Since Clark and Chalmers advanced “The Extended Mind” in 1998, a persistent dispute evolved on how our tool interactions shape the kind of cognition we have. Extended cognition generally views us as cognitively augmented and enhanced by our tool practices, which shall render our cognitive constitution extended to those tools. Bounded and embedded cognition have primarily criticized this metaphysical claim. However, another contender may arise from considering how we use more intelligent tools. We arguably employ advanced technologies that capture, mimic, (...) and then replace our cognitive skills, which we then no longer need to exercise ourselves. This precedes any metaphysical debate, since such practices might stand in a more fundamental conflict with extended cognition. The counter-hypothesis of extracted cognition states that we primarily tend to use tools that initially attain and eventually displace our cognitive responsibilities and involvements. This paper evaluates extended and extracted cognition by comparing theoretical, practical, and ethical arguments respectively. If extracted cognition describes most convincingly how such tool interactions shape our kind of cognition, then we may also endorse “The Extracted Mind”. (shrink)

Digital visualizations of cultural heritage (DVCs) are typically used to re-create or re-imagine artworks in their original state. Their apparent efficiency raises questions about their relation to the historical artefacts: What is the visualizations’ status vis à vis the originals? Can they replace them? And if so, in what capacity? This paper explores these questions from the point of view of the DVCs’ potential epistemic yield. It argues that the knowledge they are supposed to provide amounts to mediating past experiences (...) the artefacts they model occasioned and that in this role they serve an agenda with a long pedigree labelled ‘art-historical empiricism’ (AHE). However, historicism about perception can sow doubt into the AHE enterprise, including the use of DVCs. The paper maintains that if AHE is to justify or guide the DVCs’ proliferation in museums and historical scholarship, its proponents better be equipped with means of assuaging the doubt. The paper closes by discussing a general strategy of testing the soundness of epistemic uses of DVCs. (shrink)

Scientific principles can undergo various developments. While philosophers of science have acknowledged that such changes occur, there is no systematic account of the development of scientific principles. Here we propose a template for analyzing the development of scientific principles called the ‘life cycle’ of principles. It includes a series of processes that principles can go through: prehistory, elevation, formalization, generalization, and challenge. The life cycle, we argue, is a useful heuristic for the analysis of the development of scientific principles. We (...) illustrate this by discussing examples from foundational physics including Lorentz invariance, Mach’s principle, the naturalness principle, and the perfect cosmological principle. We also explore two applications of the template. First, we propose that the template can be employed to diagnose the quality of scientific principles. Second, we discuss the ramifications of the life cycle’s processes for the empirical testability of principles. (shrink)

The idea that qualities can be had partly or to an intermediate degree is controversial among contemporary metaphysicians, but also has a considerable pedigree among philosophers and scientists. In this paper, we first aim to show that metaphysical sense can be made of this idea by proposing a partial taxonomy of metaphysical accounts of graded qualities, focusing on three particular approaches: one which explicates having a quality to a degree in terms of having a property with an in-built degree, another (...) based on the idea that instantiation admits of degrees, and a third which derives the degree to which a quality is had from the aspects of multi-dimensional properties. Our second aim is to demonstrate that the choice between these accounts can make a substantial metaphysical difference. To make this point, we rely on two case studies (involving quantum observables and values) in which we apply the accounts in order to model apparent cases of metaphysical gradedness. (shrink)

This article outlines an epistemological perspective to understand the organism as a temporally changing whole. To analyze the mental faculties involved, the organism’s development and persisting existence is differentiated into four interdependent aspects: descent, future existence, persistent species, and environmentally adapted physical appearance. It is outlined that these aspects are recognized by comparative memory, concept-guided anticipation, conceptual thinking, and sensory perception, respectively. Furthermore, it is pointed out that these aspects correspond to the famous four Aristotelian “causes” or principles of explanation. (...) The descent of an organism corresponds to Aristotle’s efficient principle (“where does it come from?”), its future existence to the final principle (“what is if for?”), its physical structure to the material principle (“out of what is it?”) and its persistent species to the formal principle (“what is it?”). Aristotle regarded the unity of the efficient, formal and final principle as the ontological cause of the organism and called it the “soul” (psyche), while the material principle can be understood to represent its “body” (soma). I suggest that Aristotle’s “soul” corresponds to three of the four mental faculties required for cognition of a self-maintaining organism. I argue that in a Kantian perspective, the Aristotelian “soul” represents the condition for recognizing an organism at all. Therefore, the Aristotelian principle of life becomes intelligible and even empirically observable through the inner sense. In summary, I suggest that the four aspects of the organism described here can be viewed as the general, epistemological and ontological principle of the organism, the Bio-Logos. (shrink)

A promising development in the philosophy of causation analyzes actual causation using structural equation models, i.e., “causal models”. This paper carefully considers what it means for an interpreted model to be accurate of its target situation. These considerations show, first, that our existing understanding of accuracy is inadequate. Further, and more controversially, they show that any causal model analysis is committed to a kind of relativism – a view whereby causation is a three-part relation holding between a cause, an effect, (...) and something else. In particular, insofar as a causal model analysis construes causation mind-and-language independently, it must treat causation as relative to a specification of background possibilities – i.e., a ‘modal profile.’ Or, so I argue. (shrink)

To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...) appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted. (shrink)

The past several decades have seen a frenzy of philosophical focus on artifacts, spawning numerous theories of artifacts. Most proposals understand being an artefact as being a member of a particular artifact kind; to be an artifact is to be a chair or a pencil or a crank shaft or flatbed truck or whatever. Despite the many theories of artifacts, no one has asked what makes a kind an artifact kind, specifically. While the artifact literature has yet to address this (...) issue, the philosophy of art has already been addressing a parallel question about art by asking what kinds are the art kinds, if being an artwork requires belonging to an artkind. Michel Xhignesse has proposed that the artkinds are those kinds governed by the social norms of the art world which constitute an artistic practice. In this paper, I argue that Xhignesse’s answer can be extended to artifacts generally. I argue that artifact kinds like cabinet, cellphone or sedan chair are constituted by the social norms which govern the associated artifact practice. These social norms determine what features are constitutive of the kind, how the kind should be used, treated, and regarded and by whom and in what context. Crucially, these social norms are often arbitrary and always contingent—there’s nothing necessary about the artifact kinds that happen to be at the center of our current artifact practices. I call this the social practice view of artifact kinds. To illustrate the social practice view, I consider two cases. First, the historical case of chopines—elevated shoes associated with Venetian prostitutes during the Renaissance—illustrates how a distinct social practice arose in a particular historical context, simultaneously giving rise to a new kind of shoe constituted by its attendant norms which differentiated the chopine from the similar clog and high heel, and which eventually fell out of fashion. There was nothing necessary about the chopine being a distinct kind of footwear from clogs or high heels. Rather, the kind arose and developed as a result of distinct social practices and in response to various competing social values. Similar considerations hold for all other artifact kinds—e.g. chairs and stools, pens and pencils, laptops and tablets. Second, is the case of Jaffa cakes, a British confection where there’s debate about whether they’re cakes or biscuits because if they’re the latter they will be subject to an additional tax. Here there’s disagreement about the artifact kind a given artifact belongs to because there is heavy overlap between the social norms and concomitant social practices. Where our practices are indeterminate, we are deciding that Jaffa cakes are or are not biscuits, that is, we are stipulating what social practice Jaffa cakes should be subject to. In many cases, an informal answer is sufficient since people will treat them however they want, but sometimes what kind an artifact belongs to requires more formal. (shrink)

We present an argument about the methodology of ethics, broadly conceived, drawing on recent research on modelling in the philosophy of science. More specifically, we argue that normative ethics should adopt the methodology of modelling. We make our case in two parts. First, despite the perhaps unfamiliar terminology, modelling already happens in ethics. We identify it, and argue that its practice could be improved by recognising that it is modelling and by adopting some methodological lessons from philosophy of science. Second, (...) modelling should be adopted more widely within normative ethics, because it fits well with various methodological ends we shall identify. Models can be used to investigate ethical questions in a manner that is systematic but relatively free of foundational theoretical commitments in first-order ethics. Models are more local, and less ambitious, than theories. They can be used to break deadlocks, by focusing attention on the particularities of a sub-domain and by providing a common tool–the surrogate model system–which each side can use to make their principles precise, illustrate the implications of their view, and identify sources of disagreement or points of agreement. We are pluralists about method, so this is not a call to abandon other philosophical methods. It is simply a plea for modelling, motivated by the method’s independent benefits and its fruitfulness in resolving some persistent methodological problems in ethics. (shrink)

Many draw the distinction between truth in, and truth at, a possible world. The latter notion purportedly allows for propositions to be true relative to worlds even if they do not exist relative to those same worlds. Despite its wide application, the distinction is controversial. Some think that the notion of truth at a world is unintelligible. Here, I outline and discuss the most influential argument for the unintelligibility of truth at a world, The Picture Thinking Argument. I outline and (...) defend a neglected strategy to respond to this, arguing that if we take seriously the idea that possible worlds represent total ways the world could be, the distinction can be drawn intelligibly. (shrink)

