Synthese

ISSNs: 0039-7857, 1573-0964

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  1.  80
    The Experience of Dysmenorrhea.Carlota Serrahima & Manolo Martínez - 2023 - Synthese 201 (173):1-22.
    Dysmenorrhea, or menstrual pain, is regularly suffered by 45 to 95% of menstruating women. Despite its prevalence, and despite the philosophical importance of pain as a general phenomenon, dysmenorrhea has been all but completely overlooked in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. This paper aims at rectifying this situation. We single out three properties of what is often considered the paradigmatic case of painful experience, what we call injury-centered pains, and argue that dysmenorrhea does not have any of them, and hence (...)
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  2.  77
    Irrationality and Indecision.Jan-Paul Sandmann - 2023 - Synthese 201 (137):1-20.
    On the standard interpretation, if a person holds cyclical preferences, the person is prone to acting irrationally. I provide a different interpretation, tying cyclical preferences not to irrationality, but to indecision. According to this alternative understanding – coined the indecision interpretation – top cycles in a person’s preferences can be associated with a difficulty in justifying one’s choice. If an agent’s justificatory impasse persists despite attempts to resolve the cycle, the agent can be deemed undecided. The indecision interpretation is compatible (...)
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  3. Gender and first-person authority.Gus Turyn - 2023 - Synthese 201 (122):1-19.
    Following Talia Mae Bettcher, many philosophers distinguish between ethical and epistemic conceptions of the first-person authority that we have over our gender identities. Rather than construing this authority as explained by our superior epistemic access to our own gender identities, many have argued that we should view this authority as explained by ethical obligations that we have towards others. But such views remain silent on what we ought to believe about others’ gender identities: when someone avows their gender identity, should (...)
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  4.  49
    Vice epistemology, norm-maintenance and epistemic evasiveness.Adam Piovarchy - 2023 - Synthese 201 (105):1-20.
    Vice epistemology studies how character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles systematically get in the way of knowledge, while doxastic responsibility is concerned with what kinds of responses are appropriate towards agents who believe badly. This paper identifies a new connection between these two fields, arguing that our propensity to take responsibility for our doxastic failures is directly relevant for vice epistemology, and in particular, understanding the social obstacles to knowledge that epistemic vices can create. This is because responses to norm (...)
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  5.  20
    Luck and the Value of Communication.Megan Hyska - 2023 - Synthese 201 (96):1-19.
    Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article (...)
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  6.  85
    The Modal Basis of Scientific Modelling.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Synthese 201 (75):1-16.
    The practice of scientific modelling often resorts to hypothetical, false, idealised, targetless, partial, generalised, and other types of modelling that appear to have at least partially non-actual targets. In this paper, I will argue that we can avoid a commitment to non-actual targets by sketching a framework where models are understood as having networks of possibilities as their targets. This raises a further question: what are the truthmakers for the modal claims that we can derive from models? I propose that (...)
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  7.  18
    Generics and Metalinguistic Negotiation.David Plunkett, Rachel Katharine Sterken & Timothy Sundell - 2023 - Synthese 201 (50):1-46.
    In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers argue about (...)
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  8.  34
    Debunking Interface Theory: Why Hoffman's Skepticism (Really) is Self-Defeating.Jeffrey N. Bagwell - 2023 - Synthese 201 (25):1-23.
    Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and others have recently advanced an evolutionary debunking argument aimed at our perceptual beliefs in ordinary objects, based on the Interface Theory of Perception. In contrast with most recent criticisms of Interface Theory, which have targeted its characterizations of perception and veridicality, I raise a broad dialectical problem for Hoffman’s debunking argument. I show that the argument is self-defeating, and that responding to this problem by appealing to Universal Darwinism leads to a fatal dilemma for the (...)
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  9. Accuracy and Infinity: A Dilemma for Subjective Bayesians.Mikayla Kelley & Sven Neth - 2023 - Synthese 201 (12):1-14.
    We argue that subjective Bayesians face a dilemma: they must offend against the spirit of their permissivism about rational credence or reject the principle that one should avoid accuracy dominance.
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  10. What must be lost: on retrospection, authenticity, and some neglected costs of transformation.Olivia Bailey - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-18.
    A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences (...)
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  11. On automorphism criteria for comparing amounts of mathematical structure.Thomas William Barrett, J. B. Manchak & James Owen Weatherall - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-14.
    Wilhelm (Forthcom Synth 199:6357–6369, 2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing structure of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM \(^*\), another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM \(^*\). We then formulate a new criterion that improves on both SYM \(^*\) and Subgroup, answering Wilhelm’s criticisms of SYM \(^*\) along the way. We conclude by arguing that no criterion that looks only to the (...)
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  12. Can fanaticism be a liberatory virtue?Heather Battaly - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-27.
    Quassim Cassam (Cassam, Extremism, Routledge, 2022a) and Paul Katsafanas (Katsafanas, Philosopher’s Imprint 19:1–20, 2019) have argued that fanaticism and extremism are morally and epistemically vicious. I suggest an alternative approach that: (i) explains what makes fanaticism and extremism vicious in the very many cases in which they are; but also (ii) allows for cases in which fanaticism and extremism aren’t vices and may even be liberatory-virtues. My hope is that this approach might serve as a resource for those in liberatory (...)
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  13. Inductive knowledge under dominance.Marco C. Campi - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-29.
    Inductive reasoning aims at constructing rules and models of general applicability from a restricted set of observations. Induction is a keystone in natural sciences, and it influences diverse application fields such as engineering, medicine and economics. More generally, induction plays a major role in the way humans learn and operate in their everyday life. The level of reliability that a model achieves depends on how informative the observations are relative to the flexibility of the process by which the model is (...)
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  14.  2
    The pragmatic structure of refusal.Laura Caponetto - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...)
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  15. Distinctive substantial self-knowledge and the possibility of self-improvement.Josep E. Corbí - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-22.
    Quassim Cassam distinguishes between trivial and substantial cases of self-knowledge. At first sight, trivial cases are epistemically distinctive insofar as the agent needn't provide any sort of evidence to ground her claim to knowledge. Substantial cases of self-knowledge such as ‘I know I want to have a second child’ do not seem to bear this distinctive relation to evidence. I will argue, however, that substantial cases of self-knowledge are often epistemically distinctive and, to this end, I will challenge a crucial (...)
