As Vetter says, we are at the “beginning of the debate, not the end” (2015: 300) when it comes to evaluating her potentiality-based account of metaphysical modality. This paper contributes to this developing debate by highlighting three problems for Vetter’s account. Specifically, I begin (§1) by articulating some relevant details of Vetter’s potentiality-based view. This leads to the first issue (§2), concerning unclarity in the idea of degrees of potentiality. Similarly, the second issue (§3) raises trouble for Vetter’s proposed individuation (...) conditions for potentialities. Finally, the third issue (§4) is about apparently unmanifestable intrinsic potentialities, and suggests that there might be some deeper problems with anchoring metaphysical possibilities in concrete objects. More generally, though the issues detailed here are problematic, I do not take them to be fatal. However, they do show that, at minimum, further clarification of Vetter’s potentiality view is required. As Vetter says, we are at the “beginning of the debate, not the end” (2015: 300) when it comes to evaluating her potentiality-based account of metaphysical modality. This paper contributes to this developing debate by highlighting three problems for Vetter’s account. Specifically, I begin (§1) by articulating some relevant details of Vetter’s potentiality-based view. This leads to the first issue (§2), concerning unclarity in the idea of degrees of potentiality. Similarly, the second issue (§3) raises trouble for Vetter’s proposed individuation conditions for potentialities. Finally, the third issue (§4) is about apparently unmanifestable intrinsic potentialities, and suggests that there might be some deeper problems with anchoring metaphysical possibilities in concrete objects. More generally, though the issues detailed here are problematic, I do not take them to be fatal. However, they do show that, at minimum, further clarification of Vetter’s potentiality view is required. (shrink)

Are the objects and events that take place in Virtual Reality genuinely real? Those who answer this question in the affirmative are realists, and those who answer in the negative are irrealists. In this paper we argue against the realist position, as given by Chalmers (2017), and present our own preferred irrealist account of the virtual. We start by disambiguating two potential versions of the realist position—weak and strong— and then go on to argue that neither is plausible. We then (...) introduce a Waltonian variety of ictionalism about the virtual, arguing that this sort of irrealist approach avoids the problems of the realist positions, fits with a unifying theory of representational works, and offers a better account of the phenomenology of engaging in virtual experiences. (shrink)

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter‐examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are ‘fundamentally misguided’. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter‐examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness (...) restriction, I proceed to show how the resulting sparse modalism circumvents Fine's original counter‐examples. After dismissing a potential problem concerning the membership relation, I conclude that, as at least one form of modalism is viable, the project of understanding essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is not so fundamentally misguided after all. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of the reductive-essence-first view, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally (...) ‘loaded’—that together strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

We offer an original argument for the existence of universal fictions—that is, fictions within which every possible proposition is true. Specifically, we detail a trio of such fictions, along with an easy-to-follow recipe for generating more. After exploring several consequences and dismissing some objections, we conclude that fiction, unlike reality, is unlimited when it comes to truth.

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...) I all wanting to be modalists, but disagreeing on the details. As such, while my primary aim is to show what’s wrong with this trio, the secondary aim is demonstrating how what’s right about them in fact pushes one towards my own sparse modalist account. So while the primary conclusion of this paper is negative, the secondary, positive, conclusion is that modalists shouldn’t give up hope – plausible responses to Fine are still out there. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of thereductive-essence-firstview, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally ‘loaded’—that together (...) strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

The past decade and a half has seen an absolute explosion of literature discussing the structure of reality. One particular focus here has been on the fundamental. However, while there has been extensive discussion, numerous fundamental questions about fundamentality have not been touched upon. In this chapter, I focus on one such lacuna about the modal strength of fundamentality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis - that is, the idea that the fundamentalia are only contingently (...) fundamental (or, in property-terms, that the property of being fundamental is not a (weakly) necessary property). And while I think this thesis is plausible – indeed, I show here that it lurks in the unexamined shadows/assumptions of some fairly prominent positions – as far as I can tell, nothing has been said either for or against it. Here, I hope to fix this by giving the thesis a proper airing. In this way, this chapter represents a first-pass at exploring not only the modal status of fundamentality, but also offers a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality. (shrink)

