In these conversations with Simon Tabet, Zygmunt Bauman narrates important parts of his biographical and intellectual itineraries, from his formative years at the University of Warsaw to his Polish exile and final settlement in England, and how this influenced his sociological vision, as an ‘outsider’. Bauman considers some central concepts of his thought, his main sources of critical inspiration, and his position on such contemporary phenomena as the rise of populism and terrorism in Europe and the consequent relationship (...) between politics and insecurity. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology has known very divers receptions, depending on the intellectual contexts and periods of writing. Through a study of the prolific work of the author, this article aims at describing the different steps of this path, in order to grasp the process leading to such disparities. This analysis will try to explain the feeble reception of the thinker within the French intellectual sphere, as well as the several polemics engendered by his work in the English-speaking academic world. Lastly, (...) this article would like to partially define the form and status of what the author has called ‘liquid sociology’ in recent years. (shrink)

Algeria depends solely on publicly produced housing. Algeria’shousing industry has been lagging behind in its development. This has causedmany citizens to struggle with finding proper housing. Aside from being oneof the highest countries in terms of rent rates, construction and distribution ofpublic houses in Algeria takes more than 15 years of waiting. Despite that thequality of the housing is bad. This paper proposes Shari’ah-compliant housingcertificates, a new Islamic financial instrument that would assist in houseconstruction in Algeria. This instrument uses Istisnaʽ (...) as the underlying contractand accommodates guaranteed returns as well as negotiability for investors. Ithas great potential in contributing to solving the prolonged problem of housingin Algeria as well as countries facing problems in financing the construction ofhousing. (shrink)

I concentrate on difficulties met by Putnam's "internal" or "scientific" realism. They concern his attempt to reconcile pragmatism and realism. My line of argument is the following. A) By exploiting Putnam's argument against the "God's-eye view" and the Brains-in-a-Vat argument , it can be shown that the realism he is defending is either a too strong metaphysical realism or a too weak "residual" position. B) If it is a metaphysical position, then it contradicts Putnam's own views on GEV. C) If (...) it is a "residual" position, then in the context of a Theory of meaning for formal and natural languages, it is not more explicative than some forms of functionalism. The paper ends with an attempt to reconcile Putnam's pragmatism with a functionalist approach to epistemic features of "meaning," for the sake of a reconciliation between pragmatism and realism. (shrink)

What would it mean to apply quantum theory, without restriction and without involving any notion of measurement and state reduction, to the whole universe? What would realism about the quantum state then imply? This book brings together an illustrious team of philosophers and physicists to debate these questions. The contributors broadly agree on the need, or aspiration, for a realist theory that unites micro- and macro-worlds. But they disagree on what this implies. Some argue that if unitary quantum evolution has (...) unrestricted application, and if the quantum state is taken to be something physically real, then this universe emerges from the quantum state as one of countless others, constantly branching in time, all of which are real. The result, they argue, is many worlds quantum theory, also known as the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. No other realist interpretation of unitary quantum theory has ever been found. Others argue in reply that this picture of many worlds is in no sense inherent to quantum theory, or fails to make physical sense, or is scientifically inadequate. The stuff of these worlds, what they are made of, is never adequately explained, nor are the worlds precisely defined; ordinary ideas about time and identity over time are compromised; no satisfactory role or substitute for probability can be found in many worlds theories; they can't explain experimental data; anyway, there are attractive realist alternatives to many worlds. Twenty original essays, accompanied by commentaries and discussions, examine these claims and counterclaims in depth. They consider questions of ontology - the existence of worlds; probability - whether and how probability can be related to the branching structure of the quantum state; alternatives to many worlds - whether there are one-world realist interpretations of quantum theory that leave quantum dynamics unchanged; and open questions even given many worlds, including the multiverse concept as it has arisen elsewhere in modern cosmology. A comprehensive introduction lays out the main arguments of the book, which provides a state-of-the-art guide to many worlds quantum theory and its problems. (shrink)

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly taken to show that principles of this sort cannot be validated. To achieve this, we deny that rational agents update their credences (...) via conditionalization. We offer a new rule of update, Hyperconditionalization, which agrees with Conditionalization whenever nonmodal statements are at stake but differs for modal and conditional sentences. (shrink)

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...) principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of B-theoretic endurantism and a new account of the metaphysics of the quantum state, and highlights the parallels between the considerations that motivate them. These new accounts are both fragmentalist, in the sense that they follow Fine (2005) in invoking a symmetric coordination relation between facts, such that facts that are pairwise incompatible (like Hugh's being happy and Hugh's being sad) can both obtain provided that they are not related by this relation. (...) However, while Fine allows that fragments can be logically incoherent— P can obtain in one fragment while not-P obtains in another—the fragmentalist accounts defended here are motivated even if we insist on logical coherence between fragments. (shrink)

