This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. (...) The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S wants p'. Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown's (2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren't best by the subject's lights. That is, being best isn't necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.

This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...) to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way we explore the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)

The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire (...) fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides an elegant account of our contrasts and yields a promising analysis of hoping. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the truth-conditions of de re attitude reports, little attention has been paid to certain ‘ultra-liberal’ uses of those reports. We believe that if these uses are legitimate, then a number of interesting consequences for various theses in philosophical semantics follow. The majority of the paper involves describing these consequences. In short, we argue that, if true, ultra-liberal reports: bring counterexamples to a popular approach to de re attitude ascriptions, which we will call ‘descriptivism’; and (...) combine with independently plausible principles about the logic of belief to imply that subjects can achieve omniscience about what exists from the armchair. Although we are not committed to the view that ultra-liberal reports are false, in the final part of the paper we discuss the prospects of pursuing a line according to which the acceptability of such reports ought not be taken at face value. We conclude by arguing that those who are sympathetic with this move might have reason to doubt the truth of an even broader class of acceptable de re attitude reports, namely those that have been taken to undermine orthodox accounts of de re attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

Several theorists have observed that attitude reports have what we call “revisionist” uses. For example, even if Pete has never met Ann and has no idea that she exists, Jane can still say to Jim ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis in ten lessons’ if Pete believes all 6-year-olds can learn to play tennis in ten lessons and it is part of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge that Ann is a 6-year-old. Jane’s assertion seems acceptable because the claim (...) she reports Pete as believing is entailed by Pete’s beliefs if they are revised in light of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge. We provide a semantic theory of revisionist reports based on this idea. We observe that the admissible “revisions” are limited in a striking way. Jane cannot say ‘Pete thinks Ann is a 6-year-old and can play tennis in ten lessons’ in the same context that she can say ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis ten lessons’, even though this too follows from Jane and Jim’s background knowledge together with what Pete believes. Our theory predicts the infelicity of these latter reports. It also has the resources to predict the truth of “exported” attitude reports and casts the relationship between these reports and “singular thought” in a new light. We conclude by discussing how revisionist reports make trouble for a simplistic view of the connection between the relations expressed by attitude verbs in natural language and the relations of most interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

The Ideal Worlds Account of Desire says that S wants p just in case all of S’s most highly preferred doxastic possibilities make p true. The account predicts that a desire report ⌜S wants p⌝ should be true so long as there is some doxastic p-possibility that is most preferred. But we present a novel argument showing that this prediction is incorrect. More positively, we take our examples to support alternative analyses of desire, and close by briefly considering what our (...) cases suggest about the logic of desire. (shrink)

In order to handle presuppositions in the scope of attitude verbs, the binding theory allows presuppositions triggered in a subject's beliefs to be bound at the matrix level; and it allows presuppositions triggered in non-doxastic attitudes to be bound in the subject's beliefs (Geurts, 1999; Maier, 2015). However, we argue that this leads to serious overgeneration, for example it predicts that the unacceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that she won't and that only Sue will (...) come to the party' should be equivalent to the acceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that nobody will come to the party'. This is because the presupposition triggered by `only Sue will come to the party' should be able to be bound at the matrix level. We discuss some responses to this problem, but argue that they all have shortcomings. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...) to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions (...) are evaluated relative to a contextually supplied set of propositions, or alternatives. The semantic value of an ascription ‘S wants p’ is determined by S's preference ordering over these alternatives. Second, we propose that desire reports carry a requirement to the effect that the prejacent of the ascription must be suitably related to the background set of alternatives. Finally, we suggest that desire reports carry a dominance condition concerning the subject's ranking of the alternatives. Overall, we argue that our theory provides us with an elegant resolution of our puzzles, and yields a promising approach to desire. (shrink)

One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Schlenker, 2009; Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. `all', `both', etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of (...) subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b), e.g. the fact that sentences such as `All of the two presidential candidates are crooked' are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called "explanatory problem" for dynamic semantics (Soames, 1982; Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009). (shrink)

Schlenker (Semant Pragmat 2(3):1–78, 2009; Philos Stud 151(1):115–142, 2010a; Mind 119(474):377–391, 2010b) provides an algorithm for deriving the presupposition projection properties of an expression from that expression’s classical semantics. In this paper, we consider the predictions of Schlenker’s algorithm as applied to attitude verbs. More specifically, we compare Schlenker’s theory with a prominent view which maintains that attitudes exhibit belief projection, so that presupposition triggers in their scope imply that the attitude holder believes the presupposition (Karttunen in Theor Linguist 34(1):181, (...) 1974; Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Sudo in The art and craft of semantics: a festschrift for Irene Heim, MIT Press, 2014). We show that Schlenker’s theory does not predict belief projection, and discuss several consequences of this result. (shrink)

Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a positive analysis, (...) and show that this proposal provides a satisfying account of our intuitions. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw attention to comparative preference claims, i.e. sentences of the form \S prefers p to q\. I show that preference claims exhibit interesting patterns, and try to develop a semantics that captures them. Then I use my account of preference to provide an analysis of desire. The resulting entry for desire ascriptions is independently motivated, and finds support from a wide range of phenomena.

In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target (...) contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005). (shrink)

This paper is about conjunctions and disjunctions in the scope of non-doxastic atti- tude verbs. These constructions generate a certain type of ignorance implicature. I argue that the best way to account for these implicatures is by appealing to a notion of contex- tual redundancy (Schlenker, 2008; Fox, 2008; Mayr and Romoli, 2016). This pragmatic approach to ignorance implicatures is contrasted with a semantic account of disjunctions under `wonder' that appeals to exhausti cation (Roelofsen and Uegaki, 2016). I argue that (...) exhausti cation-based theories cannot handle embedded conjunctions, so a pragmatic account of ignorance implicatures is superior. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a novel approach to the semantics of natural language pronouns. On this account, which I call 'demonstrativism', pronouns are semantically equivalent to demonstratives. I begin by presenting some contrasts that provide support for demonstrativism. Then I try to explain these contrasts by developing a particular demonstrativist proposal. I build on the "hidden argument" theory of demonstratives. On this theory, demonstratives are semantically similar to definite descriptions, with one important difference: demonstratives take two arguments, rather than (...) one. Using these ideas, I propose that pronouns also take two (covert) arguments, and that the second argument needs to be sufficiently salient to members of the conversation in order for the use of a pronoun to be felicitous. As for the first argument, I maintain that its content is constrained by the process of noun-phrase deletion. Taken together, I argue that these constraints provide us with a satisfying account of the uses to which pronouns are put. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically (...) conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way. (shrink)

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test (...) this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. (shrink)

The historical record of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed (...) in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself.Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true."Stanford has genuinely advanced the philosophical discussion about scientific realism with his careful articulation of the problem of unconceived alternatives."-- The Review of Metaphysics "Stanford's book deserves to be widely read. Its central argument is clearly stated, its conclusion is radical, it engages in a productive fashion with detailed case studies, and it lays down several substantial challenges to scientific realism. Lastly, it is consistently thought-provoking."-Science. (shrink)

With his 1951 publication of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, W.V.O. Quine launched a series of arguments against the idea that analyticity – “truth in virtue of meaning alone” – could be a philosophically explanatory notion. While his rejection represents a significant philosophical stride in its own right, to which many in the contemporary philosophical scene pay verbal respects, the revolutionary consequences of this insight often go ignored today. Much of current professional philosophy in virtually every sub-discipline carries on as though (...) analyticity were a viable notion, because much of it aims at conceptual analysis – the “discovery” of the meanings of philosophical concepts, such as ‘mind’, ‘truth’, ‘meaning’, ‘person’, and ‘right’. Rejecting analyticity as a viable philosophical notion undermines such efforts insofar as they aim at conceptual analysis. If philosophers give up the notion of analyticity, as they should, they are left with the questions of what goals and methods are viable for the analysis of concepts. One option is to concentrate effort on explication of familiar concepts; explication is an alternative to conceptual analysis in that it does not aim to dig out analytic truths about given concepts. Rather, it identifies what is interesting about a certain vague concept, and generates a new, more rigorous and precise concept to replace the old one. The justification for the replacement, in the most appealing cases, is in the possibilities for understanding that are introduced by the new explication. Examples of explication in my sense are the replacement of ordinary grammatical terms by the operators of first order logic, replacement of ‘game’ with a decision theoretic notion of games in game theory, and replacement of ‘true’ with ‘true-in-L’ in Tarskian semantics. Advances of this sort depart consciously in some ways from ordinary usage of the terms they focus on, but in so departing, they develop new possibilities and perspectives for rigorously understanding the world. In the dissertation that follows, I not only recommend explication as a method, I also put it into practice. I develop an explication of the sameness and difference relations that relies solely on the relation of denotation between a predicate and objects of which it is true. Two things are the same with respect to R just in case there is at least one R-predicate that denotes them in common. I used this explication to develop related explications of similarity and analogy. These latter explications, I use to critique the current fashion of research on similarity and analogy in cognitive psychology. These studies have produced an immense body of interesting and promising work in the past several decades; however, much of the research design and data interpretation harbors philosophical errors and so often imports unjustified prejudices from the researchers themselves. My explication offers alternative formulations of the most salient aspects of these research traditions, formulations that avoid the errors of past research and, more importantly, suggest new research questions and possibilities that would not occur under the previous, philosophically muddled paradigm. The project closes with an application of my explication of analogy to a discussion and critique of the philosophical literature on analogical arguments. While philosophers and logicians have developed workable theories for deductive and inductive reasoning, very little work of promise has been done on analogical arguments. My explication of analogy is used to diagnose the problems of past attempts by philosophers to develop logics for analogical arguments and suggest, in light of the psychological research on analogy and the use of analogies in scientific thought, that philosophers should focus on analogical arguments as creative, heuristic devices, rather than as truth-preserving inference structures. (shrink)