Bare particularism is a constituent ontology according to which substances—concrete, particular objects like people, tables, and tomatoes—are complex entities constituted by their properties and their bare particulars. Yet, aside from this description, much about bare particularism is fundamentally unclear. In this paper, I attempt to clarify this muddle by elucidating the key metaphysical commitments underpinning any plausible formulation of the position. So the aim here is primarily catechismal rather than evangelical—I don’t intend to convert anyone to bare particularism, but, by (...) looking at a series of questions, to instead specify what, if one is a bare particularist, one is committed to. Along the way, I address three major objections: a classic objection about whether bare particulars have properties, a new objection raised by Bailey, and an understanding objection that questions some of the position’s resources. (shrink)

In this paper, we make a case for the disjunctive view of phenomenal consciousness: consciousness is essentially disjunctive in being either physical or non-physical in the sense that it has both physical and non-physical possible instances. We motivate this view by showing that it undermines two well-known conceivability arguments in philosophy of mind: the zombie argument for anti-physicalism, and the anti-zombie argument for physicalism. By appealing to the disjunctive view, we argue that two hitherto unquestioned premises of these arguments are (...) false. Furthermore, making use of the resources of this view, we formulate distinct forms of both physicalism and anti-physicalism. On these formulations, it is easy to see how physicalists and anti-physicalists can accommodate the modal intuitions of their opponents regarding zombies and anti-zombies. We conclude that these formulations of physicalism and anti-physicalism are superior to their more traditional counterparts. (shrink)

General consensus has it that contingencies lack the requisite modal umph to serve as explanations for the modal status of necessities. The central aim of this paper is to show that this received opinion is incorrect: contingent necessity-makers are in fact possible. To do so, I identify certain conditions the satisfaction of which entail the possibility of contingent necessity-makers. I then argue for two broad instances where these conditions are satisfied. Consequently, the associated necessities in fact have contingent necessity-makers.

How can you steal something that doesn’t exist? This question confronts those of us who take an irrealist view of virtual objects and agree with the Supreme Court of the Netherlands that robbery took place when two boys used non-virtual violence to coerce a third boy into relinquishing his virtual amulet and mask. Here we outline this Puzzle of Virtual Theft, along with the closely related Puzzle of Virtual Value. After demonstrating how these puzzles are deeply problematic for the irrealist, (...) we go on to sketch a solution that not only circumscribes the puzzles but also offers a framework by which legal scholars can make sense within existing legal codes of the new phenomenon of virtual theft. (shrink)

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow is it that we can rationally assert that sport outcomes do not really matter, while also seeming to care about them to an absurd degree? This is the so-called puzzle of sport. The broadly Waltonian solution to the puzzle has it that we make-believe the outcomes matter. Recently, Stear has critiqued this Waltonian solution, raising a series of five objections. He has also leveraged these objections to motive his own contextualist solution to the puzzle. The aim of this paper (...) is to defend the Waltonian solution. The general upshot is that, contra Stear, a make-believe based solution to the puzzle is viable after all. (shrink)

Many have offered moral objections to video games, with various critics contending that they depict and promote morally dubious attitudes and behaviour. However, few have offered moral arguments in favour of video games. In this chapter, we develop one such positive moral argument. Specifically, we argue that video games offer one of the only morally acceptable methods for acquiring some ethical knowledge. Consequently, we have (defeasible) moral reasons for creating, distributing, and playing certain morally educating video games.

Recently, Xhignesse has argued that the principle of poetic licence, which roughly states that any class of propositions is true in some possible fiction, ought to be rejected. Here, we defend PPL from Xhignesse’s objection by demonstrating that, properly understood, his purported counter-example case is either irrelevant or unproblematic. The upshot is that Xhignesse has given us no reason to reject PPL.

