An important objection to political liberalism is that it provides no means by which to decide conflicts between public and non-public reasons. This article develops John Rawls' idea of `reasoning from conjecture' as one way to argue for a commitment to public reason. Reasoning from conjecture is a form of non-public justification that allows political liberals to reason from within the comprehensive views of at least some unreasonable citizens. After laying out the basic features of this form of non-public justification, (...) this article responds to three objections based on concerns about insincerity, cultural imperialism, and the epistemic authority of those who reason from conjecture. (shrink)

An influential strand of neo-Aristotelianism, represented by writers such as Philippa Foot, holds that moral virtue is a form of natural goodness in human beings, analogous to deep roots in oak trees or keen vision in hawks. Critics, however, have argued that such a view cannot get off the ground, because the neo-Aristotelian account of natural normativity is untenable in light of a Darwinian account of living things. This criticism has been developed most fully by William Fitzpatrick in his book (...) Teleology and the Norms of Nature . In this paper, I defend the neo-Aristotelian account of natural normativity, focusing on Fitzpatrick's arguments. I argue that a natural goodness view is not impugned by an evolutionary account. Nor can neo-Aristotelian life form judgments be replaced by an evolutionary view of living things. (shrink)

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)

Predictive processing approaches to the mind are increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. This surge of interest is accompanied by a proliferation of philosophical arguments, which seek to either extend or oppose various aspects of the emerging framework. In particular, the question of how to position predictive processing with respect to enactive and embodied cognition has become a topic of intense debate. While these arguments are certainly of valuable scientific and philosophical merit, they risk underestimating the variety of approaches gathered (...) under the predictive label. Here, we first present a basic review of neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical approaches to PP, to illustrate how these range from solidly cognitivist applications—with a firm commitment to modular, internalistic mental representation—to more moderate views emphasizing the importance of ‘body-representations’, and finally to those which fit comfortably with radically enactive, embodied, and dynamic theories of mind. Any nascent predictive processing theory must take into account this continuum of views, and associated theoretical commitments. As a final point, we illustrate how the Free Energy Principle attempts to dissolve tension between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition, by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal ‘representations’ arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus furnishes empirically productive process theories by which to guide discovery through the formal modelling of the embodied mind. (shrink)

A common objection to the idea of public reason is that it cannot resolve fundamental political issues because it excludes too many moral considerations from the political domain. Following an important but often overlooked distinction drawn by Gerald Gaus, there are two ways to understand this objection. First, public reason is often said to be inconclusive because it fails to generate agreement on fundamental political issues. Second, and more radically, some critics have claimed that public reason is indeterminate because it (...) cannot provide any citizen with sufficient reason(s) for making important political decisions. Against the first of these objections, I argue that the purpose of public reason is not to end reasonable disagreement. Rather, it is to provide a suitable framework of values and principles within which citizens may resolve their moral and political differences. Against the second objection, I argue, first, that the indeterminacy of public reason is much less common than its inconclusiveness; and, second, that there are second-order decision-making strategies that may enable citizens to cope with cases of indeterminacy. The incompleteness of public reason, whether it takes the form of inconclusiveness or indeterminacy, is not a reason for citizens to abandon their commitment to public justification. (shrink)

NoteThe following was written as a commentary on an article we published in our Spring 2023 issue, “’Comprehensive Healthcare for America’: Using the Insights of Behavioral Economics to Transform the U. S. Healthcare System,” by Paul C. Sorum, Christopher Stein, and Dale L. Moore. This commentary should have appeared alongside that article. We apologize to the authors and our readers for the error.