I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are (...) to be identified with pluralities of microphysical particles. Along the way I rebut the objections that pluralities of particles don’t display the right emergent, ‘lingering’, or modal properties to be good candidates for identification with higher-level objects. In the second argument I claim that microphysical manyism is uniquely able to capture a compelling and widespread physicalist intuition concerning the intimate nature of the relationship between higher-level, composite objects and the microphysical world. (shrink)

The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliche of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of (...) faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism--or is there another way? From Rousseau's politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Zizek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence. (shrink)

Climate change is projected to have very severe impacts on future generations. Given this, any adequate response to it has to consider the nature of our obligations to future generations. This paper seeks to do that and to relate this to the way that inter-generational justice is often framed by economic analyses of climate change. To do this the paper considers three kinds of considerations that, it has been argued, should guide the kinds of actions that one generation should take (...) if it is to treat both current and future people equitably. In particular it examines the case for what has been termed pure time discounting, growth discounting and opportunity cost discounting; and it assesses their implications for climate policy. It argues that none of these support the claims of those who think they give us reason to delay aggressive mitigation policies. It also finds, however, that the second kind of argument can, in certain circumstances, provide support for passing on some of the costs of mitigation to future generations. (shrink)

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing (...) our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework. (shrink)

You care about what others believe about you. What others believe about you determines whether you have a good reputation, whether you have the respect of your peers, and whether your friends genuinely like you. Your caring about others’ beliefs makes sense, because others’ beliefs bear directly upon your level of well-being. Your beliefs can influence others’ well-being, as much as their beliefs can influence yours. How your beliefs influence another’s well-being is a different matter from whether your beliefs are (...) supported by the evidence. Sometimes you can benefit another person by regulating your beliefs in response to considerations of her well-being, not of the evidence. Usually, you do not have strong reasons to regulate your beliefs in response to considerations of the interests of others. But it can be different when the person in question is your friend. Within some perfectly good friendships, the support that each friend provides for the other extends as far as their being willing to regulate their beliefs with the goal of benefiting the other, even if that makes it less likely that their beliefs will be supported by the evidence. Within our friendships, we then have reasons for belief that do not arise directly from, and sometimes compete with, reasons provided by evidence. This claim conflicts with the widespread Aristotelian view that good friendship is oriented to virtue. But it fits with a more plausible view about friendship, on which the function of friendship is to help us cope with the fact that we are not fully virtuous, and to serve needs that we have because we are not fully virtuous. (shrink)

How should we choose on behalf of groups of agents who violate expected utility theory by being risk averse or risk seeking? Unfortunately, we sometimes have to choose either acts that everyone disprefers or acts that are sure to turn out worse than another act. This observation is particularly troubling for risk-expected utility theorists: neither option sits comfortably with their view.

LLMs have dramatically improved in capabilities in recent years. This raises the question of whether LLMs could become genuine agents with beliefs and desires. This paper demonstrates an in principle limit to LLM agency, based on their architecture. LLMs are next word predictors: given a string of text, they calculate the probability that various words can come next. LLMs produce outputs that reflect these probabilities. I show that next word predictors are exploitable. If LLMs are prompted to make probabilistic predictions (...) about the world, these predictions are guaranteed to be incoherent, and so Dutch bookable. If LLMs are prompted to make choices over actions, their preferences are guaranteed to be intransitive, and so money pumpable. In short, the problem is that selecting an action based on its potential value is structurally different then selecting the description of an action that is most likely given a prompt: probability cannot be forced into the shape of expected value. The in principle exploitability of LLMs raises doubts about how agential they can become. This exploitability also offers an opportunity for humanity to safely control such AI systems. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced during (...) interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that there are principled as well as pragmatic reasons for compromise in politics, even within the context of reasonable moral disagreements such as the abortion controversy.