ABSTRACTAccording to Bernard Suits, people in Utopia would spend their time playing games and would not spend any time creating or engaging with artworks. Here, we argue against this claim. We do s...

The aim of this chapter is broadly exploratory: we want to better understand online affective manipulation and what, if anything, is morally problematic about it. To do so, we begin by pulling apart various forms of online affective manipulation. We then proceed to discuss why online affective manipulation is properly categorized as manipulative, as well as what is wrong with (online) manipulation more generally. Building on this, we next argue that, at its most extreme, online affective manipulation constitutes a novel (...) form of affective injustice that we call affective powerlessness. To demonstrate this, we introduce the notions of affective injustice and affective powerlessness and show how several forms of online affective manipulation leave users in this state. The upshot is that this chapter gives us a better grip on the nature of online affective manipulation, as well some tools to help us understand when and why it is morally problematic. (shrink)

While recent history has seen significant debate concerning the nature and extension of essence, comparatively little attention has been paid to the epistemology of essence. This is strange, as, plausibly, what answers we give to the metaphysical questions about essence will (or should) be partially constrained by our essence epistemology. Here, I aim to go some way towards filling this lacuna. In particular, I here argue that there is no plausible epistemic story available for non-modal accounts of essence. In particular, (...) existing accounts of essence epistemology cannot explain how we are able to know that something is genuinely essential, rather than merely necessary. One consequence is that modal accounts of essence – which only needs to supply an epistemology for a non-hyperintensional notion – look that much more plausible. (shrink)

Lange has argued that contingencies lack the modal strength to be necessity-makers. Here, I argue that Lange’s case turns upon a faulty premise, and that there is no obvious fixes he might pursue. The general upshot is that his argument gives us no reason to think that contingencies could not be necessity-makers after all.

Emotions play an important role in both sport and games, from the pride and joy of victory, the misery and shame of defeat, and the anger and anxiety felt along the way. This volume brings together experts in the philosophy of sport and games and experts in the philosophy of emotion to investigate this important area of research. The book discusses the role of the emotions for both participants and spectators of sports and games, including detailed discussions of suffering, shame, (...) anger, anxiety, misery and hatred. It also investigates the issues of collective emotions in relation to sport such as the shared joy of a football crowd when their team scores a goal. In addition, this volume examines the role of pretence and make believe in emotional reactions to sport. In so doing, it makes important contributions both to the philosophy of sport and to the philosophy of emotions, which will be of interest to researchers and students in both fields. (shrink)

Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. (...) In particular, we contend that the principle has plausible counterexamples, resulting from the fact that some mental states are not fully grounded by goings on ‘in our heads’ but also require external factors to be included in their full grounds. We draw the sceptical conclusion that it remains unclear whether non-reductive physicalists can plausibly respond to the exclusion argument by appealing to considerations of grounding. (shrink)

This brief note critically assesses the central arguments in Morato’s recent contribution to the growing literature on Blackburn’s dilemma about necessity. In particular, I demonstrate that neither of Morato’s two novel reconstructions of the dilemma’s contingency horn succeed, since both turn on false premises; and, Morato fails to adequately motivate his own response to these reconstructions. The upshot is that Morato has set himself a pair of flawed problems, then offered a flawed solution.

The meanings of words seem to change over time. But while there is a growing body of literature in linguistics and philosophy about meaning change, there has been little discussion about the metaphysical underpinnings of meaning change. The central aim of this paper is to push this discussion forward by surveying the terrain and advocating for a particular metaphysical picture. In so doing, we hope to clarify various aspects of the nature of meaning change, as well as prompt future philosophical (...) investigation into this topic. More specifically, this paper has two parts. The first, broadly exploratory, part surveys various metaphysical accounts of meaning change. The goal here is to lay out the terrain, thereby highlighting some key choice points. Then, in the second part, after critiquing Prosser’s (Philosophy Phenomenol Res 100(3):657–676, 2020) exdurantism about ‘mental files’, we sketch and defend the enduring senses view of meaning change. (shrink)