This essay defends Aristotelian naturalism against the objection that it is naïvely optimistic, and contrary to empirical research, to suppose that virtues like justice are naturally good while vices like injustice are naturally defective. This objection depends upon the mistaken belief that our knowledge of human goodness in action and choice must come from the natural sciences. In fact, our knowledge of goodness in human action and character depends upon a practical understanding that is possessed by someone not qua scientist (...) but qua practically wise person. I spell out some key features of this knowledge of human form, including its relation to practical reasons and its similarity to the “know-how” of crafts-persons. My account of virtue as knowledge of human form sheds light on the Aristotelian thesis that humans live according to an understanding of their own form. My account also clarifies the kinship and the divergence between Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. (shrink)

In the 20th century, public health was responsible for most of the 30-year increase in average life expectancy in the United States.1 Most of the significant advances in public health required the combined effort of scientists and attorneys. Scientists identified public health threats and the means of controlling them, but attorneys and policymakers helped convert those scientific discoveries into laws that could change the behavior of industries or individuals at a population level. In tobacco control, public health scientists made the (...) groundbreaking discovery that smoking caused lung cancer, but attorneys and policymakers developed and implemented the policies and litigation strategies that helped reduce smoking rates by more than half over the past 50 years. (shrink)

This article examines the philosophical work of Dallas Willard, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. After outlining his major translations, it explores four of Willard’s central theses: that Husserl’s phenomenology of knowledge solved a fundamental puzzle about the objectivity of knowledge; that the success of Husserlian phenomenology’s account of knowledge depended upon Husserl’s ontological insights; that Husserl was already a phenomenologist when Frege was purportedly converting him from psychologism; and that Husserl maintained his early account of (...) knowledge—and thus his realism—throughout his career. Though Willard was instrumental in starting the “Early” or “Realist Phenomenology” movement in America, his philosophical contributions have yet to be fully explored. Therefore, the paper concludes with a guide to those who would like to understand and develop Willard’s work further. (shrink)

It appears that one of the aims of John Rawls' ideal of public reason is to provide people with good reason for exercising restraint on their nonpublic reasons when they are acting in the public political arena. I will argue, however, that in certain cases Rawls' ideal of public reason is unable to provide a person with good reason for exercising such restraint, even if the person is already committed to Rawls' ideal of public reason. Because it is plausible to (...) believe that such cases are widespread, the issue I am raising represents a serious problem for Rawls' account of public reason. After posing this problem, I consider potential responses on behalf of Rawls' view, and I reply to those responses. The moral of this story, as I see it, is that the kind of duty an ideal of public reason aims to place on citizens must be more modest than Rawls supposes. (shrink)

There is a critical inconsistency in the literature on analogical retrieval. On the one hand, a vast set of laboratory studies has found that people often fail to retrieve past experiences that share deep relational commonalities, even when they would be useful for reasoning about a current problem. On the other hand, historical studies and naturalistic research show clear evidence of remindings based on deep relational commonalities. Here, we examine a possible explanation for this inconsistency—namely, that remindings based on relational (...) principles increase as a function of expertise. To test this claim, we devised a simple analogy‐generation task that can be administered across a wide range of expertise. We presented common events as the bases from which to generate analogies. Although the events themselves were unrelated to geoscience, we found that when the event was explainable in terms of a causal principle that is prominent in geoscience, expert geoscientists were likely to spontaneously produce analogies from geoscience that relied on the same principle. Further, for these examples, prompts to produce causal analogies increased their frequency among nonscientists and scientists from another domain, but not among expert geoscientists (whose spontaneous causal retrieval levels were already high). In contrast, when the example was best explained by a principle outside of geoscience, all groups required prompting to produce substantial numbers of analogies based on causal principles. Overall, this pattern suggests that the spontaneous use of causal principles is characteristic of experts. We suggest that expert scientists adopt habitual patterns of encoding according to the key relational principles in their domain, and that this contributes to their propensity to spontaneously retrieve relational matches. We discuss implications for the nature of expertise and for science instruction and assessment. (shrink)

Johnson and Hudecki argue that Bernard Suits fails to refute Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ view of games because Suits’s account of how games begin, how they are played, and the ends they involve, fails to match basic facts of player experience. In reply, the current paper describes three keys to interpreting The Grasshopper: (1) distinguishing the four perspectives from which Suits describes games, (2) recognizing Suits' dispositional view of rule following, and (3) understanding the geometrical metaphor Suits uses to describe rules. (...) In light of these, this paper argues that Johnson and Hudecki’s critiques are either mistaken or are actually affirmations of Suits' position. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis, as formalized by the free-energy principle, is ascendant in cognitive science. But, how does the Bayesian brain obtain prior beliefs? Veissière and colleagues argue that sociocultural interaction is one important source. We offer a complementary model in which “interoceptive self-inference” guides the estimation of expected uncertainty both in ourselves and in our social conspecifics.

