pain as equally morally considerable to that of childbearing persons they gestate within. I explain that the only sound way to apply the principle of equal consideration of comparable interests is to compare experiences of actual persons. Therefore, while supporting a vegan economy may be morally praiseworthy, it should not be deemed morally obligatory. (shrink)

A popular claim in recent philosophy of mind and action is that events only exist once they are over. This has been taken to have the consequence that many temporal phenomena cannot be understood ‘from the inside’, as they are unfolding, purely in terms of events. However, as I argue here, the claim that events exist only when over is incoherent. I consider two ways of understanding the claim and the notion of existence it involves: one that ties existence to (...) the logic of quantification, and another that assimilates the existence of an event to that of a continuant. The first of these, I argue, cannot be the right way to understand the target claim, as there are serious logical obstacles to regarding this notion of existence as temporally variable. The second, on the other hand, leaves it ultimately mysterious what the existence of an event could amount to. I close with the suggestion that the undeniable temporal asymmetries which parties to the debate are interested in are properly understood in perspectival, not ontological, terms. (shrink)

I present an alternative account of causation in the biomedical and social sciences according to which the meaning of causal claims is given by their inferential relations to other claims. Specifically, I will argue that causal claims are inferentially related to certain evidential claims as well as claims about explanation, prediction, intervention and responsibility. I explain in some detail what it means for a claim to be inferentially related to another and finally derive some implication of the proposed account for (...) the epistemology, semantics and metaphysics of causation. (shrink)

Thought experiments are ubiquitous in science and especially prominent in domains in which experimental and observational evidence is scarce. One such domain is the causal analysis of singular events in history. A long‐standing tradition that goes back to Max Weber addresses the issue by means of ‘what‐if’ counterfactuals. In this paper I give a descriptive account of this widely used method and argue that historians following it examine difference makers rather than causes in the philosopher’s sense. While difference making is (...) neither necessary nor sufficient for causation, to establish difference makers is more consistent with the historians’ more ultimate purposes. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In a recent paper Lee Walters criticizes a number of philosophers – including Gundersen – for committing a ‘failure in the argumentative strategy’ when they attempt to amend the standard Lewis semantics for counterfactuals in order to avoid the so‐called principle of Conjunction Conditionalization. In this article we defend a Gundersen‐style probability‐based semantics against Walter's major misgivings: that it is not logically conservative, that it is committed to the Connection Hypothesis, and that it cannot deal satisfactory with irrelevant semi‐factuals.

In “All Play and No Work,” Andrew Kania claims that standard form jazz involves no works, only performances. This article responds to Kania by defending one of the alternative ontological proposals that he rejects, namely, that jazz works are ontologically continuous with works of classical music. I call this alternative “the standard view,” and I argue that it is the default position in the ontology of standard form jazz. Kania has three objections to the standard view. The bulk of the (...) article is devoted to explaining why none of these objections succeed. (shrink)