The Master Argument from Hallucination is one of the most discussed challenges to Naïve Realism. Naïve Realists have thoroughly scrutinised a number of strategies for resisting it. However, they have generally dismissed out of hand what I call the Monist Strategy, according to which the hallucinations invoked by the argument also consist of a relation of perceptual awareness with the mind-independent environment. In this paper, I consider whether this often-implicit dismissal is justified. I suggest that the core of resistance plausibly (...) lies in an assumption regarding the causal requirements for the obtaining of the relation of perceptual awareness invoked by Naïve Realists. Drawing on the existing literature (Raleigh, 2014; Ali, 2018), I consider and elaborate ways in which the Monist Strategy might be developed consistently with this assumption. I suggest that there are indeed reasons to question the viability of this project. However, I argue that it is not entirely clear why Naïve Realists are forced to buy into this assumption. If they were willing to reject it, I contend, a compelling version of the Monist Strategy could be developed. According to such a view, at least some hallucinations are episodes of perceptual awareness of regions of space. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical interpretation and evaluation of Wilfrid Sellars’s treatment of skepticism about empirical justification. It defends three central claims. First, against the suggestion that Sellars’s work simply bypasses traditional skeptical problems, I make the novel interpretive claim that Sellars not only addresses skepticism about empirical justification, but offers two independent (albeit sketchy) arguments against it: a transcendental argument that the likely truth of our perceptual beliefs is a necessary condition of the possibility of empirical content, and a (...) pragmatic argument that we’re warranted in accepting their likely truth in virtue of our aim of being effective agents. To the extent these have previously been distinctly formulated by commentators, the transcendental argument has been regarded as forceful, while the pragmatic argument has been dismissed as non-responsive. My second and third claims challenge this understanding. I argue, second, that examination of the literature relating to transcendental arguments from semantic externalism like Sellars’s (especially concerning the McKinsey paradox) suggests that such arguments are unpromising, while, third, a modified version of his pragmatic argument represents a powerful skeptical solution to skepticism about empirical justification, one that answers the worry that such skepticism would undermine the rationality of all our practical commitments. (shrink)

The literature on faith has largely focused on the relationship between faith and belief, specifically the question: does faith entail belief? At the same time, it’s also widely held that faith involves a desire or pro-attitude, but more attention has been paid to the specifics of faith’s doxastic component than to faith’s affective component. This paper focuses on the relationship between faith and desire. I’ll argue that faith is weakly positive: while faith may not always involve a flat-out desire, faith (...) necessarily involves a positive desire-like attitude. (shrink)

Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence (...) of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN. Although this strategy may initially appear promising, in this paper I will argue that the directive to incorporate patient values (as dictated by values-based medicine) cannot do the work of mitigating medical paternalism in the treatment of egosyntonic disorders such as AN. Rather than chalking this up as a failure due to AN being a particularly challenging case, I will instead conclude that the failure of values-based medicine in this context cuts to the heart of the limitations of rectifying medical paternalism within psychiatry as it currently exists. (shrink)

The coexistence of Supersymmetry (SUSY) and the Spin-Statistics Theorem (SST) poses a challenge, given their seeming incompatibility. While SUSY connects particles with distinct spins, SST links particle’s spin to their statistics. We propose a solution to this puzzle: both spin and SST may emerge as low-energy phenomena. To do so, we look at SUSY breaking at lower energy scales, exploring if this mechanism aligns with the concept of emergence. The paper presents a comprehensive review of the SUSY-SST tension, a philosophical (...) introduction to SUSY-breakig, and an argument for spin and SST emergence within SUSY. Overall, our aim is to show how SUSY and SST can coexist in the same theory and thus deepen our understanding of SUSY quantum field theory. (shrink)

A central task of developmental psychology and philosophy of science is to show how humans learn radically new concepts. Famously, Fodor has argued that such learning is impossible if concepts have definitional structure and all learning is hypothesis testing. We present several learning processes that can generate novel concepts. They yield transformations of the fundamental feature space, generating new similarity structures which can underlie conceptual change. This framework provides a tractable, empiricist-friendly account that unifies and shores up various strands of (...) the neo-Quinean approach to conceptual development. (shrink)

What do we owe to each other when communicating? One area where these questions become immediately relevant is that of mental healthcare settings. Mental healthcare relies heavily on communication with patients/clients. However, it has been argued that patients/clients in mental healthcare settings are often vulnerable to various forms of epistemic injustice, e.g., by not being listened to, not being taken seriously, not being considered as a source of knowledge by healthcare professionals (e.g., Crichton et al., 2017 ; Scrutton, 2017 ; (...) Kurs & Grinshpoon 2018 ; Kidd, Spencer& Carel 2023 ). The paper investigates normative aspects of communication in settings where interlocutors occupy specific _social_ and _professional roles_. I focus on the _conversational pressures_ account, recently proposed by Goldberg ( 2020 ), and communicative interactions in mental healthcare settings, where issues of epistemic injustice and deficient communication are of great importance. I suggest that professional roles in mental healthcare settings have an impact on the normative evaluation of interlocutors, as well as the conversational pressures they are under. I discuss whether and to what extent ethical and epistemic features of the social and professional contexts can be seen as providing a direct normative source for conversational pressures. I close by sketching a map of issues that require further investigation. (shrink)

The Identity of Indiscernibles is the principle that objects cannot differ only numerically. It is widely held that one interpretation of this principle is trivially true: the claim that objects that bear all of the same properties are identical. This triviality ostensibly arises from haecceities (properties like _is identical to a_). I argue that this is not the case; we do not trivialize the Identity of Indiscernibles with haecceities, because it is impossible to express the haecceities of indiscernible objects. I (...) then argue that this inexpressibility generalizes to all of their trivializing properties. Whether the Identity of Indiscernibles is trivially true ultimately turns on whether we can quantify over properties that we cannot express. (shrink)

The most common theoretical approaches to defining mental disorder are naturalism, normativism, and hybridism. Naturalism and normativism are often portrayed as diametrically opposed, with naturalism grounded in objective science and normativism grounded in social convention and values. Hybridism is seen as a way of combining the two. However, all three approaches share a common feature in that they conceive of mental disorders as deviations from norms. Naturalism concerns biological norms; normativism concerns social norms; and hybridism, both biological and social norms. (...) This raises the following two questions: (a) Are biological and social norms the only sorts of norms that are relevant to considerations of mental disorder? (b) Should addressing norm deviations continue to be a major focus of mental healthcare? This paper introduces several norms that are relevant to mental disorder beyond the biological and social. I argue that mental disorders often deviate from individual, well-being, and regulatory norms. I also consider approaches which question mental healthcare’s focus on addressing norm deviations in the first place, including the neurodiversity paradigm, social model of disability, and Mad discourse. Utilizing these critical approaches, I contend that whether mental health intervention is justified depends, in part, on the type of norm deviation being intervened upon. (shrink)

The ecological approach to rationality, exemplified in theories such as Gerd Gigerenzer’s Fast and Frugal Heuristics, posits that different decision-making procedures are rational in various decision environments. In this regard, the ecological approach sharply contrasts with standard normative theories like Expected Utility Theory, which is often viewed merely as an analysis of bounded rationality. In this article, I aim to provide philosophical foundations for the ecological approach as a framework for normative rationality. I draw on John Norton’s Material Theory of (...) Induction to argue that the appropriate method for addressing uncertain evidence is domain-dependent and sensitive to the environment, as the ecological approach suggests. Furthermore, I argue that, motivated by insights from material theory, we should re-examine the claim that consistency requirements are universal standards of rationality in three ways: first, the plausibility of consistency axioms depends on the decision environment; second, the application of standard theories is contingent upon the structural conditions of that environment; and third, arguments for axioms, such as money-pump arguments, are plausible only in specific domains. Finally, I argue that the ecological approach can provide a substantive account of rationality norms and that its performance-related criteria for these norms should facilitate the evaluation and modification of agents’ decision-making. These arguments underscore the advantages of the ecological approach over standard theories while situating it within the broader philosophical framework of induction. (shrink)

This paper argues for a unified account of semantic and pragmatic infelicity. It is argued that an utterance is infelicitous when it communicates an inconsistent set of propositions, given the context. In cases of semantic infelicity the relevant utterance expresses a set of inconsistent propositions, whereas pragmatic infelicity is a matter of the utterance conflicting with contextual expectations or assumptions. We spell out this view within the standard framework according to which a central aim of communication is to update a (...) body of information shared among the participants. We show that this account explains different kinds of infelicity for both declarative and non-declarative utterances. Further, the account is seen to make correct predictions for a range of cases involving irony, joking, and related non-assertoric utterances. (shrink)

Mill’s classic argument for liberty requires that people’s exercise of freedom should be governed by the harm principle (MHP): that is, an action should not harm another. In this paper, we develop the concept of a Millian harm equilibrium (MHE) in _n_-person games where players maximize utility subject to the constraint of an MHP. Our main result is in the spirit of the fundamental theorems of welfare economics. We show that for every initial ‘reference point’ in a game the associated (...) MHE is Pareto efficient and, conversely, every Pareto efficient point can be supported as an MHE for some initial reference point. This is an important result for an old question in political philosophy over whether the exercise of liberty is consistent with order in society and for how we think about policy in a non-ideal world. (shrink)