In Speech Matters, Seana Shiffrin claims that certain lies should be tolerated on grounds of political inclusiveness. If political equality requires perfect compliance with fair terms of social cooperation, and if lying violates those terms, then liars might be at risk of losing their standing as political equals. To avoid that draconian result requires accommodation of moral imperfections, including some lies. In response, I argue that Shiffrin’s view may have broader implications for requirements of sincerity under non-ideal political conditions. In (...) some circumstances, where there is widespread defection from fair terms of cooperation, lying might be a moral but not a political wrong. (shrink)

Bernard Suits is commonly thought to have defined games as challenges. This paper argues that Suits could not have done so without ruining his larger philosophical project. It then argues that he did not do so. Suits defined game playing in quantitative terms (i.e. being more or less efficient) not qualitative ones (e.g. difficulty, struggle). The paper concludes by exploring the consequences of this shift in perspective.

This article investigates the analogy of the “laws of nature” through Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic naturalism (ON). Both thinkers challenge the literalist interpretation of scientific knowledge by emphasizing the indirect nature of relation and the primacy of the autonomy of discrete beings over pre-established physical laws. Harman’s OOO defends this autonomy as the irreducible independence of objects from their relations, while Simondon focuses on the modulation of information in shaping the laws of nature through individuation. (...) The article argues that while science remains the best recursive triangulation between logic and empirical evidence, its grasp of an ultimate, literal Truth is constricted by an epistemological relation to autonomous realities, grounded in analogy. Consequently, the laws of nature are considered as legislated by discrete autonomies, with space and time emerging from the things themselves. The article concludes by discussing the consequences of this reframing in light of the ancient conception of díkēkosmos (cosmic justice). (shrink)

A very liberal sexual ethics now holds sway in Western culture, such that mutual consent alone is widely seen as morally legitimizing almost any sexual activity between adults. It is further commonly assumed by both philosophers and nonphilosophers that arguing for some alternative to liberal sexual ethics requires appeal to ethical commands specific to some religious tradition or other. The purpose of this paper is to challenge that assumption by suggesting some purely naturalistic and independently-plausible premises that can be used (...) to argue for a much more conservative system of sexual ethics than is widely accepted today. (shrink)

The notion of ‘durability’ plays a central role in the discourse, policies, and practices surrounding forced displacement. Yet, for all the talk of ‘durable solutions’ to refugee situations, durability is in many ways the quality most conspicuously absent in refugees' everyday lives and living spaces. As the world has grown progressively more inured to the practice of using provisional spaces of transit as permanent sites of residence, displaced persons are increasingly finding themselves trapped in spaces marked by a kind of (...) permanent temporariness. In this article, I sketch three different ways in which living for long periods of time in temporary spaces can harm inhabitants: first, I argue that non-durability in the home can undermine cognitive function; second, that it can attenuate various forms of agency; and third, that it fails to furnish a ground on which refugees can build meaningful lives and futures for themselves. I conclude by arguing that the deprivation of durable living conditions is not only harmful, but wrongful. (shrink)

It is widely believed that AGI has the potential to be a wonderful tool that humans can use to meet our needs, solve our problems, and improve our lives. Against this view, we argue that any entity with truly general, human-level intelligence would have the capacity to lead its own life, with its own purposes and integrated hierarchy of goals. And thus any true AGI could not be merely a tool, even if it turned out to be extremely helpful for (...) human beings. If we are correct, there is a dilemma at the heart of the ambition to build AGI as a valuable tool. On the one hand, any mere tool that we might build would lack capacities essential to the kind of general intelligence exhibited by human beings; it would not be genuine AGI. On the other hand, were we to create genuine AGI, then what we would have created would not be a mere tool, but something more. In this paper, we make the case for this dilemma. In so doing, we illuminate the connections between a set of core ideas: intelligence, agency, tools, and life. (shrink)