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  16. Know-how and why self-regulation will not go away.Benjamin Elzinga - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-24.
    In the 1940s, Gilbert Ryle argued that knowing how to do something is not just a matter of being well-regulated but also a matter of self-regulation. Ryle appears to have thought that know-how requires self-regulation in both a backward-looking and forward-looking sense, but both ideas run counter to ordinary intuitions about know-how. The basic idea behind self-regulation, undertaking trials and adjusting to feedback, is captured by the “law of effect.” Daniel Dennett has argued that the “law of effect will not (...)
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  17. Understanding of the norm of political discourse.Emma C. Gordon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-13.
    It is argued that understanding is the norm of political discourse, and it is shown why political assertions can be epistemically problematic within a liberal democracy even when asserted knowledgeably.
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  18.  57
    Resurrecting the Hume's Dictum argument against metaethical non-naturalism.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-23.
    I argue for the viability of one neglected way of developing supervenience-based objections to metaethical non-naturalism. This way goes through a principle known as ‘Hume’s Dictum’, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I challenge several objections to the Hume’s Dictum-based argument. In the course of doing so, I formulate and motivate modest and precise versions of Hume’s Dictum, illustrate how arguments employing these principles might proceed, and argue that the Hume’s Dictum argument enjoys some advantages (...)
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  19. Comparative success and empirical progress without approximate truth.Jonathon Hricko - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-22.
    This paper argues against a particular version of the inference from the success of a scientific theory to the claim that the theory must be approximately true to some extent. The kind of success at issue is comparative, where one theory is more empirically successful than its rival if that theory predicts phenomena that are inexplicable or anomalous according to its rival. A theory that exhibits this kind of comparative success can be seen as thereby achieving empirical progress over its (...)
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  20. Naturalized metaphysics or displacing metaphysicians to save metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-25.
    Naturalized metaphysics aims to establish justified metaphysical claims, where metaphysics is meant to carry its usual significance, while avoiding the traditional methods of metaphysics—a priori reasoning, conceptual analysis, intuitions, and common sense—which naturalized metaphysics argues are not epistemically probative. After offering an explication of what it means to do metaphysics, this paper argues that naturalized metaphysics, at the outset, is hospitable to doing metaphysics. The underdetermination of metaphysics by science, however, changes the picture. Naturalized metaphysics has to break this underdetermination, (...)
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  21. Accounting for Doxastic Agency: Mental Action and Self-Awareness.Sophie Keeling - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-24.
    Uncontroversially, individuals exercise agency in acting; can we say the same about believing? This paper argues that subjects do indeed exercise agency over their beliefs and provides an account by which this is possible. On my picture, self-awareness is fundamental to the nature of doxastic agency. Drawing on work in the philosophy of action, I argue that subjects exercise agency in performing mental actions that form and sustain their beliefs, where they are aware of these actions as part of reasoning (...)
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  22. Model templates: transdisciplinary application and entanglement.Tarja Knuuttila & Andrea Loettgers - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-23.
    The omnipresence of the same basic equations, function forms, algorithms, and quantitative methods is one of the most spectacular characteristics of contemporary modeling practice. Recently, the emergence of the discussion of templates and template transfer has addressed this striking cross-disciplinary reach of certain mathematical forms and computational algorithms. In this paper, we develop a notion of a model template, consisting of its mathematical structure, ontology, prototypical properties and behaviors, focal conceptualizations, and the paradigmatic questions it addresses. We apply this notion (...)
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  23. Kinds of modalities and modeling practices.Rami Koskinen - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-15.
    Several recent accounts of modeling have focused on the modal dimension of scientific inquiry. More precisely, it has been suggested that there are specific models and modeling practices that are best understood as being geared towards possibilities, a view recently dubbed modal modeling. But modalities encompass much more than mere possibility claims. Besides possibilities, modal modeling can also be used to investigate contingencies, necessities or impossibilities. Although these modal concepts are logically connected to the notion of possibility, not all models (...)
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  24. How much do you trust me? A logico-mathematical analysis of the concept of the intensity of trust.Michele Loi, Andrea Ferrario & Eleonora Viganò - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-30.
    Trust and monitoring are traditionally antithetical concepts. Describing trust as a property of a relationship of reliance, we introduce a theory of trust and monitoring, which uses mathematical models based on two classes of functions, including _q_-exponentials, and relates the levels of trust to the costs of monitoring. As opposed to several accounts of trust that attempt to identify the special ingredient of reliance and trust relationships, our theory characterizes trust as a quantitative property of certain relations of reliance that (...)
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  25.  19
    Perception needs modular stimulus-control.Anders Nes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-30.
    Perceptual processes differ from cognitive, this paper argues, in functioning to be causally controlled by proximal stimuli, and being modular, at least in a modest sense that excludes their being isotropic in Jerry Fodor's sense. This claim agrees with such theorists as Jacob Beck and Ben Phillips that a function of stimulus-control is needed for perceptual status. In support of this necessity claim, I argue, inter alia, that E.J. Green's recent architectural account misclassifies processes deploying knowledge of grammar as perceptual. (...)
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  26. Correction to: Epistemic diversity and industrial selection bias.Manuela Fernández Pinto & Daniel Fernández Pinto - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-1.
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  27. Critical social ontology.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...)
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  28.  2
    Don’t be deceived: bald-faced lies are deceitful assertions.Jakub Rudnicki & Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-21.
    The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that _prima facie_ look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses of the (...)
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  29. Frege on the introduction of real and complex numbers by abstraction and cross-sortal identity claims.Matthias Schirn - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-18.
    In this article, I try to shed new light on Frege’s envisaged definitional introduction of real and complex numbers in _Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik_ (1884) and the status of cross-sortal identity claims with side glances at _Grundgesetze der Arithmetik_ (vol. I 1893, vol. II 1903). As far as I can see, this topic has not yet been discussed in the context of _Grundlagen_. I show why Frege’s strategy in the case of the projected definitions of real and complex numbers in (...)
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  30. The epistemic challenge to longtermism.Christian Tarsney - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-37.
    _Longtermists_ claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict—perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that end, I (...)