I begin with a gap in the literature on conversational relevance, wherein utterances that shift probability distributions included in the common ground do not count as relevant if they do not rule out one or more answers to the question under discussion. In order to provide a satisfying account of probabilistic conversational relevance, I introduce a relevance measure, \(R(\cdot )\). I motivate six axioms for such a function, and show that they uniquely characterize the symmetrized Kullback–Leibler divergence. I then show (...) how we can incorporate this result into an expanded definition of conversational relevance. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty has been a source of inspiration for philosophers concerned with the notion of deep disagreement (see Fogelin in Informal Logic 25(1):3–11, 2005; Pritchard in Topoi 40:1117–1125, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9612-y ). While Wittgenstein’s examples of certainties do not include moral certainties, some philosophers have argued that an analogy can be drawn between certainty regarding the empirical world and moral certainty (Goodman in Metaphilosophy 13:138–148,1982; Hermann in On moral certainty, justification, and practice: A Wittgensteinian perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015; Pleasants (...) in Inquiry 51(3):241–267, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201740802120673 ). Moral certainty manifests itself in our fundamental ways of feeling, thinking, and acting morally. It is closely related to an “agreement in form of life” (Wittgenstein in Philosophical investigations, Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Third ed., Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1968, § 241.), which makes moral disagreements possible in the first place. In this paper, I aim to shed light on the phenomenon of moral deep disagreement by relating it not only to the notion of moral certainty but also to the concept of deep disruption as it is currently developed and discussed in the philosophy of technology. I argue that certainty, deep disagreement, and deep disruption are all located at the level of “bedrock practices” (Williams in Wittgenstein, mind and meaning, Routledge, Milton Park, 1999, p. 198), and that the fundamentality of their objects should be understood in terms of relationality and interconnectedness. Deep disagreements can occur through deep technology-induced disruption and can take the form of a disruption of deep conceptual agreement. Conceptual common ground can be re-established by continuous interaction and a collective process of moral articulation. Deep disruption and moral deep disagreement can lead to moral progress, for instance in the form of recognising and correcting an epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Higher-order evidence, such as that arising from peer disagreement, is typically bracketed in scholarly argumentation. For instance, we do not challenge a philosophical position by noting that it is subject to peer disagreement. Two questions related to this phenomenon remain unresolved: 1) Why is scholarly argumentation governed by a norm against the use of higher-order evidence? 2) Which higher-order evidence is affected by this norm? This article argues, first, that the reason higher-order evidence is bracketed is not related to the (...) sincerity with which we may hold our views, or to the promotion of cognitive diversity. Rather, it is due to the inconclusive nature of arguments based on higher-order evidence. Second, it argues that the ban on higher-order evidence extends to all types of higher-order evidence, not just a subset. The rationale behind banning higher-order evidence suggests that philosophical inquiry aims at solving philosophical questions with a high degree of conclusiveness, even if this aim might only be achieved in the far future. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis conceives of the brain as a generative model (GM) of its environment, where the model improves its accuracy by updating itself via Bayesian inferential statistics. This is accomplished by adjusting the model’s prior beliefs into posterior beliefs based on the sensory input from the environment. Thus, the Bayesian brain learns the causal structure of world events and refines its belief space. The Bayesian brain is thought to learn by updating its beliefs and the parameters of its (...) GM. It is less clear whether Bayesian updating alone is sufficient to explain the genesis and evolution of belief space, as it appears challenging to explain the generation of truly novel original priors (structure learning) or the transition to the direct opposite of the initial prior through Bayesian updating. To address this challenge, we suggest integrating Bayesian updating with the principles of the dialectical development of thought as conceived in Hegel’s work. We argue that applying dialectics and the freeenergy principle to Bayesian inference makes the evolution of belief space both its emergent and imperative property. We naturalize this idea by illustrating how behaviors of different complexity from the molecular mechanisms of the simplest biological behavior, such as bacterial chemotaxis, through psychopathology can be viewed in the ‘dialectical Bayes’ framework. This framework is used to explore the cognitive dynamics of physical and emotional pain and to propose a mechanism of chronic suffering. (shrink)

The neo-Aristotelian conception of essence has gained prominence in recent analytic metaphysics. I will present an epistemic problem for such essentialists. The challenge centers on the following question: assuming there are essence-facts, what relationship between essence-facts and essence-attitudes explains why those attitudes’ correctness is not coincidental? It is a debunking challenge—what I call the explanatory challenge. The explanatory challenge is distinctive for at least three reasons: (i) it does not centrally concern the domain in question containing abstract objects, or having (...) evolutionary etiologies, (ii) it targets neo-Aristotelian essentialism, not merely essentialism insofar as it is modally analyzable, and (iii) the challenge comes in three grades—weak, moderate, and strong. Although debunking challenges do not pose a problem unique to essentialism, they have yet to be explicitly applied to essentialism in detail. I aim to redress this omission here. I begin by explaining the challenge’s grades, paying particular attention to a species of the moderate grade, which generates a more specific challenge I call the deflationary challenge. Then, I’ll survey David Oderberg’s and E.J. Lowe’s epistemologies of essence. I’ll argue that their accounts fail the weak challenge and that this leaves them especially vulnerable to the moderate challenge, where this involves positive reason to think essence-facts do not, in fact, play an explanatory role in forming one's essence-attitudes. Lastly, I’ll propose that Amie Thomasson’s deflationary account of identity-conditions might offer a deflationary challenge for essentialism. (shrink)

Drobňák and Kaluziński argue that normative inferentialism is an attractive theory of meaning, which can play an important part in the semantic minimalism—contextualism debate. In particular it can explain such phenomena as context-sensitivity, ambiguity and conversational implicatures. In what follows I’ll critically asses their approach, point out its weaknesses and suggest possible improvements and modifications. In Sect. 2 I take issue with some of the analyses of contextualists’ scenarios proposed by Kaluziński and offer a more uniform treatment. I also argue—pace (...) Kaluziński and following Drobňák—that inferentialism is best seen as a variant of contextualism. In Sect. 3 I describe Drobňák’s approach to implicatures, homonymy and polysemy, whereas in Sect. 4 I analyze this approach in detail and indicate its shortcomings. I also suggest an alternative analysis of implicatures and an important modification of the way in which inferential significances are constructed. As far as I can see, my suggestions are in line with inferentialism’s spirit and could easily be incorporated within its framework. (shrink)

This topical collection brings together papers that address memory and aboutness. Focal points of the contributions concern relationships between episodic memory, reference (or singular thought), the content of remembering, and the accuracy conditions of remembering. Though there has been increasing work on these particular issues in recent years, continued progress demands theorising that can address these phenomena with an eye to exploring, examining, and explaining their systematic interrelations. The principal aim of this topical collection was to prompt such conversations by (...) bringing researchers specialising on these topics within one forum for the first time. The result is 15 papers that push the boundaries of this area of inquiry into new and exciting directions. (shrink)

This article shows, through both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, that there is an absence of consensus among philosophers of science, scientists, and science communicators regarding the correctness of realist versus anti-realist interpretations of scientific theories. It is argued that integrating this finding within the current prevalent norm of consensus reporting necessitates a reconsideration of how results from the natural sciences are reported. As such, the article advances a model for science reporting that more accurately represents the complexity of scientific (...) expert opinions, thereby aligning more closely with the actual epistemic conditions within the scientific community. (shrink)

Cognitive maps play a crucial role in mammalian navigation. They provide the organism with information about its own location and the locations of landmarks within known environments. Cognitive maps have yet to receive ample attention in philosophy. In this article, we argue that cognitive maps should not be understood along the lines of conceptual mental states, such as beliefs and desires. They are more plausibly understood to be non-conceptual. We clarify what is at stake in this claim, and offer two (...) empirically-informed arguments in its favor. Both arguments submit that cognitive maps are probably non-conceptual because their representational structure seems to differ from that of conceptual mental states. (shrink)

A prominent class of arguments for external world skepticism rely on the plausible view that knowledge is closed under logical entailment. From the fact that one does not know that one is not a handless brain in a vat it can be inferred that one does not know that one has hands, in virtue of the fact that having hands logically entails that one is not a handless brain in a vat. The complements of knowing-how ascriptions, however, are not—obviously, at (...) least—related by logical entailment to any proposition, and therefore, they resist that skeptical argument. Even if I don’t know that I am not a brain in a vat, it does not follow that I don’t know how to, say, play a drum rudiment. Thus, knowing-how can withstand closure-based skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

Humanism is the traditional approach in many disciplines, including history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. Humanists tend to assume that there is an important distinction between the knowing subject and the rest of the world. Posthumanism challenges this assumption, asking us to examine how the distinction between subject and object is constructed in the first place. To do so, posthumanists argue that we must abandon our traditional resources for understanding the knowing subject. In its place, we must adopt a radical new (...) notion of agency that encompasses humans and nonhumans. This paper argues that, although posthumanism teaches us a valuable lesson, the real problem lies not with humanism, but with Cartesianism. To show this, I develop a new version of humanism by drawing on two anti-Cartesian strands within recent philosophy of mind: _the extended mind thesis_ and _mental fictionalism_. The result is a view that allows us to retain our traditional resources for understanding the knowing subject, while recognising that the nature of that subject can change over time. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between the method of arbitrary functions and single-case probabilities, and offer an interpretation of these probabilities by reference to physical symmetries of chance experiments. The method of arbitrary functions attempts to explain outcome frequencies through the underlying deterministic dynamics of chance experiments and the constant proportions of these dynamics that lead to different outcomes in repeated chance experiments. However, the method of arbitrary functions alone appears to provide no comprehensive interpretation of deterministic chance (...) since it relies on distributions of initial conditions that, in turn, require interpretation. Moreover, even without reference to distributions of initial conditions, the method of arbitrary functions may not be able to provide genuine single-case probabilities since the constant proportions appear to become relevant for outcomes only in repeated chance experiments. In this paper, I propose an explanation of the constant proportions of dynamics via the physical properties of single chance experiments. By doing so, I attempt to develop the method of arbitrary functions into a comprehensive interpretation of probability that does not rely on the distribution of initial conditions and covers genuine single-case probabilities. Specifically, I show how the constant proportions result from what I will call _the relevant physical symmetries of chance experiments_, i.e., from a regular constitution of chance devices with respect to the dynamically realized symmetry transformations in single chance experiments. (shrink)