Mereological nihilists typically employ a paraphrase strategy in order to mitigate the apparent absurdity of their denial of the existence of composite objects. I argue here that the nihilist's paraphrase strategy is incomplete, because no schema for generating nihilistically acceptable paraphrases of sentences concerning material constitution has ever been given. Nor can an adequate schema be arrived at by generalising things that nihilists have already said. I fill this lacuna in the nihilist's account by developing and defending a novel paraphrase (...) schema that makes essential reference to the determinable‐determinate relation that holds between arrangement‐properties instantiated by the simples. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many (...) things are like this when you look closely enough. The problem arises for mundane things like rocks, houses and coins. It also arises for entities that present special philosophical challenges, like persons and experiencers. In this essay, I present a new argument that the problem of the many experiencers is an especially hard problem of the many, and property dualism—the view that properties that there is something it is like to instantiate are irreducible—may be the best way to solve it. (shrink)

While most large companies around the world now have a code of ethics, reported ethical malpractice among some of these does not appear to be abating. The reasons for this are explored, using academic studies, survey reports as well as insights gained from the Institute of Business Ethics' work with large corporations. These indicate that there is a gap between the existence of explicit ethical values and principles, often expressed in the form of a code, and the attitudes and behaviour (...) of the organisation. The paper suggests that two basic reasons appear to be at the heart of the problem: ineffective ethics programmes and deficiencies in corporate culture. The paper concludes that successfully embedded corporate ethical values requires well-designed ethics policies, sustained ethical leadership and incorporation of ethics in organisational processes and strategy as part of an ethical culture at all levels of the organisation. It makes some practical suggestions on how this can be achieved. (shrink)

I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves on standard alternative-semantic architectures that use point-wise composition to subvert islands, as well as on in situ approaches to indefinites more generally. Unlike grammars based on point-wise composition, scope-based alternative management is thoroughly categorematic, doesn’t under-generate readings when multiple sources of alternatives occur on an island, and is compatible with standard treatments of binding. (...) Unlike all in situ treatments of indefinites, relying on a true scope mechanism prevents over-generation when an operator binds into an indefinite. My account relies only on function application, some mechanism for scope-taking, and two freely-applying type-shifters: the first is Karttunen’s :3–44, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935) proto-question operator, aka Partee’s Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers, Foris, Dordrecht, 1986) IDENT, and the second can be factored out of extant approaches to the semantics of questions in the tradition of Karttunen. These type-shifters form a decomposition of LIFT, the familiar function mapping values into scope-takers. Exceptional scope of alternative-generating expressions arises via scopal pied-piping: indefinites take scope over their island, which then itself takes scope. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the shapelessnesss hypothesis, which is often referred to and relied on by certain sorts of ethical and evaluative cognitivist, and which they use primarily in arguing against a certain, influential form of noncognitivism. I aim to (i) set out exactly what the hypothesis is; (ii) show that its original and traditional use is left wanting; and (iii) show that there is some rehabilitation on offer that might have a chance of convincing neutrals.

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the second of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on probability. Branching processes are identified as chance processes, and the squares of branch amplitudes are chances. Since branching is emergent, physical probability is emergent as well.

We examine physicists’ charge of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism in the standard model of elementary particle physics. We argue that even though this charge never rested on a clear-cut and well-entrenched definition of “ad hoc”, it is based on conceptual and methodological assumptions and principles that are well-founded elements of the scientific practice of high-energy particle physics. We further evaluate the implications of the recent discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider for the charge (...) of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

Little is known about research misconduct within industry and how it compares to universities, even though a lot of biomedical research is performed by–or in collaboration with–commercial entities. Therefore, we sent an e-mail invitation to participate in an anonymous computer-based survey to all university researchers having received a biomedical research grant or scholarship from one of the two national academic research funders of Belgium between 2010 and 2014, and to researchers working in large biomedical companies or spin-offs in Belgium. The (...) validated survey included questions about various types of research misconduct committed by respondents themselves and observed among their colleagues in the last three years. Prevalences of misconduct were compared between university and industry respondents using binary logistic regression models, with adjustments for relevant personal characteristics, and with significance being accepted for p < 0.01. The survey was sent to 1766 people within universities and an estimated 255 people from industry. Response rates were 43 and 48%, and usable information was available for 617 and 100 respondents, respectively. In general, research misconduct was less likely to be reported by industry respondents compared to university respondents. Significant differences were apparent for one admitted action and three observed actions, always with lower prevalences for industry compared to universities, except for plagiarism. This survey, based on anonymous self-report, shows that research misconduct occurs to a substantial degree among biomedical researchers from both industry and universities. (shrink)

A key question of the ‘maverick’ tradition of the philosophy of mathematical practice is addressed, namely what is mathematical progress. The investigation is based on an article by Penelope Maddy devoted to this topic in which she considers only contributions ‘of some mathematical importance’ as progress. With the help of a case study from contemporary mathematics, more precisely from tropical geometry, a few issues with her proposal are identified. Taking these issues into consideration, an alternative account of ‘mathematical importance’, broadly (...) within the framework of progress Maddy offers, is developed with a special focus on mathematicians’ peer-review practice. (shrink)