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  31. Conjoined cases.Tomasz Wysocki - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    Incorporating normality ascriptions into counterfactual theories of causation was supposed to handle isomorphs. It doesn’t—conjoining isomorphs can produce cases that such ascriptions cannot resolve.
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  32.  9
    Is there causation in fundamental physics? New insights from process matrices and quantum causal modelling.Emily Adlam - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-40.
    In this article we set out to understand the significance of the process matrix formalism and the quantum causal modelling programme for ongoing disputes about the role of causation in fundamental physics. We argue that the process matrix programme has correctly identified a notion of ‘causal order’ which plays an important role in fundamental physics, but this notion is weaker than the common-sense conception of causation because it does not involve asymmetry. We argue that causal order plays an important role (...)
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  33.  11
    A Defence of the Austere View of Nonsense.Krystian Bogucki - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-30.
    The austere view of nonsense says that the source of nonsense is not a violation of the rules of logical syntax, but nonsense is always due to a lack of meaning in one of the components of a sentence. In other words, the necessary and sufficient condition for nonsensicality is that no meaning has been assigned to a constituent in a sentence. The austere conception is the key ingredient of the resolute reading of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that presents a therapeutical interpretation (...)
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  34.  17
    Natural meaning, probabilistic meaning, and the interpretation of emotional signs.Constant Bonard - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-24.
    When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative intentions. I argue that Grice’s notion of natural meaning, because (...)
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  35. The relationship between strong belief and assumption.Adam Brandenburger, Amanda Friedenberg & H. Jerome Keisler - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-18.
    We define two maps, one map from the set of conditional probability systems (CPS’s) onto the set of lexicographic probability systems (LPS’s), and another map from the set of LPS’s with full support onto the set of CPS’s. We use these maps to establish a relationship between strong belief (defined on CPS’s) and assumption (defined on LPS’s). This establishes a relationship at the abstract level between these two widely used notions of belief in an extended probability-theoretic setting.
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  36. Correction to: Broad Medical Uncertainty and the ethical obligation for openness.Rebecca C. H. Brown, Mícheál de Barra & Brian D. Earp - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-1.
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  37.  4
    Hinges in the knowledge economy. on greco’s common and procedural knowledge.Annalisa Coliva - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-18.
    In his “Common knowledge” (2016) and _The Transmission of Knowledge_ (2021), John Greco proposes a novel account of hinge propositions. Central to it is the idea that they are items of common knowledge – that is, of knowledge that is already present in the system, freely available to anyone, without having to figure it out by oneself or having to be taught it by others. As such, they are not subject to any quality control at all. Furthermore, they figure in (...)
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  38.  8
    Modals model models: scientific modeling and counterfactual reasoning.Daniel Dohrn - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-22.
    Counterfactual reasoning has been used to account for many aspects of scientific reasoning. More recently, it has also been used to account for the scientific practice of modeling. Truth in a model is truth in a situation considered as counterfactual. When we reason with models, we reason with counterfactuals. Focusing on selected models like Bohr’s atom model or models of population dynamics, I present an account of how the imaginative development of a counterfactual supposition leads us from reality to interesting (...)
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  39.  2
    Linguistic modalities and the sources of linguistic utterances.Anna Drożdżowicz - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-24.
    As an object of philosophical study, language is typically considered as an abstract object rather than a lived phenomenon that comes with rich and varied phenomenology. And yet our modes of engaging with language are complex and many. The first goal of this paper is to illustrate this variety by looking at some of the linguistic modalities and forms of communication. The second goal is to suggest that at least in some specific philosophical debates, language and communication should be investigated (...)
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  40.  3
    Expert deference and Adams conditionalization.Patryk Dziurosz-Serafinowicz - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-21.
    The standard principle of expert deference says that conditional on the expert’s credence in a proposition _A_ being _x_, your credence in _A_ ought to be _x_. The so-called Adams conditionalization is an attractive update rule in situations when learning experience prompts a shift in your conditional credences. In this paper, I show that, except in some trivial situations, when your prior conditional credence in _A_ obeys the standard principle of expert deference and then is revised by Adams conditionalization in (...)
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  41.  5
    Correction to: Computer verification for historians of philosophy.Landon D. C. Elkind - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-1.
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  42. Teleology and mechanism: a dialectical approach.Andrea Gambarotto - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-23.
    The paper proposes a dialectical approach to our understanding of the relation between teleology and mechanism. This approach is dialectical both in form and content. In _form_, it proposes a contemporary interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysical account of teleology. This account is grounded in a dialectical methodology, which consists in scrutinizing the inherent limitations of a theoretical position that lead it to suppress itself and evolve into a better one. I apply the same methodology to the function debate. For Hegel, teleology (...)
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  43.  10
    Epistemological issues in neurodivergence and atypical cognition: introduction.Claudia Lorena García & Alejandro Vázquez-del-Mercado - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-23.
    This is the introduction of the Synthese Topical Collection Epistemological Issues in Neurodivergence and Atypical Cognition written by the guest editors. In order to justify the relevance of the topic, a minimum context is given on the notions of neurodivergence as well as some brief remarks on the neurodiversity advocacy movement. This serves as a basis to establish the importance of increasing the scope of epistemology to include issues that do not fit in the descriptions of typical subjects and cognitive (...)
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  44. The first words ever spoken.Luca Gasparri - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    I argue that ontologies of words should engage with the emergence of lexical communication in the deep history of our line. It may seem that the evolutionary origins of words are orthogonal to the analytical project of establishing the defining features of wordhood, and that an adequate ontology of words requires nothing more than an observation of the properties of modern languages. I suggest instead that models of the initial stages of language evolution can offer valuable insights into the matter. (...)
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  45. How to be a capacitist.Christoph Kelp - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-16.
    Capacitism is the view that capacities come first in epistemological theorising: they are explanatorily basic and key epistemic phenomena are to be analysed in terms of capacities. This paper develops a problem for capacitism and outlines a motivated way of solving it.
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  46.  13
    Norms, epistemic norms, context, and counterfactuals.Thomas Kroedel - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-21.