Recently, a version of realism has been offered to address the simplification strategies used in computational neuroscience. According to this view, computational models provide us with knowledge about the brain, but they should not be taken literally in _any_ sense, even rejecting the idea that the brain performs computations (computationalism). I acknowledge the need for considerations regarding simplification strategies in neuroscience and how they contribute to our interpretations of computational models; however, I argue that whether we should accept or reject (...) computationalism about the brain is a separate issue that can be addressed independently by a philosophical theory of physical computation. This takes seriously the idea that the brain performs computations while also taking an analogical stance toward computational models in neuroscience. I call this version of realism “Analogical Computational Realism.” Analogical Computational Realism is a realist view in virtue of being committed to computationalism while taking certain computational models to pick out real patterns that provide a how-possibly explanation without also thinking that the model is literally implemented in the brain. (shrink)

This paper aims to improve on Michael Lynch’s functionalist account of truth-grounding. According to Lynch, truth is grounded in another (non-generic) alethic property when the latter has all the conceptually essential features of truth. However, this view faces a problem raised by Marian David (“Lynch’s Functionalist Theory of Truth”) and Crispin Wright (“A Plurality of Pluralisms”), which is that some conceptually essential features of truth are not possessed by the properties usually taken to ground it (such as correspondence and superwarrant), (...) so that Lynch’s account cannot allow truth to be grounded in these properties. In response to this objection, I propose to modify Lynch’s account by restricting the range of truth’s essential features that a truth-grounding property must have to the class of what I call the “bearer-centered” features of truth. They are those features whose possession by truth amounts to certain facts about how propositions bearing truth behave. The resultant account then is that truth is grounded in a property when the latter has all the essential and bearer-centered features of truth. This account is immune to the David–Wright objection because the features they mention do not belong to the class of bearer-centered features. Also, this account is well-motivated by some principled reasons. The account thus serves as a viable functionalist account of truth-grounding. (shrink)

The paper studies in detail a precise formal construction of spacetime from matter suggested by the logician John Burgess. We presuppose a continuous and perdurantistic matter ontology. The result is a systematic method to translate claims about the geometry of a flat relativistic, or classical, spacetime into claims about geometrical relations between matter points. The approach is extended to electric and magnetic fields by treating them as multifields defined on matter, rather than as fields in the vacuum. A few tentative (...) suggestions are made to adapt the method to general relativity and to quantum theories. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of interest in the idea that spacetime is not fundamental. Much of this interest has focused on the implications for physics. There has been less work investigating the implications of spacetime emergence for existing theories in metaphysics. This paper aims to fill this gap by considering the impact of spacetime emergence on priority monism. We argue that one prominent version of priority monism is incompatible with spacetime emergence. We go on to present a solution (...) to this problem, which involves rethinking the nature of concreteness. This leads to a new version of priority monism that is compatible with emergent spacetime. (shrink)

A popular view in metasemantics is the view that a speaker’s dispositions regarding the use of a symbol determine the meaning of that symbol for the speaker. Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982) arguments against simple versions of semantic dispositionalism have inspired ever new versions. A recent account in the literature, due to Warren (Noûs 54(2):257–289, 2020) offers a sophisticated version of semantic dispositionalism whereby certain conditions are imposed on speaker’s dispositions to count as (...) meaning determining—conditions we can refer to as ‘standard’. In this paper, I argue that there are a number of cases that suggest that even under such conditions, a speaker’s meaning and their dispositions can come apart, and that this suggests that dispositional accounts of semantic content presuppose that there are semantic norms, independent of a speaker’s dispositions, and thus do not explain semantic content. I conclude that, since these problems generalise to non-standard dispositionalist accounts, the dispositionalist’s prospects are dim. (shrink)

The current regulatory regime for pharmaceuticals is criticized from a libertarian perspective for imposing the same risk–benefit analysis on all patients. The critics call for the abandonment of market access regulations. But the regulatory regime is also criticized by philosophers of science for applying too low epistemic standards, who call for stricter regulation. This article aims to engage the debate in a less polarized way, first by advancing the libertarian alternative to the current regime through an approach I call Certified (...) Capitalism for Pharmaceuticals (CCP), without endorsing this view in the end; second, by developing an argument against all regulatory regimes without market access regulations, including CCP, based on the possibility that the pharmaceutical industry could bend pharmaceutical science to its interests in such a regime. Whether this argument is successful, or whether CCP is able to circumvent it, cannot be decided on the basis of the empirical information currently available. Third, these arguments lead to two further insights for a philosophy of science that takes the social embeddedness of science seriously: Market access regulations limit the bending of research by industry by limiting epistemic diversity. The patent system can be seen as the thread of a well-functioning scientific system because it can give some agents enough resources to bend science through industrial selection. (shrink)

Integrative structure modeling is a method for using information from multiple sources to compute structural models of biomolecular systems. It proceeds via four steps: (i) defining the model _representation_, which determines the variables whose values will be computed; (ii) constructing a function for _scoring_ alternative models according to how well they accommodate input information; (iii) _searching_ a space of candidate models for acceptable models; and (iv) _analyzing_ acceptable models to evaluate their fit with input information. These steps are iterated until (...) a model adequate for addressing biological questions is found. In this paper, we draw lessons from integrative modeling about effective integration and about modeling. We describe what it means to integrate information from multiple sources: Integration amounts to distributing information among the four steps of integrative modeling. Theory and data alike can be sources of information; this process thus generates _models of information_, rather than models of theory or models of data. We then propose heuristics for distributing information and designing multiple iterations of modeling. Effective iteration requires prioritizing the most reliable information and minimizing the time required to obtain an adequate model. Rather than being constructed from theory and assessed using data, models are constructed from any available information and assessed in a coherentist manner. (shrink)

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) casts human cognition as constitutively dependent on its bodily and environmental context. Drawing on recent empirical work on ‘cognitive offloading’, HEC’s defenders claim that information processing offloaded onto such brain-external resources is sometimes ‘genuinely’ cognitive. But while debates about offloading have a high profile in philosophy of cognitive science, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that paradigm cases of offloading are intentional actions. As a result, opposition to HEC is driven in (...) part by unarticulated intuitions about the metaphysics of human agency. Thinking of action as a kind of interface between separately constituted intentions and bodily movements can make HEC look problematic. But while this view of agency has been popularised – most prominently by Donald Davidson – as analytic philosophy of action’s ‘standard story’, it has come under pressure from philosophers influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe’s very different account. According to this, actions express an agent’s intention only in so far as they fit into the right kind teleologically structured worldly context. In this paper, I’ll argue that HEC’s supporters should adopt an Anscombean model of action. That is, they should understand cognitive offloading as a manifestation of human agency’s general dependence on its bodily and environmental setting. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium ("RE", for short) is a method of justification which works roughly as follows: We start with our pre-theoretical judgements (about, e.g. moral issues) and try to explain them by a systematic theory. This leads to a process in which judgements and principles are mutually adjusted to each other until a state of equilibrium is reached. For more than half a century, RE has been very popular, as well as controversial, among philosophers of many persuasions. Given how frequently the (...) method is mentioned, embraced and attacked, it is surprising that only very few attempts have been made at analysing and developing RE in detail. This topical collection brings together papers that develop RE on a conceptual level, analyse it using formal methods or investigate applications of RE. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to develop an indispensability argument in support of the existence of virtual particles in scattering processes. In order to avoid the Paradox of Infinite Limits, which allegedly poses a challenge to scientific realism, one needs to de-idealize the fictitious systems introduced by the two limiting procedures employed in the perturbation scheme, namely the infinite expansion in Dyson series and the limits for negative and positive infinite times associated with the assumption of free particles. We show (...) that these limits do not introduce essential idealizations, in agreement with scientific realism. What is more, according to our argument, unobservable virtual particles arise as essential approximations and they should be interpreted as propagators of the interaction responsible for subatomic scattering. As such, their existence is based on the use of approximations that matter. (shrink)

The search for origins of human linguistic behavior is a consuming project in many fields. Philosophers drawing on studies of animal behavior are working to revise some of the standard cognitive requirements in hopes of linking the origins of human language to non-human animal communication. This work depends on updates to Grice’s theory of communicative intention and Millikan’s teleosemantics. Yet the classic idea of speaker meaning on which these new projects rest presupposes coherent, stable, individual, internal, and prior intention as (...) a cognitive or mental state, which is also the framework presupposed in theory of mind. This framework neglects the co-authored nature of communicative intentions and is thereby at odds with enactivist views of cognition. In this paper we draw on the idea of participatory sense-making alongside research on non-human animal communication to identify _utterances—_co-authored meaningful acts—as the token of communicative activity cross-species. Utterances by our definition are expressive, relational, and work without mindreading. In closing we propose the possibility of dialogical subjectivity, and engage with animal studies to show that some species exhibit its traits. (shrink)

The “Authority Problem” is the problem that arises when speakers who lack authority successfully perform speech acts that require speaker authority in order to be felicitous. One solution that has been offered to the Authority Problem holds that the non-authoritative speaker of a successful authoritative illocution comes to have authority through a process of presupposition accommodation. I call this solution the Authority Accommodation Analysis, or AAA. In this paper, I argue that there is no Authority Problem, and thus, no need (...) for an AAA. The appearance of the problem relies on a conflation between the _felicity_ of speech acts and their _success_. Yet a speech act can be successfully performed even in the absence of felicity. While authority is often a felicity condition for certain speech acts, I argue that it need not be a success condition. Ultimately, the consequence of my argument is that I must reject conventionalism about illocutionary success. (shrink)