Here, we focus on the underexplored fictional relevance of videogame glitches. For this purpose, we will make use philosophical theories on fiction, as well as standard suggestions about how best to deal with unintended errors within fiction. Focusing on glitches like that of Red Dead Redemption’s "manimals", we argue that glitches, more than any kinds of mistakes in traditional, non-interactive fictions, can actually have a significant influence on the fictional worlds of the work in which they appear. In particular, we (...) will show that some glitches generate new fictional content without this content being intended by a videogame’s creators, and will offer practical ways for dealing with the inconsistencies that inevitably accompany such glitch-generated fictions. (shrink)

The “somewhat vague, intuitive” notion from computability theory of an effective procedure (method) or algorithm can be fairly precisely defined even if it is not sufficiently formal and precise to belong to mathematics proper (in a narrow sense)—and even if (as many have asserted) for that reason the Church–Turing thesis is unprovable. It is proved logically that the class of effective procedures is not decidable, i.e., that no effective procedure is possible for ascertaining whether a given procedure is effective. This (...) undecidability result is proved directly from the notion itself of an effective procedure, without reliance on any (partly) mathematical lemma, conjecture, or thesis invoking recursiveness or Turing-computability. In fact, there is no reliance on anything very mathematical. The proof does not even appeal to a precise definition of ‘effective procedure’. Instead, it relies solely and entirely on a basic grasp of the intuitive notion of an effective procedure. Though the result that effectiveness is undecidable is not surprising, it is also not without significance. It has the consequence, for example, that the solution to a decision problem, if it is to be complete, must be accompanied by a separate argument that the proposed ascertainment procedure invariably terminates with the correct verdict. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices:The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and HeartWesley J. WildmanBrains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors can be diagnosed (...) and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.The term "error" is a potentially problematic one in that it misleadingly suggests that there might be a uniquely correct way in which cognition should work. I do not wish to suggest such a binary opposition. After all, biases exist in the human cognitive system either because they have been selected in the evolutionary process for their survival benefits or because they are side effects of other traits selected for their usefulness. My concern is with the wondrous human discovery that we can analyze [End Page 61] our behaviors and beliefs with such precision that we can sometimes detect when our cognitive biases produce mistaken beliefs and self-defeating behaviors. This forms the basis for my contention that cognition can often work better than it does—more accurately, less self-destructively—when tendencies to cognitive error are diagnosed, corrected, and perhaps even systematically resisted.The profound irony here is that the very same social groups (secular and religious) with an obvious vested interest in resisting such enlightenment in some respects can also promote processes of discernment and insight in other respects. Existing literature in the cognitive psychology of religion rarely bothers with such subtleties. It is common to assume that simply to notice the operation of cognitive biases in religion—say, in supporting belief in supernatural entities who providentially interact in human affairs, or in establishing and reinforcing people's willingness to defer to certain kinds of religious authority—is at the same time to establish the presence of rampant cognitive error, massive resistance to diagnosing and correcting it, and thus the infliction of pernicious cruelties on young children who have no way of escaping the resulting irrational indoctrination.This moral reflex to condemn religious groups because of their characteristic reluctance to acknowledge the role of cognitive biases in their beliefs and practices is understandable given the irrationality, ignorance, or denial that such reluctance suggests. I frankly acknowledge that I share this moral concern. But the actual complexities of religious practice demonstrate that the situation demands a subtler evaluation. Resistance to awareness of cognitive biases exists both inside and outside religious groups; economic and political practices in all eras and of all types have every bit as much to gain from neglecting to enlighten people about their cognitive operations as religious groups do—just consider the techniques employed in commercial advertising and political campaigns. Moreover, religious groups also promote methods of discernment and self-awareness that have historically been, and continue to be, the dominant method by which... (shrink)