    The paper defends an account of the context-sensitivity of norms that draws on the resources of counterfactual conditionals. The account combines two assumptions: the assumption that permission is rule-abiding performance in some contextually relevant situations; and the assumption that the contextually relevant situations are picked out by the mechanism that selects the possible worlds relevant for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals. The account explains the non-monotonicity of permissions and solves a puzzle, raised by Timothy Williamson, about the seeming failure of (...)
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  47. Correction to: Against a normative asymmetry between near- and future-bias.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-2.
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  48. Evolutionary debunking of (arguments for) moral realism.Arnon Levy & Itamar Weinshtock Saadon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-22.
    Moral realism is often taken to have common sense and initial appearances on its side. Indeed, by some lights, common sense and initial appearances underlie all the central positive arguments for moral realism. We offer a kind of debunking argument, taking aim at realism’s common sense standing. Our argument differs from familiar debunking moves both in its empirical assumptions and in how it targets the realist position. We argue that if natural selection explains the objective phenomenology of moral deliberation and (...)
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  49.  71
    X-Phi and the challenge from ad hoc concepts.Michelle Liu - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-25.
    Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.
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  50.  3
    The explanatory and heuristic power of mathematics.Marianna Antonutti Marfori, Sorin Bangu & Emiliano Ippoliti - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-12.
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  51.  5
    Evolutionary trends and goal directedness.Daniel W. McShea - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-26.
    The conventional wisdom declares that evolution is not goal directed, that teleological considerations play no part in our understanding of evolutionary trends. Here I argue that, to the contrary, under a current view of teleology, field theory, most evolutionary trends would have to be considered goal directed to some degree. Further, this view is consistent with a modern scientific outlook, and more particularly with evolutionary theory today. Field theory argues that goal directedness is produced by higher-level fields that direct entities (...)
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  52.  3
    The epistemic vices of corporations.Marco Meyer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-22.
    Vice epistemology studies the qualities of individuals and collectives that undermine the creation, sharing, and storing of knowledge. There is no settled understanding of which epistemic vices exist at the collective level. Yet understanding which collective epistemic vices exist is important, both to facilitate research on the antecedents and effects of collective epistemic vice, and to advance philosophical discussions such as whether some collective epistemic vices are genuinely collective. I propose an empirical approach to identifying epistemic vices in corporations, analyzing (...)
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  53. Unwanted knowledge transmission.Ísak Andri Ólafsson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    John Greco (2020) sets out to create a unified virtue-theoretic account of knowledge generation and transmission in his book The Transmission of Knowledge. One of the advantages of his view is that it can defend the achievement view from a known strand of counterexamples. To accomplish that, he relies on joint agency being essential to knowledge transmission. Joint agency can be characterized as a sort of interdependent and interactive cooperation between speaker and hearer that share an intention to transmit knowledge. (...)
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  54. Stubborn emotions, stubborn beliefs.Kate Pendoley - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    Recalcitrant emotions, such as fear of flying, are emotions that persist even though they are in tension with the emoter’s considered belief. A widely accepted argument against cognitivist theories of emotion holds that recalcitrant emotions show that emotions are more like sensory states than like thoughts or beliefs. I show that this argument does not succeed: Emotions are usually sensitive to our changing beliefs in a way that is more akin to cognitive states than to sensations. Moreover, empirical evidence strongly (...)
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  55. Correction to: How can embodied cognition naturalize bounded rationality?Enrico Petracca & James Grayot - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-1.
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  56.  2
    Epistemic diversity and industrial selection bias.Manuela Fernández Pinto & Daniel Fernández Pinto - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-18.
    Philosophers of science have argued that epistemic diversity is an asset for the production of scientific knowledge, guarding against the effects of biases, among other advantages. The growing privatization of scientific research, on the contrary, has raised important concerns for philosophers of science, especially with respect to the growing sources of biases in research that it seems to promote. Recently, Holman and Bruner ( 2017 ) have shown, using a modified version of Zollman ( 2010 ) social network model, that (...)
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  57.  3
    The dialectics of accuracy arguments for probabilism.Alexander R. Pruss - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-26.
    Scoring rules measure the deviation between a credence assignment and reality. Probabilism holds that only those credence assignments that satisfy the axioms of probability are rationally admissible. Accuracy-based arguments for probabilism observe that given certain conditions on a scoring rule, the score of any non-probability is dominated by the score of a probability. The conditions in the arguments we will consider include propriety: the claim that the expected accuracy of _p_ is not beaten by the expected accuracy of any other (...)
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  58.  3
    Implicit quantification for modal reasoning in large games.R. Ramanujam, Anantha Padmanabha & Ramit Das - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-34.
    Reasoning about equilibria in normal form games involves the study of players’ incentives to deviate unilaterally from any profile. In the case of large anonymous games, the pattern of reasoning is different. Payoffs are determined by strategy distributions rather than strategy profiles. In such a game each player would strategise based on expectations of what fraction of the population makes some choice, rather than respond to individual choices by other players. A player may not even know how many players there (...)
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  59.  2
    Sameness beyond Numerical Identity. A Defence of the One Object View of Kant´s Transcendental Idealism.Mattia Riccardi - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    Some Kant scholars argue that appearances and things in themselves are distinct things (Two Objects View). Others argue that they are the same things (One Object View). This last view is often understood as the claim that appearances and things in themselves are numerically identical (Numerical Identity). However, Walker (2010) and Stang (2014) show that Numerical Identity clashes against Kant’s claim that we lack knowledge of things in themselves (Noumenal Ignorance). I propose a weaker version of the One Object View (...)
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  60. Specification of time in Tichý’s transparent intensional logic and Prior’s temporal logic.Zuzana Rybaříková - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-15.
    In his paper ‘The logic of temporal discourse’, Pavel Tichý pointed out that contemporary systems of logic were unable to sufficiently formalise tenses. He therefore suggested temporal specification in transparent intensional logic (TIL), a system of logic that he developed. Discussing contemporary systems of logic, Tichý also took into account the system of Arthur N. Prior, who developed the first systems of modern temporal logic, and his criticism was also addressed to Prior. Tichý only focused, however, on Prior’s early systems (...)
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  61.  3
    Inductive neutrality and scientific representation.Elay Shech & Alison A. Springle - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-16.