In science, uncertainty is always with us, both in observations and in predictions from theory. This paper investigates the important role played by uncertainty in two related problems in philosophy of science: corroboration and the language-dependence of closeness to truth. When predictions from theory are confronted with observations, the theories can be falsified or corroborated. This is an iterative process, since new observations may falsify a previously corroborated theory. Quantification of uncertainty is crucial in determining whether a prediction is consistent (...) with an observation or not. Moreover, quantitative measures of corroboration must be time-dependent, because they rely on estimates of uncertainty, which are always open to reassessment. We also discuss some consequences of these ideas on corroboration for theories of verisimilitude. In response to Karl Popper’s original concept of verisimilitude, Pavel Tichý offered an alternative method for ranking theories in terms of closeness to truth. David Miller raised objections, showing that rankings within Tichý’s system did not survive transformation into a different mathematical space. This problem is named here the “Miller-Tichý paradox”, and it has implications for the language-dependence of closeness to truth. We show how this paradox can be resolved by taking account of the inevitable uncertainties in observations and in predictions from theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that a neopragmatist approach can allow for normativity to be integrated into a thoroughly naturalist account of mental disorder. A recognition of the malleability of norm-governed social practices reveals language, rationality, and mind to be open-ended, fluid processes that resist characterization in terms of fixed mechanistic structures. This, we will argue, foregrounds the import of vocabularies in determining the structure and content of mindedness. Specifically, the broader role that our discursive practices play in generating minds means that (...) the conditions contemporary psychiatric practice seeks to treat are themselves partly constituted by the vocabularies of treatment adopted. We then offer some positive proposals about how mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) may be enhanced once we replace representational approaches to mind with a vocabulary that explicitly articulates the inherent fluidity of self. To do this we draw on insights from mindfulness’s contextual home, namely Buddhism, and elaborate on the significance this tradition places on the doctrine of “not-self” (_anātman_) as a necessary framework for successful mindfulness practice– a framework that neatly slots into the neopragmatist understanding of mind and self as dynamic and socially constituted. (shrink)

In recent years, (autonomy-centered) enactivism has been used to provide an integrative and relational account of mental conditions. A significant advancement lies in its naturalized and pluralistic treatment of normativity, which transcends traditional objectivist and normativist dichotomies. This article explores the varieties of normativity within this paradigm and their implications for understanding mental conditions. We address purported challenges associated with the integration of social normativity into the enactive naturalistic framework of cognition, particularly concerning mental conditions. Drawing upon the distinction between (...) the constitution problem and the status problem, we conceptualize mental conditions as intersubjectively constituted with an intersubjectively negotiated status. Adopting a participatory sense-making perspective, we address three challenges posed by social movements: (1) Hermeneutical dilemmas related to the ontological openness of mental health categories. (2) The difficulties and urgency to mitigate epistemic injustices. (3) The complex attribution of (social) responsibility in psychological wellbeing. In conclusion, this perspective prompts a reevaluation of epistemological assumptions, advocating for a second-person and engaged perspective on mental conditions. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a new formulation of the experimentalist challenge to the method of cases. Unlike previous attempts to articulate the challenge, the one proposed is based on a clear characterization of the targeted philosophical methodology. The method of cases is explicated as a form of thought experimentation aimed at testing philosophical hypotheses with a distinctive modal force. Given this explication, the empirical evidence gathered by experimental philosophers concerning the instability of case judgments is shown to constitute a stumbling (...) block for the validation of the method as a rational form of hypothesis testing. The experimental challenge is presented as the challenge to compellingly indicate how this stumbling block can be removed, and the method of cases validated as a form of thought experimentation suitable for rationally testing philosophical hypotheses. The challenge, as presented in the text, is shown to be free from all the main criticisms leveled at previous versions of it and as one not yet met. (shrink)

Do perceptual states necessarily constitute evidence epistemically supporting corresponding perceptual beliefs? Susanna Schellenberg thinks so. She argues that perceptual states, veridical or not, necessarily provide (or constitute) a kind of evidence (for the existence of the truth-maker) supporting corresponding perceptual beliefs. She uses “phenomenal evidence” as a label for this kind of evidence and calls her argument “The Phenomenal Evidence Argument.” Having introduced her project, we offer a reconstruction of Schellenberg’s argument (Sect. 2 ). A key premise has it that, (...) necessarily, for items with a function, fulfillment of the function (the good case) is explanatorily and metaphysically prior to function failure (the bad case). We suggest that the etiological theory of functions renders this key premise plausible (Sect. 3 ). However, Schellenberg rejects the etiological theory of functions (Sect. 4 ) and likewise the idea that the epistemic or warranting force of perceptual states is grounded in their being reliably linked to veridical perception (Sect. 5 ). But then what supports the key premise? Schellenberg argues that accurate perception is a part of the _nature_ of perceptual capacities because the nature of perceptual capacities is explained in terms of their function, and their function is to represent accurately (Sect. 6 ). We suggest that Schellenberg is committed to an understanding of priority which doesn’t require any _actual_ good cases—just possible ones (Sect. 7 ). This reading, we argue, is too weak to support the key premise (Sect. 8 ). Given Schellenberg’s commitments, it is not necessarily the case that perceptual states are evidence for a corresponding perceptual belief. Before concluding we discuss an overgeneralization objection to Schellenberg’s argument (Sect. 9 ). (shrink)

You ought to believe in accordance with available evidence. This evidential norm, as widely recognized, can be implausibly demanding by requiring you to hold pointless beliefs. In this paper, I first consider some seemingly promising versions of the positive evidential requirement to form beliefs in accordance with your evidence and argue that they either fail to avoid the problem of pointlessness or fail to bind you independently of practical requirements. I then show that even the negative requirement not to believe (...) against your evidence falls prey to the same problem: either it enjoins pointlessness or its binding force depends essentially on practical norms. This is puzzling, as our epistemic practice seems to presuppose evidential standards that are independent of practical rationality. I suggest that the alleged evidential “norms” are evaluative ‘ought’-statements about what it would be epistemically ideal for you to do, which, on their own, do not issue any genuine prescriptions or demands. (*published with open access). (shrink)

The inferentialism due to Robert Brandom presents a compelling normative-deontic picture of language and discursive practices, and as such it is well positioned to address phenomena like lying. This short work outlines a simple account of how lying can be conceptualized within that framework. To that end, the basic Brandomian position is extended to include a novel type of status – namely, pseudo-commitments, which are unique in their being non-binding. The traditional definition of lying is then given a status-oriented form, (...) such that lying consists in presenting a pseudo-commitment with the intention for it to be attributed as a standard commitment. Importantly, this can be articulated in our scorekeeping practices, which is demonstrated with three example exchanges – one featuring an undetected lie, one featuring a detected lie, and one featuring a bald-faced lie. Though simple, the account works and invites extension to other similar phenomena, like sarcasm, acting, bullshit, etc. The notion of pseudo-commitment may also find application outside of the inferentialist context. (shrink)

This paper provides resources from the philosophy of science to identify differences between explanatory norms across disciplines and to examine their impact on interdisciplinary work. While the body of literature on explanatory norms is expanding rapidly, a consensus on a theoretical framework for systematically identifying norms across disciplines has yet to be reached. The aims of this paper are twofold: (i) to provide such a framework and use it to identify and compare explanatory norms across different domains; and (ii) to (...) derive indications about interdisciplinary practice accordingly. By pursuing these goals, this work aims to be both theoretically significant and practically relevant. It contributes to the ongoing work on explanatory norms; and offers recommendations for the analysis of interdisciplinary science. (shrink)

We relate recent accounts of Wittgenstein-inspired deep disagreement to polarised understandings of sex and gender, considering their strengths and limitations in clarifying clashes that may sometimes appear in our most intimate sexual relationships. Our starting point is a heated and deeply disruptive argument between a man and a woman in a heterosexual relationship, presented in the lyrics and music video for Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige’s song ‘We Cry Together’. We use this example to bring out some of the fixed (...) assumptions about the nature of deep disagreements, seen in Robert J. Fogelin’s account of forms of life, David M. Godden and William H. Brenner’s account of concept determination, Duncan Pritchard’s account of hinge commitments, and Victoria Lavorerio’s account of pictures. Though we find much of the discussion present in these accounts promising, we argue that none are able to grasp the messy, unpredictable, and constantly shifting nature of the (quite ordinary) disagreement in our example. This offers support to scholars who caution against making a priori claims about which topics (e.g. abortion) necessarily evoke deep disagreements, and suggests that we resist attempts to establish, a priori, what deep disagreements _must_ look like, and how they _must_ be resolved. This enables us to bring out the ways in which pig-headedness and self-righteousness, in our example, do not provide reasons to reject this particular disagreement as “genuinely” deep, but provide a picture of an emotional dynamic on which the depth of this particular deep moral disagreement seems to hinge. (shrink)

I argue that, if naturalistic dualism about consciousness is true, there are many conscious beings in the immediate vicinity of each of us. I give two arguments for this conclusion: an argument from analogy and an argument from inference to the best explanation. Both adapt traditional arguments for the existence of other minds. Together, they pose a novel challenge to naturalistic dualism. They also undermine a recent family of arguments for dualism in general and for substance dualism in particular.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are epistemically opaque in the sense that their inner functioning is often unintelligible to human investigators. Inkeri Koskinen has recently argued that this poses special problems for a widespread view in social epistemology according to which thick normative trust between researchers is necessary to handle opacity: if DNNs are essentially opaque, there simply exists nobody who could be trusted to understand all the aspects a DNN picks up during training. In this paper, I present a counterexample (...) from scientific practice, AlphaFold2. I argue that for epistemic reliance on an opaque system, trust is not necessary, but reliability is. What matters is whether, for a given context, the reliability of a DNN has been compellingly established by empirical means and whether there exist trustable researchers who have performed such evaluations adequately. (shrink)