Changing our minds isn't easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? -/- Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry was to understand (...) how our beliefs are often distorted by prejudice and self-interest, and to improve the foundations of human knowledge. Ballantyne seeks to recover and modernize this classical tradition by vigorously defending an interdisciplinary approach to epistemology, blending philosophical theorizing with insights from the social and cognitive sciences. -/- Many of us need tools to help us think more circumspectly about our controversial views. Ballantyne develops a method for distinguishing between our reasonable and unreasonable opinions, in light of evidence about bias, information overload, and rival experts. This method guides us to greater intellectual openness--in the spirit of skeptics from Socrates to Montaigne to Bertrand Russell--making us more inclined to admit that sometimes we don't have the right answers. With vibrant prose and fascinating examples from science and history, Ballantyne shows how epistemology can help us know our limits. (shrink)

Alonzo Church famously provided three principal competing criteria for “strict synonymy,” i.e., sameness of semantic content. These are his Alternatives (0), (1), and (2)—numbered in order of increasing course-grainedness of content. On Alternative (2), expressions are deemed strictly synonymous iff they are logically equivalent. This criterion seems hopeless as an account of the objects of propositional attitude. On Alternative (1), expressions are deemed synonymous iff they are λ-convertible. Alternative (1) also evidently conflicts with discourse about the attitudes. On Alternative (0), (...) expressions are deemed strictly synonymous iff they are “synonymously isomorphic” in Church’s sense. On Alternative (0), semantic content is so fine-grained that not even “Romeo loves Juliet” and “Juliet is loved by Romeo” qualify as strictly synonymous. A fourth alternative, here called “Alternative (3),” deems expressions strictly synonymous iff they are co-intensional, i.e., they have the same semantic extension with respect to the same possible worlds. This criterion’s notion of content is even more course grained than that of Alternative (2). Several objections to Alternative (3) are considered. (This article is contained within the author’s more definitive essay, “Singular Concepts”.). (shrink)

Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing is ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognizing this will require us to be more intellectually modest.

Some rules seem more important than others. The moral rule to keep promises seems more important than the aesthetic rule not to wear brown with black or the pool rule not to scratch on the eight ball. A worrying number of metaethicists are increasingly tempted to explain this difference by appealing to something they call “authoritative normativity” – it’s because moral rules are “authoritatively normatively” that they are especially important. The authors of this chapter argue for three claims concerning “authoritative (...) normativity”: (1) that motivation for it originates in a parochial conception of “normative flavours”; (2) that arguments against alternative ways of explaining e.g., morality’s importance are overblown; and (3) that there are strong reasons against theorizing in terms of “authoritative normativity”. The overarching aim is not to show that “authoritative normativity” is incoherent or entirely unmotivated. Rather, it is to discuss some of “authoritative normativity’s” deeper commitments to correct the impression that is it largely benign or that it is entailed by familiar and popular “metanormative” positions. Authoritative normativity, it seems to us, is a solution in search of a problem. (shrink)

A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...) waking, and which is relevant to the conditional chance of heads: de re acquaintance with the awakening itself and the non-locating knowledge that it is an experimental awakening. David Lewis and company are committed to several unjustifiable and unacceptable probability assessments. Previous commentators have in effect confused the information that Beauty undergoes this particular experimental awakening for the information that she undergoes some experimental awakening or other. Lewis in particular thereby illegitimately tips the scales both in favor of heads and in favor of Monday. The Sleeping Beauty Problem is equivalent to a ball-in-urn word problem in elementary probability theory. (shrink)

Two theses figure centrally in work on the epistemology of disagreement: Equal Weight (‘EW’) and Uniqueness (‘U’). According to EW, you should give precisely as much weight to the attitude of a disagreeing epistemic peer as you give to your own attitude. U has it that, for any given proposition and total body of evidence, some doxastic attitude is the one the evidence makes rational (justifies) toward that proposition. Although EW has received considerable discussion, the case for U has not (...) been critically evaluated. Endorsing U, we argue, commits one to the highly controversial thesis that whatever fixes your rational attitudes can do so only by fixing what evidence you have. This commitment imposes a relatively demanding requirement on justified belief in U, one that we argue is not satisfied by what is currently the strongest available case for U, due to Roger White [2005]. Our challenge to U makes more trouble for its proponents than do the worries about U expressed by Gideon Rosen [2001] and Thomas Kelly [2010]. Moreover, if Kelly [2010] is correct in thinking that EW “carries with it a commitment to” U—a claim which we accept for reasons similar to Kelly’s but is beyond this paper’s scope (but see Ballantyne and Coffman [forthcoming])—then our challenge to U bears importantly on EW: to the extent that our challenge to U succeeds, EW also suffers. (shrink)