The central claim of Aristotelian naturalism is that moral goodness is a kind of species-specific natural goodness. Aristotelian naturalism has recently enjoyed a resurgence in the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. However, any view that takes moral goodness to be a type of natural goodness faces a challenge: Granting that moral goodness is natural goodness for human beings, why should we care about being good human beings? Given that we are rational creatures who (...) can ‘step back’ from our nature, why should we see human nature as authoritative for us? This is the authority-of-nature challenge. In this essay, I state this challenge clearly, identify its deep motivation, and distinguish it from other criticisms of Aristotelian naturalism. I also articulate what I consider the best response, which I term the practical reason response. This response, however, exposes Aristotelian naturalism to a new criticism – that it has abandoned the naturalist claim that moral goodness is species-specific natural goodness. Thus, I argue, Aristotelian naturalists appear to face a dilemma: Either they cannot answer the authority-of-nature challenge, or in meeting the challenge they must abandon naturalism. Aristotelian naturalists might overcome this dilemma, but doing so is harder than some Aristotelians have supposed. In the final sections of the paper, I examine the difficulties in overcoming the dilemma, and I suggest ways that Aristotelians might answer the authority-of-nature challenge while preserving naturalism. (shrink)

This article argues that philosophers tend to employ a particular method in constructing their theories and critiquing their opponents. To substantiate this claim, the article examines the work of Nietzsche and Locke, the Empiricists and Rationalists, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, and Russell and Wittgenstein, showing how each relies on a method the article labels “revolution-through-return.” The method consists in identifying the authority behind your opponent's theory, then appealing to something “prior to” that authority, from which you then proceed to derive (...) your own theory. The article distinguishes between several senses of priority, argues that modern philosophers tend to rely on temporal priority, and discusses the questions in priority theory that need to be addressed in order evaluate and construct revolution-through-return arguments. (shrink)

John Locke's theory of toleration has been criticized as having little relevance for politics today because it rests on controversial theological foundations. Although there have been some recent attempts to develop secular; or publicly accessible, arguments out of Locke's writings, these tend to obscure and distort the religious arguments that Locke used to defend toleration. More importantly, these efforts ignore the role that religious arguments may play in supporting the development of a normative consensus on the legitimacy of liberal political (...) principles. Bracketing the search for publicly accessible justifications makes it possible to appreciate the continued relevance of Locke's religious arguments for toleration. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre's account of tradition-based rationality has been the subject of much discussion, as well as the object of some recent charges of inconsistency. The author considers arguments by Jennifer Herdt, Peter Mehl, and John Haldane which attempt to show that MacIntyre's account of rationality is, in some way, inconsistent. It is argued that the various charges of inconsistency brought against MacIntyre by these critics can be understood as variations on two general types of criticism: (1) that MacIntyre's account of (...) tradition-based rationality presents a picture of rationality with inconsistent internal elements, and (2) that MacIntyre, in the act of presenting his picture of rationality, makes the sort of claims to which his own account of rationality denies legitimacy, and thus MacIntyre's account is self-referentially incoherent. In response to criticisms of the first sort, it is argued that MacIntyre can further clarify or develop his position to take the current criticisms into account without altering the fundamental aspects of his picture of rationality. In response to the charge of self-referential incoherence, it is argued that the charge rests on a mistaken understanding of MacIntyre's position and of the nature of justification. In dealing with these arguments, the author hopes to not only vindicate MacIntyre's account of rationality against the charges of some of its recent critics, but also to shed some light on the nature of arguments both for and against relativism and historicism. (shrink)

This paper argues that grammatical constructions, specifically argument structure constructions that determine the “who did what to whom” part of sentence meaning and how this meaning is expressed syntactically, can be considered a kind of relational category. That is, grammatical constructions are represented as the abstraction of the syntactic and semantic relations of the exemplar utterances that are expressed in that construction, and it enables the generation of novel exemplars. To support this argument, I review evidence that there are parallel (...) behavioral patterns between how children learn relational categories generally and how they learn grammatical constructions specifically. Then, I discuss computational simulations of how grammatical constructions are abstracted from exemplar sentences using a domain-general relational cognitive architecture. Last, I review evidence from adult language processing that shows parallel behavioral patterns with expert behavior from other cognitive domains. After reviewing the evidence, I consider how to integrate this account with other theories of language development. (shrink)