The use of linear regression is ubiquitous across the social and behavioral sciences, and yet researchers rarely hold that the variables in their target systems are in fact linearly related. This raises the question of how to interpret linear regression coefficients when there is ‘functional misspecification’ and the target system exhibits nonlinearity. Here, recent methodological discussions among practitioners have mirrored philosophical debates over scientific realism. In this paper, I frame the prevailing views in terms of their stance on the scientific (...) realism debate. I then present a novel realist interpretation of linear regression—the ‘secant interpretation’—based on a property I derive about the manner in which linear regression coefficients represent properties of non-linear systems of interest. (shrink)

Naive set theory, as practiced in the nineteenth century by Cantor, Dedekind, and Frege, consists of two basic principles: _extensionality_ and _naive comprehension_. According to the latter, _every_ condition determines a set. This is usually formalized by the schema \(\exists y \forall x\, (x \in y \leftrightarrow A(x))\), where \(A(x)\) is any condition on \(x\) in which \(y\) doesn’t occur free. Some philosophers have argued that, since this restriction is in place to avoid paradox, in a logic weak enough to (...) handle paradoxes, the restriction on \(A(x)\) should be lifted in order to better capture the full generality of naive comprehension. I argue that, on the contrary, lifting the restriction doesn’t do more justice to naive comprehension but is the product of a serious misunderstanding of what the principle really says. (shrink)

In his final notebooks, published posthumously as _On Certainty_, Wittgenstein set forth a radical picture of the structure of rational evaluation, one that has arational hinge commitments at its heart. Much of the focus of discussion of hinge commitments has been on the commonsense, Moorean, factual commitments that fall into this class (such as that one has hands, one’s name is such-and-such, and so on). But on a plausible rendering of the Wittgensteinian position, there ought to also be hinge commitments (...) of a broadly axiological nature, which express the subject’s fundamental values (moral, political, and so forth) that comprise her worldview. Various recent proposals for understanding axiological hinge commitments are considered, with most of them found to be problematic. A particular conception of axiological hinge commitments is offered, and their philosophical relevance is explored by considering how they relate to deep moral disagreements. (shrink)

What is active touch? A common conception of active touch gives a rough but rather intuitive sketch. That is, active touch can be understood as mainly object-oriented, controlled movement. While parts or the totality of this characterization is espoused by an important number of researchers on touch, I will argue that this conception faces important challenges when we pay close attention to each of these features. I hold that active touch should be considered as before all else purposive. This view (...) has its roots in the active sensing literature in robotics but will be amended to give insight into human touch in the natural world. (shrink)

The life sciences have evoked long-standing philosophical debates on a system view of life versus a reductionist view that reduces the complexity of life-forms to parts-based entities that can be described purely mechanistically. This paper examines how current scientific advances in the life sciences can contribute to an anti-reductionist concept of life. It does so by looking at synthetic biology, a discipline within the life sciences that has an ambiguous relationship to this debate. While the field’s engineering approach to life (...) could be considered a manifestation of a reductionist view of life, it also builds on a more holistic, systems view of life. This paper analyses recent scientific practices taking place within synthetic biology that seem to challenge the reductionist view of life. After analyzing the main anti-reductionist philosophical accounts of life, I ask how synthetic biology practices can support these accounts of life by considering living systems as processual, collaborative, and cognitive, and life versus nonlife on a more gradual scale. This empirically informed paper contributes to the literature by drawing observations about the concept of life by connecting the following: the reductionist view in the life sciences, the different anti-reductionist metaphysical stances in the philosophy of biology, and the emerging practices in synthetic biology. The paper concludes that synthetic biology can support anti-reductionist views of life in the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Debates surrounding the nature of mental disorder have tended to divide into an objectivist camp that takes psychiatric classification to be a value-free scientific matter, and a normativist camp that takes it to be irreducibly values-based. Here we present an overlooked distinction between _status_ and _constitution_. Questions of the form “What is x?” are ambiguous between status questions (“What gives something the status of an x?”), and constitution questions (“Given that something has the status of an x, what is it (...) made of?”). We elucidate this distinction in detail, and argue that normativism is uniquely well-placed to answer status questions while objectivism provides answers, where they are available, to constitution questions. (shrink)

Since the early debates on teleosemantics, there have been people objecting that teleosemantics cannot account for evolutionarily novel contents such as “democracy” (e.g., Peacocke in A Study of Concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992). Most recently, this objection was brought up by Garson (What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108560764 ) and in a more moderate form by Garson and Papineau (Biol Philos 34(3):36, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9689-8 ). The underlying criticism is that the traditional selected (...) effects theory of functions on which teleosemantics is built is unable to ascribe new functions to the products of ontogenetic processes and thus unable to ascribe functions to new traits that appear during the lifetime of an individual organism. I will argue that this underlying thought rests on rather common misunderstandings of Millikan’s theory of proper functions, especially her notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions (Millikan in Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984: Ch. 2). The notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions not only help us solve the problem of novel contents and can ascribe functions to the products of ontogenetic selection mechanisms but are indispensable parts of every selected effects theory. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel approach to resolving a problem for inferentialist metasemantic theories that arises from a naturalistic point of view. According to normative inferentialists, expressions have their semantic content in virtue of the inferential rules that govern them. This poses a problem because a rule is a naturalistically suspicious normative notion that is used by normative inferentialists as an explanatory tool. I propose a reconciliation of naturalism and inferentialism by adopting a quasi-realist view on inferential rules. (...) According to this approach, inferential rules viewed externally are considered non-normative constitutive rules that are implicit in the dispositions of a linguistic community to allow and prohibit certain inferences. Conversely, from the internal perspective on linguistic practice, inferential rules are treated as regulative and carry a normative force, i.e., they have an action-guiding character because of the fact that they are individually accepted by members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is characterized by long-term changes in perception as a result of practice or experience. In this paper, I argue that through perceptual learning we can become newly sensitive to basic perceptual features. First, I provide a novel account of basic perceptual features. Then, I argue that evidence from experience-based plasticity suggests that basic perceptual features can be learned. Lastly, I discuss the common scientific and philosophical view that perceptual learning comes in at least four varieties: differentiation, unitization, attentional (...) weighting and stimulus imprinting (Goldstone 1998, Connolly 2019). Becoming newly sensitive to basic perceptual features, I argue, does not fit into any of these categories. This paper’s contribution to the literature is twofold. First, I present a novel view of basic perceptual features which can be used in subsequent theorizing. Second, I show that learning basic perceptual features, since it does not fit into this standardized taxonomy, constitutes an underappreciated form of perceptual learning. This result has important implications for recent discussions in the philosophy of perception and epistemology. (shrink)

Silence has been a relatively neglected phenomenon despite its significance in psychiatric research. Acknowledging this oversight, there has been a recent move towards systematically describing the first-personal experience of silence in mental disorders within the field of philosophy of psychiatry. This paper contributes to this research effort by highlighting the underexplored interpersonal aspect of silence crucial for both psychopathological and therapeutic research. More specifically, I develop the interpersonal aspect of distressing silence associated with depression, recently coined as ‘empty silence’. Complementing (...) its original analysis, I argue that this distressing silence not only involves the loss of linguistic agency but also the loss of social agency. Having established this claim, I situate it within the wider research context and open an ethical dimension to the current analysis. I explore this by identifying a therapeutic silence others can establish for an individual undergoing a severe depressive episode. I provisionally term it ‘undemanding silence’ and argue that this form of silence can help restore the loss of social agency by providing a distinct form of social affordance that depressed individuals can easily realise at their own pace. (shrink)

Daniel Nolan successfully predicted a hyperintensional revolution in metaphysics in his 2014 paper ‘Hyperintensional Metaphysicsʼ. He argued that hyperintensionality is not restricted to representations. However, it seems that one of the most promising candidates for non-representational hyperintensionality has not yet been considered as such: art. We will argue that art can provide a rather strong case for non-representational hyperintensionality. One reason for this is that the hyperintensionality of art cannot be captured via a representational kind of hyperintensionality.

How should we measure the quality of experimental research? With talk of a looming “replicability crisis”, this question has gained additional significance. Yet, common measures of research quality based on reliability and validity do not always track core epistemic virtues. To remedy this issue, we draw on information theory and propose a measure of research quality based on mutual information. Mutual information measures how much information an experimental method carries about the world. We show that this measure tracks epistemic virtues (...) that reliability and validity do not. We conclude by discussing implications of this information-theoretic measure of research quality and address some limitations of this approach. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that deep disagreements essentially involve disputes about what counts as good reasoning, whether it is theoretical or practical reasoning. My central claim is that deep disagreements involve radically different paradigms of some principle or notion that is constitutively basic to reasoning—I refer to these as “basic concepts”. To defend this claim, I show how we can understand deep disagreements by accepting the indeterminacy of concept-formation: concepts are not set in stone but are responsive to human (...) needs, and differences in individuating and ordering concepts lead to clashes in paradigms of reasoning. These clashes can be difficult to resolve because linguistic concepts, especially basic concepts, impose a normative structure onto thought to make reasoning possible at all. This, I also argue, is an authentically Wittgensteinian account of the nature of reasoning. While deep disagreements involving theoretical and practical reasoning both stem from the same root problem of clashing paradigms of basic concepts, I will also draw attention to the particularly radical indeterminacy of moral concept-formation, which makes moral deep disagreements more difficult to resolve. Over the course of the paper, I will discuss two examples of deep disagreements to illustrate and defend my central claim: deep disagreements over vaccines and the concept of “evidence” (theoretical reasoning) and deep disagreements over affirmative action and the concept of “fairness” (practical reasoning). I conclude by suggesting how my account of reasoning does not lead to moral relativism. (shrink)

