This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...) there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful. (shrink)

The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also (...) argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give “easy” answers to these questions—easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very (...) mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. (shrink)

This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe as changes in one’s de (...) se beliefs. To solve this problem, the paper defends the possibility of overlapping people, and addresses a number of objections to this idea. (shrink)

Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. (...) Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself. (shrink)

How is grounding related to metaphysical explanation? The standard view is that the former somehow “backs”, “undergirds” or “underlies” the latter. This view fits into a general picture of explanation, according to which explanations in general hold in virtue of a certain elite group of “explanatory relations” or “determinative relations” that back them. This paper turns the standard view on its head: grounding doesn't “back” metaphysical explanation but is in an important sense downstream from it. I call this view “grounding (...) idealism”, since it structurally resembles an analogous view about causation that is known as “causal idealism” and has been endorsed by philosophers like Michael Scriven and Philip Kitcher. I formulate a specific version of grounding idealism, Metaphysical Explanation‐First Idealism (MEFI), according to which the semantic value of ‘grounding’ is an abundant, gerrymandered relation settled by the metaphysical explanation facts. Then I offer some theoretical considerations that support MEFI over rival accounts of the relation between grounding and metaphysical explanation. Finally, I address the question of what role is left for grounding to play, if not that of “backing” metaphysical explanations. (shrink)

Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...) to being “skeptical.” I argue that carving up logical space into pro- and anti-grounding views isn’t especially helpful; rather, we should recognize various degrees of ground-theoretic involvement depending on how inflationary our understanding of the theoretical term ‘ground’ is. (shrink)

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

According to Humeanism about the laws, the laws of nature are nothing over and above certain kinds of regularities about particular facts. Humeanism has often been accused of circularity: according to scientific practice laws often explain their instances, but on the Humean view they also reduce to the mosaic, which includes those instances. In this paper I formulate the circularity problem in a way that avoids a number of controversial assumptions routinely taken for granted in the literature, and against which (...) many extant responses are therefore ineffective. I then propose a solution that denies the alleged Humean commitment that laws are explained by their instances. The solution satisfies three desiderata that other solutions don’t: it provides independent motivation against the idea that Humean laws are explained by their instances; it specifies the sense in which Humean laws are nonetheless “nothing over and above” their instances; and it gives an alternative account of what does explain the laws, if not their instances. This solution, I will argue, is not only the simplest but also the oldest one: it appeals only to tools and theses whose first appearance predates the earliest statements of the circularity problem itself. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...) forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies. (shrink)

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...) ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought. (shrink)

This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider (...) the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings‐on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused (“brutism”). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper’s final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well‐known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory‐building. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer use a number of experiments to show that folk intuitions about composition and persistence are driven by pre-scientific teleological tendencies. They argue that these intuitions are fit for debunking and that the playing field for competing accounts of composition and persistence should therefore be considered even: no view draws more support from folk intuitions than its rivals, and the choice between them should be made exclusively on the basis (...) of theoretical considerations. In this paper I argue that Rose and Schaffer draw the wrong conclusion from their own findings, which should instead push us toward sparse views about composition and persistence. Most metaphysicians (including Schaffer himself, and arguably Rose too) should be worried by this result, since they hold views that are flatly incompatible with it. (shrink)

In a series papers, Jonathan Schaffer defended priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object, on which all other objects depend. A primitive notion of dependence plays a crucial role in Schaffer’s argu- ments for priority monism. The goal of this paper is to scrutinize this notion and also to shed new light on what is at stake in the debate. I present three familiar arguments for priority monism and point out that each relies on (...) a connecting principle that ties dependence to other metaphysical relations. I then argue for two desiderata: the relation between dependence and other metaphysical relations needs to be strong enough to establish that other metaphysical relations are relevant to the direction of dependence but not so strong as to leave no room for revisionary versions of priority monism. I propose a particular way of meeting these desiderata, according to which the target notion of dependence is graded rather than all-or-nothing. One upshot is that we should be less preoccupied with priority monism itself and should instead focus on specific aspects of a broader monistic worldview. (shrink)

On many currently popular ontologies of material objects, we share our place with numerous shorter-lived things that came into existence after we did or will go out of existence before we will. Subpeople are intrinsically indistinguishable from possible people, and as several authors pointed out, this raises grave ethical concerns: it threatens to make any sacrifice for long-term goals impermissible, as well as to undermine our standard practices of punishment, reward, grief, and utility calculation. The aim in this paper is (...) to offer a unified set of solutions to these problems. The paper’s starting point is the "self-making view," according to which our de se beliefs help determine our own spatiotemporal boundaries. This paper argues that the self-making view also plays a key role in the best treatment of the moral problems of subpeople. (shrink)