What mechanisms underlie children’s language production? Structural priming—the repetition of sentence structure across utterances—is an important measure of the developing production system. We propose its mechanism in children is the same as may underlie analogical reasoning: structure-mapping. Under this view, structural priming is the result of making an analogy between utterances, such that children map semantic and syntactic structure from previous to future utterances. Because the ability to map relationally complex structures develops with age, younger children are less successful than (...) older children at mapping both semantic and syntactic relations. Consistent with this account, 4-year-old children showed priming only of semantic relations when surface similarity across utterances was limited, whereas 5-year-olds showed priming of both semantic and syntactic structure regardless of shared surface similarity. The priming of semantic structure without syntactic structure is uniquely predicted by the structure-mapping account because others have interpreted structural priming as a reflection of developing syntactic knowledge. (shrink)

Many contemporary eudaimonists emphasize the role of agency in the good life. Mark LeBar, for example, characterizes his own eudaimonist view this way: “It is agentist, not patientist, because it emphasizes that our lives go well in virtue of what we do, rather than what happens, to us or otherwise”. Nicholas Wolterstorff, however, has argued that this prioritizing of agency over patiency is a fatal flaw in eudaimonist accounts of well-being. Eudaimonism must be rejected, Wolterstorff argues, because many life-goods are (...) “passivities” that are out of a person’s hands, including how she is treated by others. In this paper, I defend eudaimonism against this passivities objection. I argue that eudaimonism can maintain its agentist character while also capturing the element of truth in the passivities objection—namely, that human well-being is vulnerable and social. I also argue that eudaimonists should avail themselves of the notion of receptivity to capture important aspects of the good life. (shrink)

What is the Problem with the Rarity of the Virtues?An important strand of the situationist challenge to Aristotelian virtue ethics rests on the following claim:Rarity Thesis: On the basis of evidence from psychological research, we are justified in believing that possession of the Aristotelian virtues is very rare.The Rarity Thesis is sometimes regarded as a problem for virtue ethics, or as an embarrassing implication of claims made by virtue ethicists.See John Doris, Lack of Character (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), (...) 58–60, 110–112; John Doris and Stephen Stich, “As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), see esp. 120–123. Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the purposes of this essay, I will use “virtue ethics” to refer to broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics. However, as many people have pointed out, Ari. (shrink)

This paper surveys some ways in which the chemical realm can be described and outlined in terms of the concept of supervenience. The particular contours of general chemical theory provide a ready basis for interpretation of determination, covariance, and nonreduction—the characteristic metaphysical facets of the supervenience relation—in mutual terms. Building on this, the extent to which chemically characterized properties and entities can be described in terms of a supervenience-scaffolded structure represents a particularly vivid application that philosophers in general interested in (...) supervenience would do well to attend to. In addition, the model of chemical supervenience given here can be used as a rubric on which to decide on issues already raised by philosophers of chemistry. (shrink)

This article grapples with Robert Brandom’s account of singular terms. I argue that neither Brandom’s answer to the question “What are singular terms?” nor his answer to the question “Why are there any singular terms?” works as they currently stand. Brandom’s substitution-inferential semantic account of what singular terms are fails to distinguish between the semantic role of singular terms and indefinite descriptions, and Brandom’s “expressive transcendental deduction” for why there are any singular terms fails to deciseively show that singular terms (...) are expressively necessary for the use of logical vocabulary. Still, I then characterize how Brandom does have resources within his substitution-inferential semantics to give a better, revised answer to the question “What are singular terms?” that both fits programmatically within his framework and has a curious Kantian parallel. I leave the matter offering a Brandom-friendly replacement account for why there are any singular terms thus conceived for another occasion. (shrink)