We study the handicap principle in terms of the Sir Philip Sidney game. The handicap principle asserts that cost is required to allow for honest signalling in the face of conflicts of interest. We show that the significance of the handicap principle can be challenged from two new directions. Firstly, both the costly signalling equilibrium and certain states of no communication are stable under the replicator dynamics ; however, the latter states are more likely in cases where honest signalling should (...) apply. Secondly, we prove the existence and stability of polymorphisms where players mix between being honest and being deceptive and where signalling costs can be very low. Neither the polymorphisms nor the states of no communication are evolutionarily stable, but they turn out to be more important for standard evolutionary dynamics than the costly signalling equilibrium. (shrink)

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the first of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on structure, with particular attention to the role of decoherence theory. Written in terms of the quantum histories formalism, decoherence theory just is the theory of branching structure, in Everett's sense.

Gopal Sreenivasan’s “hybrid theory” states that a moral duty is directed toward an individual because her interests justify the assignment of control over the duty. An alternative “plain theory” states that the individual’s interests justify the duty itself. I argue that a strong moral status constraint explains Sreenivasan’s instrumentalization objection to a Razian plain theory but that his own model violates this constraint. I suggest how both approaches can be reformulated to satisfy the constraint, and I argue that a reformulated (...) plain theory can also avoid an insufficiency objection. The hybrid approach consequently has no clear advantage over the plain approach. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation between something and what it is made of. Composition is the relation between something and its parts. I examine three different approaches to the relation between constitution and composition. One approach, associated with neo-Aristotelians like Mark Johnston and Kathrin Koslicki, identifies constitution with composition. A second, popular with those sympathetic to classical mereology such as Judith Thomson, defines constitution in terms of parthood. A third, advocated strongly by Lynne Baker, takes constitution to be somehow inconsistent with (...) relations of parthood. All of these approaches, I argue, face serious problems. I conclude, tentatively, that constitution and composition have nothing to do with each other. (shrink)

Memes, of the kind found often on the internet, are an increasingly significant medium of expressive activity. I develop a theory of their ontological nature and, in parallel, an analysis of the concept meme. On my view, memes are abstract artifacts made out of norms for production of instances. The norms say things like ‘use a certain image; add text of a certain kind; the text should be delivered in two chunks, one at the top of the image, one at (...) the bottom, etc.’ Instances of these memes are created when users follow these norms and publish the results. The concept meme is analyzed in terms of the notion of memographic practice, a historically situated form of activity within which memes are created and their instances produced and made public. (shrink)

Based on two qualitative case studies undertaken in Switzerland, this article compares the positioning of Climate Strike activists and construction workers on questions of climate change, so as to analyse the impact of work practices on environmental orientations. Building on a praxeological approach, the article argues that communities of practice in workplaces and educational institutions influence environmental orientations. Everyday practice in schools and universities fosters the scientific environmental knowledge that is central to the orientations of climate activists. By contrast, the (...) practice of construction workers inculcates an embodied environmental knowledge which accompanies an orientation that takes environmental problems as not primarily a question of conservation, but rather as inherently linked to workplace matters. By way of conclusion, the article argues for an expanded notion of environmental concerns, beyond the acceptance of scientific facts on ecological crisis and towards embracing the embodied environmental knowledge more broadly prevalent among manual workers. (shrink)

Over the past few years the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate and modafinil among the student population has attracted considerable debate in the pages of bioethics journals. Under the rubric of cognitive enhancement, bioethicists have discussed this use of stimulants—along with future technologies of enhancement—and have launched a sometimes forceful debate of such practices. In the following paper, it is argued that even if we focus solely upon current practices, the term cognitive enhancement encompasses a wide range of ethical (...) considerations that can usefully be addressed without the need for speculation. In taking this position it is suggested that we divide cognitive enhancement into a series of empirically-constructed frameworks—medical risks and benefits, self-medication and under-prescription, prescription drug abuse and over-medication, and finally, the intention to cognitively enhance. These are not mutually exclusive frameworks, but provide a way in which to identify the scope of the issue at hand and particular ethical and medical questions that may be relevant to enhancement. By a process of elimination it is suggested that we can indeed talk of cognitive enhancement as an observable set of practices. However, in doing so we should be aware of how academic commentaries and discussion may be seen as both capturing reality and reifying cognitive enhancement as an entity. (shrink)