On a widely shared assumption, our mental states supervene on our microphysical properties – that is, microphysical supervenience is true. When this thesis is combined with the apparent truism that human persons have proper parts, a grave difficulty arises: what prevents some of these proper parts from being themselves thinkers as well? How can I know that I am a human person and not a smaller thinker enclosed in a human person? Most solutions to this puzzle make radical, if not (...) absurd, claims. Recently, however, Michael Burke and Howard Robinson proposed conservative solutions that, according to them, do not have such undesired consequences. This paper argues that the conservative solutions tacitly assume at least one of the radical ones, and therefore they provide no alternative to the extreme solutions. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.

Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circularity objection has been offered, which seeks to avoid reading such assumptions into the Humean view. This paper argues that the new (...) semantic version tacitly relies on the familiar metaphysical one and, therefore, it ultimately brings nothing new to the table. (shrink)

Do pregnant mothers have fetuses as parts? According to the “parthood view” they do, while according to the “containment view” they don’t. This paper raises a novel puzzle about pregnancy: if mothers have their fetuses as parts, then wherever there is a pregnant mother, there is also a smaller thinking being that has every part of the mother except for those that overlap with the fetus. This problem resembles a familiar overpopulation puzzle from the personal identity literature, known as the (...) “Thinking Parts Problem”, but it’s not merely a special case of that problem. Rather, the fact that late-term fetuses have a mental life of their own makes the Problem of Pregnant Thinkers, as I will call it, a sui generis and especially recalcitrant problem. (shrink)

The Simple Question (SQ) asks: “What are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions any x must satisfy in order for it to be true that x is a simple?” The main motivation for asking SQ stems from the hope that it could teach us important lessons for material-object ontology. It is universally accepted that a proper answer to it has to be finite, complete and devoid of mereological expressions. This paper argues that we should stop treating SQ as the central (...) question to be asked about simples; there are a plethora of questions about simples that may even be addressed without answering the original question. The paper closes with some tentative remarks on how this lesson could be extended to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question. (shrink)

A survey of the connection between grounding and modality, in particular supervenience. The survey explores three possible connections between grounding and supervenience: (1) supervenience can be analyzed in terms of grounding, (2) grounded facts supervene on their grounds, and (3) grounding and supervenience overlap in their theoretical roles.

In a series of works, Jody Azzouni has defended deflationary nominalism, the view that certain sentences quantifying over mathematical objects are literally true, although such objects do not exist. One alleged attraction of this view is that it avoids various philosophical puzzles about mathematical objects. I argue that this thought is misguided. I first develop an ontologically neutral counterpart of Field’s reliability challenge and argue that deflationary nominalism offers no distinctive answer to it. I then show how this reasoning generalizes (...) to other philosophically problematic entities. The moral is that puzzle avoidance fails to motivate deflationary nominalism. (shrink)

The Argument from Vagueness for Universalism contends that any non-arbitrary restriction on composition must be vague, but that vague composition leads to unacceptable count indeterminacy. One common response to the argument is that borderline cases of composition don’t necessarily lead to count indeterminacy because a determinately existing thing may be a borderline case of a presently existing concrete composite object. We can collectively refer to such views as versions of the Status Response. This paper argues that the Status Response cannot (...) handle count indeterminacy about various categories of things, such as events, states of affairs, tropes, holes, shadows, and created abstracta, when these are understood in the right way. This makes the Status Response objectionablfy ad hoc, which should lead us to look for alternative ways of resisting the Argument from Vagueness. (shrink)

This doctoral research project reimagines Christian theological anthropology, building on the work of both ancient and modern theologians regarding the question of gender and sexuality. The project seeks to deny binary labels in favour of understanding identity to be dynamic, relational, and always in a state of growth. The objective is to develop an inclusive theological vision of the human person that affirms the equality, dignity, and uniqueness of each embodied individual. There are two central concerns: How can such notions (...) be integrated with humanity’s creation in the image of God and its eschatological perfection in the person of Jesus Christ? How might sinful human nature be recast in light of modern understandings of gender and sexuality? Through exploring these concerns, this thesis demonstrates the relevance of core theological concepts to understanding personhood in our twenty-first century context, when ethical and political decisions are based on tacit value judgements, often made in relation to gender and sexual identity. To facilitate the argument, the project brings feminists, phenomenologists, and queer theorists into a fruitful dialogue with Jewish and Christian understandings of human nature. The project also re-examines the concept of sacramentality, and points toward practical implications for building a more ethical society. (shrink)

Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted for in (...) terms of concrete particulars. In this paper, we consider a number of different kinds of property nominalism and argue that none of them sits well with property dualism. We pay special attention to the question of what it could mean for a property to count as mental given different nominalistic accounts of properties. Our conclusion is that property nominalism and property dualism are not a stable match. This is surprising, since property dualism has usually been understood as a thesis that is neutral about the nature of fundamental ontological categories and the relation between them. (shrink)

The concept of a sustainable agriculture varies much with writers: some see it as the preservation of agricultural resources or as the reduction of agricultural contamination of the environment or both. Other authors focus on economic viability or the political dimensions of a sustainable agriculture. This thesis argues for a concept of sustainable agriculture as a normative, socio-political concept. Such concepts can avoid some of the theoretical problems in purely ecological, neoclassical economic, and other accounts. Sustainability as a normative, socio-political (...) concept allows for the possibility of a sustainable agriculture in any system in history, regardless of the system's economic or political structure. The proposed concept also provides a basis for evaluating ethical issues relevant to agricultural systems, present or hypothetical. (shrink)

I argue that the present environmental crisis is, in part, a crisis of our historical relation to the four classical elements: earth, air, fire and water. Through an examination of primary sources in ancient Greek cosmology and philosophy, I first develop a typology of the elements. exploring their role in framing a physical and metaphysical order and providing an early kind of geography for philosophy. In the process, I consider topics and debates related to the social construction of nature, hylozoism (...) and the significance of the elements for understanding philosophical language, Greek culture and the environment. I then examine in detail the notion of the elements in Presocratic thought--particularly in Empedocles' Peri Phuseus and Katharmoi--and their subsequent place and displacement in the thought of Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's De Caelo, De Anima, De Generatione et Corruptione and Physics. I reconstruct, articulate, compare and critique the three major theories of the elements and show the relevancy of this scientific and philosophical work for better understanding a range of subjects, including our conceptions of pollution, democracy, evolutionary theory, philosophy of nature and place. In developing my "stoicheology"--literally, a study of the elements--I further reveal the movement of ideas and orientations within these ancient views. Finally, I conclude my investigation by attempting to find avenues out of current ethical, social and political dilemmas with regard to the environment by developing an "ecology of the elements" through an encounter with the recent contributions of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard and Henry David Thoreau, in whose works the elements make a reappearance. I lay particular emphasis on the role of dwelling, walking, the body and an ontological poetics of revery. (shrink)

Richard Granville Swinburne, the Nolloth Professor of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford, is considered by some philosophers of religion to be a leading defender of the rationality of Christian theism. While attempting to use a rational evidential method to show the logical justification of religious beliefs, Swinburne has attempted to construct a systematic philosophical defense of not only God's existence but also some specific Christian doctrines. This dissertation seeks to analyze and critique one of the most recent defenses (...) that Swinburne has produced, his defense of the doctrine of propositional revelation as presented primarily in his Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy . ;Swinburne's defense of revelation builds upon and presupposes conclusions that he has reached since 1968 in his published arguments for miracles, classical theism, and the doctrine of atonement. This dissertation seeks in part to examine the relationship between Swinburne's defense of revelation and some of Swinburne's previously published arguments. An examination of how Swinburne defends revelation in light of his previous arguments has not been possible until recently because his defense of revelation was not available. This study also analyzes some of the published criticisms that have been directed at Swinburne's apologetic programme by other scholars and raises potential problems from the philosophical perspectives of other thinkers. ;A consistent theme in Swinburne's philosophical theology is the demonstration of the logical justification of beliefs. In his defense of propositional revelation Swinburne seeks to show how language can convey meaningful information about God, what one can expect in a propositional revelation from God, and how evidence could lead one to expect a Christian revelation. This study shows that Swinburne's conclusions about the Christian revelation are restricted to a significant degree by his previously reached evaluations. His conclusions about the need for a revelation, the nature of the Christian revelation, and the implications that one can draw from the evidence in favor of a revelation are problematic and indicate that Swinburne's intuitions predispose him against some classical Christian views regarding revelation. It is suggested, however, that one aspect of his argument can be used to defend successfully a classical Christian concept of revelation. (shrink)