Every well-read architect in the English-speaking world will soon be familiar with the name of Uriel Birnbaum. For this he will have to thank a philosopher: a German philosopher, the provocative and prolific Peter Sloterdijk1—author of “the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II,”2 the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, or Critique of Cynical Reason. But Sloterdijk’s more recent 1998–2004 magnum opus, the three-volume, 2,573-page Sphären, or Spheres, has not yet been fully translated into English. This itself will prove (...) no insignificant task; the book has been variously described as “expansive,” “majestic,” “epic,” “monumental,” and even “megalomaniac,”3 and thus far only the first volume .. (shrink)

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion (...) is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the resulting epistemic position of the audience. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers such as Harry Chalmers and Hallie Liberto has called into question the moral permissibility of monogamy. In this article, I defend monogamy on a number of grounds, including practical reasons and reasons relating to commitment, specialness, and jealousy. I also attempt to reframe the debate about monogamy as not just relating to the permissibility of restricting one’s partner but as equally about one’s freedom to leave a relationship. Finally, I make a case against Liberto’s claim that (...) monogamous agreements are over-extensive. (shrink)

Knowledge is good, ignorance is bad. So it seems, anyway. But in this dissertation, I argue that some ignorance is epistemically valuable. Sometimes, we should suspend judgment even though by believing we would achieve knowledge. In this apology for ignorance (ignorance, that is, of a certain kind), I defend the following four theses: 1) Sometimes, we should continue inquiry in ignorance, even though we are in a position to know the answer, in order to achieve more than mere knowledge (e.g. (...) understanding) while minimizing the effects of confirmation bias. 2) It’s false that we should believe every proposition such that we are guaranteed to be right about it (and even such that we are guaranteed to know it) if we believe it. 3) Being in a position to know is the norm of assertion: importantly, this does not require belief or (thereby) knowledge, and so proper assertion can survive speaker-ignorance. 4) It can be permissible and conversationally useful to tell audiences things that it is logically impossible for them to come to know: Proper assertion can survive (necessary) audience-side ignorance. Cumulatively, this project suggests that, properly understood, ignorance has an important role to play in the good epistemic life. (shrink)

This paper defends a new norm of assertion: Assert that p only if you are in a position to know that p. We test the norm by judging its performance in explaining three phenomena that appear jointly inexplicable at first: Moorean paradoxes, lottery propositions, and selfless assertions. The norm succeeds by tethering unassertability to unknowability while untethering belief from assertion. The PtK‐norm foregrounds the public nature of assertion as a practice that can be other‐regarding, allowing asserters to act in the (...) best interests of their audience when psychological pressures would otherwise prevent them from communicating the knowable truth. (shrink)

This paper challenges the two aims of Michael Cholbi’s Rational Will View (RWV) which are to (1) offer an account of why paternalism is presumptively or pro tanto wrong and (2) relate the relative wrongness of paternalistic interventions to the rational powers that such interventions target (Sections 1 and 2). Some of a paternalizee’s choices harm their future selves in ways that would be wrong if they were done to others. I claim this challenges Cholbi’s second aim (2) because the (...) cases his account deems particularly wrong turn out to be not to be as wrongful as expected (Section 3). When this second aim is challenged, it has knock-on effects on the capacity of the RWV to discern which cases of paternalism are generally more wrongful than others, which undermines Cholbi’s first aim (1). I consider responses on behalf of Cholbi’s view but conclude that the account is insufficient on its own to vindicate its two aims (Section 4). Finally, I draw on recent work that adopts ideas from the practical reasoning literature to help determine paternalism’s wrongness (Section 5). I argue this helps Cholbi’s view withstand my objections, but we must remain skeptical of why interceding with rational powers is particularly wrong. (shrink)