    Prima facie, accounts of scientific representation should illuminate how models support justified surrogative reasoning while remaining neutral on the nature of inductive inference. We argue that doing both at once is harder than it first appears. Accounts like “DEKI,” which distinguish justified and unjustified surrogative inferences by appealing to a distinction between derivational and factual correctness, cannot accommodate non-formal, non-rule-based accounts of inference such as John Norton’s material theory of induction. In contrast, a recent expressivist-inferentialist account appears compatible with material (...)
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  62.  83
    An objection to the modal account of risk.Martin Smith - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-9.
    In a recent paper in this journal Duncan Pritchard responds to an objection to the modal account of risk pressed by Ebert, Smith and Durbach ( 2020 ). In this paper, I expand upon the objection and argue that it still stands. I go on to consider a more general question raised by this exchange – whether risk is ‘objective’, or whether it is something that varies from one perspective to another.
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  63. Toy models, dispositions, and the power to explain.Philippe Verreault-Julien - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    Two recent contributions have discussed, and disagreed, over whether so-called toy models that attempt to represent dispositions have the power to explain. In this paper, I argue that neither of these positions is completely correct. Toy models may accurately represent, satisfy the veridicality condition, yet fail to provide how-actually explanations. This is because some dispositions remain unmanifested. Instead, the models provide how-possibly explanations; they _possibly_ explain.
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  64. Correction to: Aptness and means-end coherence: a dominance argument for causal decision theory.J. Robert G. Williams - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-1.
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  65.  21
    A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind.Karen Yan & Chuan-Ya Liao - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-35.
    Empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM) has become a dominant research style in the twenty-first century. EIPM relies on empirical results in various ways. However, the extant literature lacks an empirical description of how EIPM philosophers rely on empirical results. Moreover, though EIPM is essentially a form of cross-disciplinary research, it has not been analyzed as cross-disciplinary research so far. We aim to fill the above two gaps in the literature by producing quantitative and qualitative descriptions of EIPM as a kind (...)
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  66. Teleology and function in non-living nature.Gunnar Babcock - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...)
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  67.  91
    Structural explanations: impossibilities vs failures.Manuel Barrantes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-15.
    The bridges of Königsberg case has been widely cited in recent philosophical discussions on scientific explanation as a potential example of a structural explanation of a physical phenomenon. However, when discussing this case, different authors have focused on two different versions, depending on what they take the explanandum to be. In one version, the explanandum is the _failure_ of a given individual in performing an Eulerian walk over the bridge system. In the other version, the explanandum is the _impossibility_ of (...)
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  68.  3
    Is the autonomy of the will a paradoxical idea?Stefano Bertea - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-21.
    This essay tackles head on the argument that sees an inherent paradox in the autonomy of the will as the ground for the authority of the fundamental practical norms. It points out that only on reductive understandings of the autonomy of the will can this idea be qualified as paradoxical, thereby yielding outcomes that either contradict their premises or present autonomy under a false guise. With that done, it will proceed to offer a conception of the autonomy of the will (...)
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  69.  8
    Introduction: Simplicity out of complexity? Physics and the aims of science.Florian J. Boge, Miguel-Ángel Carretero-Sahuquillo, Paul Grünke & Martin King - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-9.
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  70.  3
    Materials selection in economic modeling.Marcel Boumans - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-17.
    Templates travel because they offer a tractable format that can be used for model-building in a variety of domains. It is often because of this quality that a particular template is chosen. But one cannot assume that there are always templates ready to model a new phenomenon, and moreover, templates have also been designed at some point. A critical aspect of this designing process is the choice of the mathematical objects with which one hopes to capture this phenomenon. This means (...)
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  71.  5
    When Arne met J. L.: attitudes to scientific method in empirical semantics, ordinary language philosophy and linguistics.Siobhan Chapman - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    In the autumn of 1959, Arne Naess and J. L. Austin, both pioneers of empirical study in the philosophy of language, discussed their points of agreement and disagreement at a meeting in Oslo. This article considers the fragmentary record that has survived of that meeting, and investigates what light it can shed on the question of why the two philosophers apparently found so little common ground, given their shared commitment to the importance of data in the study of language. Naess (...)
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  72.  49
    Interpretation and equivalence; or, equivalence and interpretation.Neil Dewar - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-24.
    This paper argues that much of the literature on interpreting scientific theories presupposes a certain picture of what interpretation involves: a picture according to which interpreting a theory is like translating from one language to another. In place of this “external” approach to interpretation, this paper proposes an “internal” approach, according to which interpretation is more concerned with delineating a theory’s internal semantic architecture.
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  73. Questioning and addressee knowledge.Eliran Haziza - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-23.
    There are norms for asking questions. Inquirers should not ask questions to which they know the answer. The literature on the norms of asking has focused on such speaker-centered norms. But, as I argue, there are addressee-centered norms as well: inquirers should not ask addressees who fall short of a certain epistemic status. That epistemic status, I argue here, is knowledge.
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  74.  6
    The nature and significance of social ontology.Frank Hindriks & Francesco Guala - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-22.
    We propose a bridge-builder perspective on social ontology. Our point of departure is that an important task of philosophy is to provide the bigger picture. To this end, it should investigate folk views and determine whether and how they can be preserved once scrutinized from the perspective of the sciences. However, the sciences typically present us with a fragmented picture of reality. Thus, an important intermediate step is to integrate the most promising social scientific theories with one another. In addition (...)
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  75.  14
    Against intellectualism about skill.Daniel D. Hutto & Ian Robertson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    This paper will argue that intellectualism about skill—the contention that skilled performance is without exception guided by proposition knowledge—is fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualists about skill run into intractable theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical modes of presentation. It then examines a proposed solution by Carlotta Pavese which seeks to identify practical modes of presentation with motor representations that guide skilled sensorimotor action. We argue that this proposed identification is problematic on empirical (...)
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  76.  10
    Introduction to recent issues in philosophy of statistics: evidence, testing, and applications.Molly Kao, Deborah G. Mayo & Elay Shech - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-5.
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  77.  15
    Structured propositions and a semantics for unrestricted impure logics of ground.Amirhossein Kiani - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-29.