Socrates is famous for saying, in the Apology, what he never quite says--that he knows he knows nothing. A study of the dialogue reveals that the more qualified disavowals of knowledge he in fact offers are accompanied by indications that he knows a very great deal--about politics, law, and punishment, about virtue, devotion, and moral experience, and about the gods and divine revelation. Through refutations--whose purpose scholars have not generally understood--he has confirmed his deepest insights and, in the only way (...) possible, vindicated philosophy against pious and secular challenges. In the process, he has unavoidably also intensified Athenian hostility to philosophy. At his trial he tries to mitigate this hostility, in part by obscuring and beautifying philosophy. Simultaneously--and in a rhetorically complicated manner--however, he points to the truth about philosophy so that promising listeners might find their way to a life like his own. (shrink)

Two hundred and sixty-three subjects each gave examples for one of five geographic categories: geographic features, geographic objects, geographic concepts, something geographic, and something that could be portrayed on a map. The frequencies of various responses were significantly different, indicating that the basic ontological terms feature, object, etc., are not interchangeable but carry different meanings when combined with adjectives indicating geographic or mappable. For all of the test phrases involving geographic, responses were predominantly natural features such as mountain, river, lake, (...) ocean, hill. Artificial geographic features such as town and city were listed hardly at all for geographic categories, an outcome that contrasts sharply with the disciplinary self-understanding of academic geography. However, geographic artifacts and fiat objects, such as roads, cities, boundaries, countries, and states, were frequently listed by the subjects responding to the phrase something that could be portrayed on a map. In this paper, we present the results of these experiments in visual form, and provide interpretations and implications for further research. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Causation is one of philosophy's most venerable and thoroughly-analyzed concepts. However, the study of how ordinary people make causal judgments is a much more recent addition to the philosophical arsenal. One of the most prominent views of causal explanation, especially in the realm of harmful or potentially harmful behavior, is that unusual or counternormative events are accorded privileged status in ordinary causal explanations. This is a fundamental assumption in psychological theories of counterfactual reasoning, and has been transported to philosophy by (...) Hitchcock and Knobe (2009). A different view--the basis of the culpable control model of blame (CCM)--is that primary causal status is accorded to behaviors that arouse negative evaluative reactions, including behaviors that stem from nefarious motives, negligence or recklessness, a faulty character, or behaviors that lead to harmful or potentially harmful consequences. This paper describes four empirical studies that show consistent support for the CCM. (shrink)

Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our experiments show geographic categories to be similar to their non-geographic counterparts in (...) the ways in which they generate instances of different relative frequencies at different levels. Other tests, however, provide preliminary evidence for the existence of important differences in subjects’ categorizations of geographic and non-geographic objects, and suggest further experimental work especially with regard to the role in cognitive categorization of different types of object-boundaries at different scales. (shrink)

Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the (...) paper and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, (1) between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and (2) between learning that involves the encoding of instances (or fragments) versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning (...) derived from subliminal learning, conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks (e.g., artificial grammar learning) is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and between learning that involves the encoding of instances versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning derived from subliminal learning, (...) conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the “implicitly learned” rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

Large language models such as ChatGPT enable users to automatically produce text but also raise ethical concerns, for example about authorship and deception. This paper analyses and discusses some key philosophical assumptions in these debates, in particular assumptions about authorship and language and—our focus—the use of the appearance/reality distinction. We show that there are alternative views of what goes on with ChatGPT that do not rely on this distinction. For this purpose, we deploy the two phased approach of deconstruction and (...) relate our finds to questions regarding authorship and language in the humanities. We also identify and respond to two common counter-objections in order to show the ethical appeal and practical use of our proposal. (shrink)

Two hundred and sixty-three subjects each gave examples for one of five geographic categories: geographic features, geographic objects, geographic concepts, something geographic, and something that could be portrayed on a map. The frequencies of various responses were significantly different, indicating that the basic ontological terms feature, object, etc., are not interchangeable but carry different meanings when combined with adjectives indicating geographic or mappable. For all of the test phrases involving geographic, responses were predominantly natural features such as mountain, river, lake, (...) ocean, hill. Artificial geographic features such as town and city were listed hardly at all for geographic categories, an outcome that contrasts sharply with the disciplinary self-understanding of academic geography. However, geographic artifacts and fiat objects, such as roads, cities, boundaries, countries, and states, were frequently listed by the subjects responding to the phrase something that could be portrayed on a map. In this paper, we present the results of these experiments in visual form, and provide interpretations and implications for further research. (shrink)