Advocates of Structuralist theories of phenomenal intentionality maintain that the content of perceptual experiences depends on the relations among their phenomenal components. This paper extends this view beyond basic perceptual experiences to mental imagery and experiences of seeing-as without relying on cognitive phenomenology. I develop a Structuralist account of mental imagery that distinguishes between two types of imaginative content, one of which is determined by an image’s sensory phenomenal character, while the other derives from the representation that produced the image. (...) This proposal is then combined with a treatment of certain representations I call perceptual concepts to provide a Structuralist account of experiences of seeing-as. On this account, the deployment of perceptual concepts in experiences of seeing-as alters the phenomenal character and content of such experiences by imbuing them with imagery, thereby making them perceptual/imaginative hybrids. (shrink)

This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the “classical” extended mind, characterised by conditions such as “trust and glue” and phenomenal (...) transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent’s biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind. (shrink)

The symptoms and associated features of mental disorders can include profound and often debilitating effects on behaviour, mood and attitude, social interactions, and engagement with the world more generally. One area of living that is closely tied to mental disorder is that of our intellectual lives, pursuits, and projects. If the symptoms and features of mental disorders can have significance when it comes to intellectual activity, however, it is plausible that they can also have significance when it comes to epistemic-normative (...) questions. I.e., questions concerning whether a person conducts their intellectual activities as they should and what is the normative status of the outputs of those activities. In this paper, I introduce the concepts of _epistemic health_ and _epistemic disorder_ as tools to examine and help understand the relationship between mental health, mental disorders, and epistemic agency. To do so, I explore the connections between a key aspect of our epistemic lives, _epistemic self-trust_ and its associated maladjustments, _self-distrust_ and _excess self-trust_, and a specific mental disorder, _bipolar disorder_. Drawing upon empirical work on metacognition and extracts from Kay Redfield Jamison’s bipolar memoir An Unquiet Mind, I argue that there is a significant association between bipolar disorder, the symptoms of depression and mania, and the risk of self-distrust and excess self-trust. In this light, I suggest that consideration of this relationship helps us to recognise how self-trust can be the site of a significant vulnerability with respect to one’s epistemic agency that merits the label of an epistemic disorder. (shrink)

Recovery from eating disorders is known to be difficult. Individuals with eating disorders are generally poorly responsive to change: their eating behaviour is rigid, and they are often inflexible as regards their eating-related goals. This opens up questions about their agency in eating. Why do individuals with eating disorders not “just stop” performing problematic eating behaviour, despite the enormous burden this behaviour may inflict in their lives? In this article, we seek to answer this question by providing a clear view (...) of individuals’ own role in the development of and recovery from their eating disorders. Specifically, we adopt a situated perspective on agency to explain the poor responsiveness to change characteristic of these conditions. We suggest that in the pursuit of eating-related goals, individuals with eating disorders develop a project-like relation to eating, which not only pervasively changes the arrangement and content of their lives, but also their lives’ meaning. On this basis, we argue that the goal-inflexibility and rigidity of eating behaviour often ascribed to them might not be grounded in disorders or impairments of agency, but can in fact be understood in terms of their agency in eating. This is what we call the “life project account” of eating disorders. (shrink)

Although contemporary analytic epistemology continues to be dominated by externalist accounts, an alternative internalist approach has recently emerged that emphasizes the epistemic role of consciousness, in particular of conscious experience. According to the phenomenological experience-first epistemology (PEFE) discussed in this paper, certain experiences constitute a source of immediate justification as well as our ultimate evidence. One reason why internalist approaches are less popular in current debates is the common assumption that externalism fits better with scientific practice. In this picture, the (...) natural sciences are typically understood as adopting a third-person perspective that successfully abstracts away from the subject and her personal experiences. Here, I discuss an alternative view of science, namely science as understood within the framework of agent-centered approaches to quantum mechanics. More specifically, my focus will be on QBism, a highly controversial but increasingly popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, whose defining feature is the interpretation of quantum probabilities as subjective Bayesian probabilities. The objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between epistemology and science under the assumption that both PEFE and QBism are correct. (shrink)

What is it for a _belief_ to wrong someone? Views that have largely shaped the recent literature on doxastic wronging maintain that beliefs that wrong do so in virtue of _what_ is believed. This paper offers some criticisms of these views, as well as a contractualist alternative. On the view I defend here, beliefs can wrong when they stem from inferences licensed by principles to which others would have sufficiently weighty objections. Doxastic wronging, on this account, is not (or is (...) not entirely) a matter of having beliefs with certain kinds of objectionable representational content, but rather a matter of our being unable to _morally justify_ our beliefs to others. (shrink)

Remembering one’s past generically is a rather ordinary feature of mental life. I can recall my daily commute to campus, from my past perspective on my bicycle, without thereby picking out one specific occasion on which I made that commute. Memories of this form have received little theoretical attention in the philosophical literature, in part because it is difficult to see how to divorce _episodic_ modes of representation from representational _uniqueness_. The current paper makes progress on the question of how (...) an episodic memory could have for its intentional object something that is not a unique episode. It proposes an analysis of generic episodic memories on which the remembering subject represents an event _type_. Genericity over episodes is best explained in terms of the subject’s knowledge of what it was like to experience events of that type. (shrink)

Coercion is still highly prevalent in contemporary psychiatry. Qualitative research indicates, however, that patients and psychiatric staff have different understandings of what they mean by ‘coercion’. Psychiatric staff primarily employ the concept as referring to instances of formal coercion regulated by law, such as involuntary hospital admission or treatment. Patients, on the other hand, use a broader concept, which also understands many instances of informal psychological pressure as coercive. We point out that the predominance of a narrow concept of coercion (...) in psychiatry can have negative consequences for patients, and argue that this difference in how the concept ‘coercion’ is used is both grounded in epistemic oppression and reinforces such oppression. Epistemic oppression, as defined by Dotson, refers to the persistent epistemic exclusion of members of marginalized groups from participation in practices of knowledge production. We first demonstrate how patients may experience inferential inertia when communicating their experiences of coercion. We then show that the resulting predominance of a narrow concept of coercion in psychiatry can be described as a case of hermeneutical injustice in a context shaped by institutional hermeneutical ignorance. We argue for a change in institutional practices in psychiatry that allows for the adequate consideration of patients’ perspectives on coercion. (shrink)

Manifold learning and effective model building are generally viewed as fundamentally different types of procedure. After all, in one we build a simplified model of the data, in the other, we construct a simplified model of the another model. Nonetheless, I argue that certain kinds of high-dimensional effective model building, and effective field theory construction in quantum field theory, can be viewed as special cases of manifold learning. I argue that this helps to shed light on all of these techniques. (...) First, it suggests that the effective model building procedure depends upon a certain kind of algorithmic compressibility requirement. All three approaches assume that real-world systems exhibit certain redundancies, due to regularities. The use of these regularities to build simplified models is essential for scientific progress in many different domains. (shrink)

Lampert and Waldrop have recently presented a puzzle about moral responsibility and logical truth, in which they derive a contradiction from three apparently plausible principles: (A) no one is responsible for any logical truth; (B) if no one is responsible for something, then no one is responsible for what it strictly implies; and (C) someone is responsible for something. They argue that, in response, we must give up (B)—a principle that plays a key role in arguments for incompatibilism. In this (...) paper, I argue that this response is mistaken, and that the lesson to be drawn lies elsewhere. For the puzzle also rests on a conception of logical truth according to which there are contingent logical truths. And, given this conception, (A) is false—for reasons independent of (B). So the import here concerns, not a connection between responsibility and the debate over incompatibilism, but a connection between responsibility and the debate over the correct conception of logical truth: one can hold on to (A), or hold on to the relevant conception of logical truth, but not both. (shrink)

Kant claims that empirical laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity” (Kant, 1998 ; A159/B198). What precisely is this “expression of necessity” and what grounds it? The metaphysical necessitation approach asks “What are laws of nature for Kant?” It answers that, for Kant, empirical laws possess necessity and are grounded in the properties and causal powers essential to natural kinds. The epistemological systematization approach claims that empirical natures, kinds and causal laws are rightly viewed as necessitating in (...) virtue of the place they ideally take within an ultimate systematic conception of nature. The paper defends a hybrid transcendental-idealist approach to empirical necessity. It argues that Kant offers a transcendental deduction of the a priori principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature. In contrast to the systematization approach, this builds necessity into our most fundamental, conceptually articulated experience of nature. The approach can furthermore complement metaphysical necessitation accounts by showing that the commitment to necessitation follows from the metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism and the critical project of articulating the a priori transcendental conditions of experience. Recognizing the transcendental status of the principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature thus allows us to merge valuable insights of both the epistemological systematization and the metaphysical necessitation views. (shrink)

Let {‘is a woodchuck’, ‘is a groundhog’} be a pair of synonymous lexical predicates. Are they intersubstitutable within a fine-grained attitude ascription without affecting either the truth-value of the ascription or the content of the attitude? I will show that synonymy is sufficient to preserve substitutability within any non-quotational context. Only this requires that substitution is executed within a semantics that observes semantic and epistemic transparency also in contexts such as hyperintensional belief reports. I will develop my argument within Transparent (...) Intensional Logic. I use my pro-substitution claim to argue against one wrong reason for fine-graining, which introduces logical distinctions without semantic differences. (shrink)