This is a non-technical version of "The Decision Problem for Effective Procedures." The “somewhat vague, intuitive” notion from computability theory of an effective procedure (method) or algorithm can be fairly precisely defined, even if it does not have a purely mathematical definition—and even if (as many have asserted) for that reason, the Church–Turing thesis (that the effectively calculable functions on natural numbers are exactly the general recursive functions), cannot be proved. However, it is logically provable from the notion of an (...) effective procedure--without reliance on any (partially) mathematical thesis or conjecture concerning effective procedures, such as the Church–Turing thesis--that the class of effective procedures is undecidable, i.e., that no effective procedure is possible for ascertaining whether a given procedure is effective. The proof does not appeal to a precise definition of ‘effective procedure’. Instead, it relies solely and entirely on a basic grasp of the intuitive notion of such a procedure. Though this undecidability result itself is not surprising, it is also not without significance. It has the consequence, for example, that the solution to a decision problem, if it is to be complete, must be accompanied by a separate argument that the proposed ascertainment procedure is, in fact, a decision procedure, i.e., effective—for example, that it invariably terminates with the correct verdict. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that it is always intrinsically good when people get what they deserve and that there is always at least some reason to give people what they deserve. I highlight problems with this view and defend an alternative. I have two aims. First, I want to expose a gap in certain desert-based justifications of punishment. Second, I want to show that those of us who have intuitions at odds with these justifications have an alternative account of desert at (...) our disposal – one that may lend our intuitions more credibility. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

This uniquely inspirational and practical book explores human simulation, which is the application of computational modeling and simulation to research subjects in the humanities disciplines. It delves into the fascinating process of collaboration among experts who usually don’t have much to do with one another – computer engineers and humanities scholars – from the perspective of the humanities scholars. It also explains the process of developing models and simulations in these interdisciplinary teams. Each chapter takes the reader on a journey, (...) presenting a specific theory about the human condition, a model of that theory, discussion of its implementation, analysis of its results, and an account of the collaborative experience. Contributing authors with different fields of expertise share how each model was validated, discuss relevant datasets, explain development strategies, and frankly discuss the ups and downs of the process of collaborative development. Readers are given access to the models and will also gain new perspectives from the authors’ findings, experiences, and recommendations. Today we are in the early phases of an information revolution, combining access to vast computing resources, large amounts of human data through social media, and an unprecedented richness of methods and tools to capture, analyze, explore, and test hypotheses and theories of all kinds. Thus, this book’s insights will be valuable not only to students and scholars of humanities subjects, but also to the general reader and researchers from other disciplines who are intrigued by the expansion of the information revolution all the way into the humanities departments of modern universities. (shrink)

In the immediate post-war period, a set of thinkers, most notably Jacques Maritain, developed influential natural law theories of constitutional democracy. The central tenet of the natural law approach to the post-war settlement was that, without the type of foundational understanding of the constitutional system it was proposing, the new democratic political institutions would relapse into totalitarianism. In response to this natural law challenge, Hans Kelsen sought to explicate and defend a self-consciously secular and relativistic understanding of the basis of (...) constitutional democracy. This article will examine the debate between the Kelsenian and the natural law view of constitutional democracy. The debate raises questions of foundational importance, and a number of issues are of particular concern in the present global context. These issues concern the role of moral pluralism and its relevance to the structure of constitutional democracy, and the relationship between universal values and the common good of particular communities. (shrink)