    I show that the assumption of highly structured propositions can be leveraged to provide a unified semantics for various propositional logics of impure ground in a very expressive and flexible way. It is shown, in particular, that the induced models are capable of capturing an infinitude of grounding facts that follow from unrestricted logics of ground, but, due to certain artificial restrictions, are left unaccounted for by the existing semantics in the literature. It is also shown that our models, unlike (...)
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  78.  4
    Traveling with TARDIS. Parameterization and transferability in molecular modeling and simulation.Johannes Lenhard & Hans Hasse - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-18.
    The English language has adopted the word Tardis for something that looks simple from the outside but is much more complicated when inspected from the inside. The word comes from a BBC science fiction series, in which the Tardis is a machine for traveling in time and space, that looks like a phone booth from the outside. This paper claims that simulation models are a Tardis in a way that calls into question their transferability. The argument is developed taking Molecular (...)
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  79.  7
    Complexity of multi-agent conformant planning with group knowledge.Yanjun Li - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-30.
    In this paper, we propose a dynamic epistemic framework to capture the knowledge evolution in multi-agent systems where agents are not able to observe. We formalize multi-agent conformant planning with group knowledge, and reduce planning problems to model checking problems. We prove that multi-agent conformant planning with group knowledge is Pspace -complete on the size of dynamic epistemic models. We also consider the alternative Kripke semantics, and show that for each Kripke model with perfect recall and no miracles, there is (...)
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  80.  41
    Rescuing a traditional argument for internalism.Blake McAllister - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-22.
    Early moderns such as Locke and Descartes thought we could guarantee the justification of our beliefs, even in worlds most hostile to their truth, if only we form those beliefs with sufficient care. That is, they thought it possible for us to be impeccable with respect to justification. This principle has traditionally been used to argue for internalism. By placing all of the normatively relevant conditions in our minds, we ensure reflective access to what those norms require of us and (...)
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  81.  9
    Ecological rationality and economics: where the Twain shall meet.Andreas Ortmann & Leonidas Spiliopoulos - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-30.
    Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioral Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the presumption that decision makers use shortcuts that lead to deviations from rational behaviour (the Heuristics-and-Biases program). Many economists seem unaware that this viewpoint has long been contested in cognitive psychology. Proponents of an alternative program (the Ecological-Rationality (...)
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  82.  54
    What-it’s-like talk is technical talk.Erlend Owesen - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-18.
    It is common to characterise phenomenal consciousness as _what it is like_ to be in a mental state. This paper argues that the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in this context has a technical meaning, i.e. a meaning for which the association to the relevant expression is peculiar to a theoretical community. The relevant theoretical community is philosophy and some parts of cognitive science, so on this view, only philosophers and cognitive scientists use the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in the way that is characteristic in the literature (...)
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  83.  28
    Justification and epistemic agency.Phyllis Pearson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-17.
    This paper presents a novel account of what motivates internalism about justification in light of recent attempts to undermine the intuitions long thought to favour it (Srinivasan in Philos Rev 129:395–431, 2020). On the account I propose, internalist intuitions are sensitive to epistemic agency. Internalist intuitions track a desire to acknowledge the epistemic agency one has in virtue of being in a position to meet the standards one is accountable to.
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  84.  4
    How can embodied cognition naturalize bounded rationality?Enrico Petracca & James Grayot - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-28.
    The paper discusses how research on embodied cognition in cognitive science can contribute to the naturalization of rationality. The investigation takes place in two steps. First, we provide a conceptual map of possible new ideas of rationality inspired by embodied cognition. Given the plurality of theories of embodied cognition, we distinguish different approaches according to their increasing degree of radicalism. We consider ecological rationality as currently the best candidate for naturalizing rationality, and, after identifying its descriptive and normative building blocks, (...)
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  85.  9
    An instrumentalist take on the models of the Free-Energy Principle.Niccolò Aimone Pisano - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-27.
    In this paper, by means of a novel use of insights from the literature on scientific modelling, I will argue in favour of an instrumentalist approach to the models that are crucially involved in the study of adaptive systems within the Free-Energy Principle (FEP) framework. I will begin (§2) by offering a general, informal characterisation of FEP. Then (§3), I will argue that the models involved in FEP-theorising are plausibly intended to be isomorphic to their targets. This will allow (§4) (...)
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  86.  20
    What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate.Carl Sachs & Auguste Nahas - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-22.
    Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. (...)
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  87.  5
    Is the maximum entropy production just a heuristic principle? Metaphysics on natural determination.Javier Sánchez-Cañizares - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-15.
    The Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP) stands out as an overarching principle that rules life phenomena in Nature. However, its explanatory power beyond heuristics remains controversial. On the one hand, the MEPP has been successfully applied principally to non-living systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. On the other hand, the underlying assumptions to lay the MEPP’s theoretical foundations and range of applicability increase the possibilities of conflicting interpretations. More interestingly, from a metaphysical stance, the MEPP’s philosophical status is hotly debated: does (...)
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  88.  26
    Bare statistical evidence and the legitimacy of software-based judicial decisions.Eva Schmidt, Andreas Sesing-Wagenpfeil & Maximilian A. Köhl - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-27.
    Can the evidence provided by software systems meet the standard of proof for civil or criminal cases, and is it individualized evidence? Or, to the contrary, do software systems exclusively provide bare statistical evidence? In this paper, we argue that there are cases in which evidence in the form of probabilities computed by software systems is not bare statistical evidence, and is thus able to meet the standard of proof. First, based on the case of State v. Loomis, we investigate (...)
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  89.  7
    Scientific progress, normative discussions, and the pragmatic account of definitions of life.Ludo L. J. Schoenmakers - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    Discussions on the status of definitions of life have long been dominated by a position known as definitional pessimism. Per the definitional pessimist, there is no point in trying to define life. This claim is defended in different ways, but one of the shared assumptions of all definitional pessimists is that our attempts to define life are attempts to provide a list of all necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as alive. In other words, a definition of life (...)
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  90.  14
    Should epistemic instrumentalists be more social?Jordan Scott - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    Epistemic instrumentalism is often thought to face an insurmountable barrier, the ‘too few reasons’ problem. This has prompted some epistemologists to turn to a rival social kind of epistemic instrumentalism that claims epistemic normativity is instrumental to the goals of communities rather than individuals. This paper argues that this is a mistake as regular epistemic instrumentalism is better able to address the too few reasons problem than its social counterpart. In Sect. 2, I outline the two few reasons objection, highlighting (...)