Explore the Resistance to Death, and Awaken More Fully to Life Death is simply one more aspect of being a human being, but in our culture, we've made it a taboo. As a result, most of us walk through life with conscious or unconscious fears that prevent us from experiencing true contentment. Embracing the End of Life invites you to lean into your beliefs and questions about death and dying, helping you release tense or fearful energy and awaken to a (...) more vital life now. Preparing mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for this inevitable transition provides improved clarity and strength. This book shares the idea of death as a journey of three steps—resistance, letting go, and transcendence. With dozens of exercises, practices, and meditations, author Patt Lind-Kyle helps you experience your truest, most expansive self. Exploring multiple aspects of life and death—with everything from chakras and the Enneagram to living wills and health care directives—this book is meant to help you unwind the challenge of death and discover the truth of your own path to inner freedom. Praise: "The fear of dying keeps countless people from living fully—as well as keeping countless others trapped in endless suffering. Embracing the End of Life will help all of us prepare joyously for the inevitable."—Christiane Northrup, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Goddesses Never Age Winner of a 2018 Gold IPPY Award. (shrink)

Harry Chalmers argues that monogamy involves restricting one’s partner’s access to goods in a morally troubling way that is analogous to an agreement between partners to have no additional friends. Chalmers finds the traditional defenses of monogamy wanting, since they would also justify a friendship-restricting agreement. I show why three traditional defenses of monogamy hold up quite well and why they don’t, for the most part, also justify friendship-restricting agreements. In many cases, monogamy can be justified on grounds of practicality, (...) specialness, or jealousy. (shrink)

Experts in medical informatics have argued for the incorporation of ever more machine-learning algorithms into medical care. As artificial intelligence research advances, such technologies raise the possibility of an “iDoctor,” a machine theoretically capable of replacing the judgment of primary care physicians. In this article, I draw on Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology to show how an algorithmic approach to medicine distorts the physician–patient relationship. Among other problems, AI cannot adapt guidelines according to the individual patient’s needs. In response to (...) the objection that AI could develop this capacity, I use Hubert Dreyfus’s analysis of AI to argue that attention to the needs of each patient requires the physician to attune his or her perception to the patient’s history and physical exam, an ability that seems uniquely human. Human physician judgment will remain better suited to the practice of primary care despite anticipated advances in AI technology. (shrink)

In the concluding chapter of Exceeding our Grasp Kyle Stanford outlines a positive response to the central issue raised brilliantly by his book, the problem of unconceived alternatives. This response, called "epistemic instrumentalism", relies on a distinction between instrumental and literal belief. We examine this distinction and with it the viability of Stanford's instrumentalism, which may well be another case of exceeding our grasp.

We must resist thoroughly reframing climate change as a health issue. For human health–centric ethical frameworks omit dimensions of value that we must duly consider. We need a new, an environmental, research ethic, one that we can use to more completely and impartially evaluate proposed research on mitigation and adaptation strategies.

One of the main highlights from last year’s event was the 2022 Philippine National and Local Elections. The Philippine elections involve a lot of people interaction from poll workers and other deputized agencies. Further, this study explores the lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of poll watchers during the 2022 Philippine election. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) Filipino workers value a good-paying job and preferred meaningful work. (2) Amidst the experiences and challenges, the (...) poll watchers remain determined and motivated to take part in the seasonal election. (3) Poll watchers must be physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared to participate in this crucial work. Mainly, pollwatching is a self-reliant job. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential erotetic logic, inquisitive epistemic logic, and contemporary zetetic epistemology) all converge on (...) the evoked questions norm. Second, we show that suitably interpreted, the evoked questions norm correctly predicts several underappreciated kinds of bad questions. It does this, in part, by recovering versions of previously defended ignorance and knowledge norms. Some of those bad questions cannot be predicted by either norm singly, but only when corporately taken to reflect a common normative category. We identify this category as evocation. (shrink)

I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can (...) never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness, even when those diminishments are relatively small (like forgetting a particular proposition) and the (altruistic) rewards of making the tradeoff substantial. I argue that God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting. (shrink)

This article provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to enroll and collect data from pediatric research participants through online and mobile platforms, with a focus on the involvement of both children and their parents in the decision to participate.