In a merely verbal agreement, a misunderstanding between two parties creates the false impression of agreement: one or both parties think they agree on something, when in fact they do not. There is reason to believe that merely verbal agreements are as common as merely verbal disagreements and disputes. Unlike the latter, however, merely verbal agreements have so far been ignored by philosophers. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify what merely verbal agreement is by considering various (...) ways of defining and refining the notion; and second, to explore the effects of merely verbal agreement on conversational common ground, collaborative action, and academic philosophy. It will be argued that merely verbal agreement is best understood in terms of divergent speaker-meanings, that it has specific negative effects on common ground, that it impedes collaborative action, and that it is likely to play a significant role in academic philosophy. (shrink)

Recent years have seen incredible advances in our abilities to gather and store data, as well as in the computational power and methods—most prominently in machine learning—to do things with those data. These advances have given rise to the emerging field “data science.” Because of its immense power for providing practically useful information about the world, data science is a field of increasing importance. This paper argues that a core part of what data scientists are doing should be understood as (...) conceptual engineering. At all stages of the data science process, data scientists need to deliberate about, evaluate, and make classificatory choices in a variety of ways, including as part of training and evaluating machine learning models. Viewing these activities as involved in conceptual engineering offers a new way to think about them, one that helps to clarify what is at stake in them, what sorts of considerations are relevant, and how to systematically think about the choices faced. Given the increasing importance of data science, if conceptual engineering is relevant for activities in data science, this also highlights the relevance and impact of conceptual engineering as a method. Furthermore, the paper also suggests that machine learning opens distinctive and novel ways in which data scientists engage in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

This paper defends a theory of how it is that games are identical both at a time and over time. I argue that this view is an improvement over the account that Michael Ridge defends in his paper “Individuating Games”. This improvement involves a distinction between two kinds of individuation: constitutive individuation and relational individuation. I argue that this distinction does a better job at solving the various puzzles that are related to the synchronic and diachronic identity of games. I (...) go on to show how this approach can be applied to other social entities. (shrink)

Many draw the distinction between truth in, and truth at, a possible world. The latter notion purportedly allows for propositions to be true relative to worlds even if they do not exist relative to those same worlds. Despite its wide application, the distinction is controversial. Some think that the notion of truth at a world is unintelligible. Here, I outline and discuss the most influential argument for the unintelligibility of truth at a world, _The Picture Thinking Argument_. I outline and (...) defend a neglected strategy to respond to this, arguing that if we take seriously the idea that possible worlds represent total ways the world could be, the distinction can be drawn intelligibly. (shrink)

How does thinking in terms of truth contribute to our knowledge of the world? Moreover, what might the answers to this question tell us about truth itself? The aim of this paper is to canvas several roles of the truth concept for first-order inquiry (that is, inquiry into extra-linguistic and extra-mental reality) and then relate these answers to the ongoing inflationism-deflationism debate. I argue that the deflationary conception of truth is more versatile than is often appreciated, but there is nonetheless (...) one role that is uniquely inflationary. I call this role ‘representing semantic determinants’. In short, I argue that inflationism permits substantive explanations of the truth-conditional semantic facts and that such explanations can occasionally play a role in investigating certain first-order claims. (shrink)

Following Robert Fogelin’s work, philosophers have traditionally analysed deep disagreements in Wittgenstein’s thought through the lens of “On Certainty.” This paper explores another fruitful avenue for understanding Wittgenstein’s views on deep disagreements: this avenue lies in examining the form of disagreement that arises between believers and non-believers, as documented in his “Lectures on Religious Belief”. Drawing on this text and others, I will try to demonstrate how deep disagreement, starting from a situation of incompatibility and mutual non-persuasiveness between the parties, (...) can, through the intermediary stage of mutual partial emotive understanding, lead sometimes to an extreme form of resolution: the conversion of one’s own way of seeing things to that of the other party. This conversion, however, does not rely on an appeal to explanations, reasons, or rationality. Instead, it appeals to the overcoming of a blockage by the will. This concept of a complete reorientation of one’s own perspective is central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and may even be considered the ultimate goal of his mature work. (shrink)

In this paper, I grapple with the question: What attitude should we take to conceptual engineering? Particularly, I consider whether cautious optimism is warranted when conceptual engineering is understood as a means of promoting social justice. For Simion and Kelp (Noûs 54(4):985–1002, 2019), evolutionary biology and biotechnology serve as useful analogical sources for grounding optimism. In response, I argue that (1) even if the analogy holds, optimism cannot inferred from biology to conceptual engineering, and (2) the analogy breaks down. However, (...) I show that this does not mean that optimism is unwarranted. There is still a case to made for the possibility that material conditions can be intentionally manipulated in a way that would generate welcomed conceptual consequences. I call this _the pre-implementation challenge._. (shrink)

Many philosophers agree that philosophical inquiry has become more reliant on scientific research in recent decades. Some go so far as to speak of a methodological revolution. However, there is almost no systematic evidence about when, where and in what way these changes took place—if indeed, they did. To change this, we made use of citation analysis. We collected a large corpus of 9954 articles published in three high-profile generalist philosophy journals (_Noûs_; _Philosophical Studies_; _Synthese_) since 1971. We then extracted (...) reference lists from these articles and associated references to articles with their academic discipline(s) based on the publication they appeared in. We find that the overall proportions of articles from the sciences broadly understood and of articles from disciplines that primarily output empirical research referenced in these journals has seen little change over the last 50 years. At the same time, we also find that there have been major changes with respect to the specific disciplines philosophers cite from: disciplines that focus on the (empirical) study of human thought and behaviour have gained in importance, while the importance of the formal and physical sciences has been declining. We discuss the implications of our findings, and address potential criticisms and limitations of our research and the conclusions we draw from it. (shrink)

It has been over 60 years since Ernst Mayr famously argued for the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. In the following decades, Mayr’s proximate-ultimate distinction was well received within evolutionary biology and widely regarded as a major contribution to the philosophy of biology. Despite its enormous influence, there has been a persistent controversy on the distinction. It has been argued that the distinction is untenable. In addition, there have been complaints about the pragmatic value of the distinction (...) in biological research. Some even suggest that the distinction should better be abandoned. In contrast, Mayr had consistently maintained the significance of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology. There are also other attempts to defend the distinction. The paper examines the debate by taking an integrated History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) approach and argues for a functional approach to causal concepts in scientific practice. (shrink)

This paper examines a form of talking about speech acts, mental states, and other features so far unexplored in philosophy: quotative _be like._ Quotative _be like_ is the use of _like_ and _to be_ that occurs in constructions such as “Ellen was like“I’m leaving!”” We argue that neglect of quotative _be like_ represents a gap in our understanding of our ways of characterizing the minds and speech of ourselves and others. Further, we show that quotative _be like_ is not reducible (...) to more familiar forms of direct discourse or indirect discourse. Mapping out a number of different options for theorizing about quotative _be like_, we argue for an account on which the quoted material in quotative _be like_ picks out properties. (shrink)

We present a sound and complete axiomatisation of the epistemic logic \(\textsf {C.RC}\). In the logic, the propositional fragment is \(\textsf {C}\) lassical, while agents’ epistemic attitudes are closed under on–topic relevant consequence, as modeled by \(\textsf {R}\) elevant \(\textsf {C}\) ontainment logic. By doing so, \(\textsf {C.RC}\) complies with a principle of minimal mutilation of classical logic and lifts some limitations of existing frameworks, such as (i) logics of analytic implication, (ii) topic-sensitive analyses of epistemic modals, and (iii) the (...) logic of relevant reasoners in classical worlds. (shrink)

When we make transformative choices, there is always a risk of regret. While a decision-maker may predict that she will not regret her choice, others might predict the opposite and attempt to prevent her from proceeding to shield her from future regret. This paper argues that there is a pro tanto epistemic reason against such intervention because, ceteris paribus, it is prima facie irrational for others to maintain their belief (that she will regret) without deferring to the decision-maker’s own prediction. (...) This is because, unlike others, the decision-maker knows what it is like to live her current life, which puts her in a better epistemic position to make the regret prediction. (shrink)

Margaret Boden famously theorizes that the highest form of creativity is more than the production of new ideas—it involves the transformation of a conceptual space consisting of all possible ideas that a person can obtain. This article examines whether this notion of transformative creativity can be applied to the field of biology. Biological transformative creativity (BTC) is theoretically conceivable if an extension of Boden’s original framework is allowed to include non-conceptual spaces as the object of transformation. However, identifying specific biological (...) phenomena that warrant the label of transformative creativity in living systems poses a substantial challenge. After scrutinizing two recent theories regarding BTC—one connecting BTC to evolution and the other equaling it to self-organization—this paper turns to a third alternative hypothesis that emphasizes the autonomous, self-productive mechanisms through which novel organizational patterns and morphological features take shape. To unpack this idea, the paper draws on extensive evidence in epigenetic studies and argues that autonomous transformation of overall possibilities of living organisms occurs at the individual level primarily due to flexible modifications of gene expression norms in the organism. Then, the paper analyzes the developmental plasticity of _C. elegans_ and the origin and differentiation of castes in social insects as two examples of the epigenetic form of BTC. The account is expected to contribute to a more appropriate understanding of the origin of human creativity and the creative nature of life. (shrink)

The view that our best current physics deals with effective systems has gained philosophical traction in the last two decades. A similar view about open systems has also been picking up steam in recent years. Yet little has been said about how the concepts of effective and open systems relate to each other despite their apparent kinship—both indeed seem at first sight to presuppose that the system in question is somehow incomplete. In this paper, I distinguish between two concepts of (...) effectiveness and openness in quantum field theory, which provides a remarkably well-developed theoretical framework to make a first stab at the matter, and argue that on both counts, every realistic effective system in this context is also open. I conclude by highlighting how the discussion opens novel avenues for thinking of systems as open across scales. (shrink)