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  91.  6
    Truth (bearers) pluralism.Andrea Strollo - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    As for many other properties, to understand the nature of truth attention should be paid to the kind of entities that are apt to bear it. In particular, I argue that different kinds of truth bearers tend to support different properties of truth. After that, I show that there are reasons to admit a plurality of truth bearers. As a consequence of these two results, a plurality of truth properties may be naturally admitted. The general upshot of the paper is (...)
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  92.  13
    How tracking technology is transforming animal ecology: epistemic values, interdisciplinarity, and technology-driven scientific change.Rose Trappes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-24.
    Tracking technology has been heralded as transformative for animal ecology. In this paper I examine what changes are taking place, showing how current animal movement research is a field ripe for philosophical investigation. I focus first on how the devices alter the limitations and biases of traditional field observation, making observation of animal movement and behaviour possible in more detail, for more varied species, and under a broader variety of conditions, as well as restricting the influence of human presence and (...)
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  93.  7
    Correction to: On dispositional masks.Gus Turyn - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-1.
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  94.  9
    Completeness theorems for $$\exists \Box $$ -bundled fragment of first-order modal logic.Xun Wang - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-23.
    This paper expands upon the work by Wang (Proceedings of TARK, pp. 493–512, 2017) who proposes a new framework based on quantifier-free predicate language extended by a new bundled modality \(\exists x\Box \) and axiomatizes the logic over S5 frames. This paper first gives complete axiomatizations of the logics over K, D, T, 4, S4 frames with increasing domains and constant domains, respectively. The systems w.r.t. constant domains feature infinitely many additional rules defined inductively than systems w.r.t. increasing domains. In (...)
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  95.  4
    Correction to: Closure, deduction and hinge commitments.Xiaoxing Zhang - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-1.
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  96.  7
    Answering the conceptual challenge: three strategies for deflationists.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-25.
    We defend deflationism about truth against a pressing challenge, which is to explain how deflationists can understand the role that the _concept_ of truth appears to play in accounts of several other philosophically important concepts. We provide three strategies that deflationists can employ in response to the specific challenge regarding assertion that has been raised in several recent articles, viz., that the truth concept plays an ineliminable explanatory role in an account of assertion. We then show how to extend our (...)
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  97.  14
    Art, imagination, and experiential knowledge.Antony Aumann - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-20.
    In this paper, I argue that art can help us imagine what it would be like to have experiences we have never had before. I begin by surveying a few of the things we are after when we ask what an experience is like. I maintain that it is easy for art to provide some of them. For example, it can relay facts about what the experience involves or what responses the experience might engender. The tricky case is the phenomenal (...)
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  98.  27
    Processes and their modal profile.Riccardo Baratella - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-24.
    A widely debated issue in contemporary metaphysics is whether the modal profile of ordinary objects has to be explained in non-modal terms (that is, Thesis 1). However, how to solve such an issue with respect to occurrences – namely, processes and events – is a question that has been largely neglected in the current metaphysical debate. The general goal of this article is to start filling this gap. As a first result of the article, we make it plausible that, if (...)
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  99.  38
    Hinge commitments as arational beliefs.Aliosha Barranco Lopez - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):109 (2023).
    Hinge epistemology is a family of views that offers a novel approach to avoiding skeptical conclusions about the possibility of a posteriori justification of our empirical beliefs. They claim that at the basis of our empirical beliefs lie certain commitments whose rational status is not determined by our evidence. These are called hinge commitments. Prominent hinge epistemologists have claimed that hinge commitments are either rational or arational but yet not beliefs. I argue that such views are subject to decisive objections. (...)
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  100.  20
    On philosophical idling: the ordinary language philosophy critique of the philosophical method of cases.Avner Baz - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-20.
    I start with some of the early challenges to the widely-employed philosophical method of cases—the very challenges that originally prompted the new movement of experimental philosophy—and with some fundamental questions about the method that are yet to have been given satisfying answers. I then propose that what has allowed both ‘armchair’ and ‘experimental’ participants in the ongoing debates concerning the method to ignore or repress those early challenges—and in particular Robert Cummins’s ‘calibration objection’—and to discount fundamental disagreements about those questions, (...)
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  101.  10
    Greco’s explanatory salience contextualism revisited.Sven Bernecker - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-11.
    According to Greco’s early explanatory salience contextualism, _S_ knows that _p_ if and only if _S_’s cognitive abilities are the salient factor in a causal explanation of why _S_ holds a true belief rather than a false belief or no belief at all. Greco abandoned this view because it cannot handle fake barn cases and because it proves impossible to analyze knowledge in terms of a quantitative characterization of explanatory salience. The paper argues that the core idea of explanatory salience (...)
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  102.  20
    The deep neural network approach to the reference class problem.Oliver Buchholz - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-24.
    Methods of machine learning (ML) are gradually complementing and sometimes even replacing methods of classical statistics in science. This raises the question whether ML faces the same methodological problems as classical statistics. This paper sheds light on this question by investigating a long-standing challenge to classical statistics: the reference class problem (RCP). It arises whenever statistical evidence is applied to an individual object, since the individual belongs to several reference classes and evidence might vary across them. Thus, the problem consists (...)
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  103.  9
    Universalism and extensionalism revisited.Claudio Calosi & Alessandro Giordani - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-18.
    We present a new notion of mereological sum that is inequivalent to extant ones in the literature and does not fall prey to reasonable complaints that can be raised against some such notions. In light of this notion, we then revisit the relation between mereological universalism and extensionalism. In particular we argue that Varzi’s claim to the point that universalism entails extensionalism is justified only insofar as one sticks to Varzi’s notion of sum. In effect, we distinguish different versions of (...)
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  104.  10
    Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words.John Collins - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-33.
    Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal (...)
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  105.  42
    Metaphysical foundherentism.Scott Dixon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-24.
    I propose a way to accommodate plausible examples of cyclic grounding chains that have been proposed in the literature while preserving a good measure of the metaphysical foundationalist’s grounding hierarchy with a foundational level. This precludes the need to adopt a strong form of coherentism, such as the view that everything grounds everything, or even the view that everything grounds everything other than itself. I do this by developing axiomatizations of grounding which allow for localized cycles of ground at the (...)
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  106.  9
    Five lessons from teleology-neutrality and metaphor in ecology: bottom-up and top-down all at once.Justin Donhauser - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-17.
    This paper illuminates primary epistemic functions of teleological characterizations in ecology through discussion of the historical and conceptual origins of the theoretical branch of ecology (§§1–2). I subsequently defuse enduring confusions about the use of teleological characterizations in ecology; with a focus on recent critical arguments by Sagoff in this journal (Sagoff, Synthese 193:3003–3024, 2016) and some other places (e.g., his Sagoff, Ethics, Policy, and Environment 16:239–257, 2013 and Sagoff, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, 2017) (§3). (...)
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  107.  39
    Fragmented and conflicted: folk beliefs about vision.Paul E. Engelhardt, Keith Allen & Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-33.
    Many philosophical debates take for granted that there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of the phenomenon of interest. Debates about the nature of perception tend to take for granted that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision, consistent with Direct Realism. This conception is often accorded an epistemic default status. We draw on philosophical and psychological literature on naïve theories and belief fragmentation to motivate the hypothesis that untutored common sense encompasses conflicting Direct Realist and (...)
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  108.  7
    Entropy, prediction and the cultural ecosystem of human cognition.Pablo Fernandez Velasco - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-18.
    Major proponents of both Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing have argued that the two theoretical frameworks are strongly compatible. An important conjecture supporting the union of the two frameworks is that cultural practices tend to reduce entropy —that is, to increase predictability— at all scales in a cultural cognitive ecosystem. This conjecture connects Distributed Cognition with Predictive Processing because it shows how cultural practices facilitate prediction. The present contribution introduces the following challenge to the union of Distributed Cognition and Predictive (...)
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  109.  60
    Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-34.
    Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...)
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  110.  62
    Agent-centered epistemic rationality.James Gillespie - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-22.
    It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, _belief-centered_. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. This (...)
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  111.  62
    A deductive variation on the no miracles argument.Luke Golemon & Abraham Graber - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-26.
    The traditional No-Miracles Argument (TNMA) asserts that the novel predictive success of science would be a miracle, and thus too implausible to believe, if successful theories were not at least approximately true. The TNMA has come under fire in multiple ways, challenging each of its premises and its general argumentative structure. While the TNMA relies on explaining novel predictive success via the truth of the theories, we put forth a deductive version of the No-Miracles argument (DNMA) that avoids inference to (...)
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  112.  45
    Equalized Odds is a Requirement of Algorithmic Fairness.David Gray Grant - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3).
    Statistical criteria of fairness are formal measures of how an algorithm performs that aim to help us determine whether an algorithm would be fair to use in decision-making. In this paper, I introduce a new version of the criterion known as “Equalized Odds,” argue that it is a requirement of procedural fairness, and show that it is immune to a number of objections to the standard version.
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  113. Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-23.
    It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented _epistemic apocalypse_. In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology of recordings, deepfakes are much less concerning, (2) that (...)
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  114.  5
    Embedding and customizing templates in cross-disciplinary modeling.Wybo Houkes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-16.
    In this paper, I develop a template-based analysis to include several elements of _processes_ through which templates are transferred between fields of inquiry. The analysis builds on Justin Price’s identification of the importance of a “landing zone” in the recipient domain, from which “conceptual pressure” may be created. I will argue that conceptual pressure is a characteristic feature of the process of template transfer; that this means that there are costs to the process of transfer as well as benefits; and (...)
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  115.  26
    Truthmaking cannot be done afar.Asher Jiang - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-17.
    As concerns the explication of the intuitive notion of truthmaking, Barry Smith has an insight that deserves more attention. Basically, in his view, an object x makes a proposition true iff (i) x necessitates and (ii) is representationally closely tied with x. To be more specific, he suggests that (ii) is fulfilled only if x is among ’s ontological commitments. I appreciate his basic insight but reject his specific suggestion. I argue that we can make a more attractive proposal from (...)
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  116.  14
    Two kinds of a priori justification.Harold Langsam - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-19.
    John Bengson holds that an intellectual seeming is sufficient for a priori justification, whereas Elijah Chudnoff disagrees and holds that a priori justification also requires an intuitive awareness of the abstract entities that are the subject matter of the proposition to be justified. I distinguish between substantive and non-substantive a priori claims about the world, and argue that Chudnoff is correct about the justification required for the former kind of claim, and Bengson is correct about the justification required for the (...)
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  117. Against a normative asymmetry between near- and future-bias.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-31.
    Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias; another is future-bias. Philosophical theorising about these biases often proceeds on two assumptions. First, that the two biases are _independent_: that they are explained by different factors (the independence assumption). Second, that there is a normative asymmetry between the two biases: one is rationally impermissible (near-bias) and the other rationally permissible (future-bias). The former assumption at least partly feeds into the latter: if the two biases were not explained by (...)
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  118.  5
    How localized are computational templates? A machine learning approach.Maximilian Noichl - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-22.
    A commonly held background assumption about the sciences is that they connect along borders characterized by ontological or explanatory relationships, usually given in the order of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. Interdisciplinary work, in this picture, arises in the connecting regions of adjacent disciplines. Philosophical research into interdisciplinary model transfer has increasingly complicated this picture by highlighting additional connections orthogonal to it. But most of these works have been done through case studies, which due to their (...)
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  119.  12
    An epistemic logic of preferences.Anna Ovchinnikova & Pavel Naumov - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-36.
    The article studies preferences of agents in a setting with imperfect information. For such a setting, the authors propose a new class of preferences. It is said that an agent prefers one statement over another if, among all indistinguishable worlds, the agent prefers the worlds where the first statement is true to those where the second one is true. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system describing the interplay between a binary modality capturing preferences and the (...)
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  120.  12
    Deepfakes and depiction: from evidence to communication.Francesco Pierini - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-21.
    In this paper, I present an analysis of the depictive properties of deepfakes. These are videos and pictures produced by deep learning algorithms that automatically modify existing videos and photographs or generate new ones. I argue that deepfakes have an intentional standard of correctness. That is, a deepfake depicts its subject only insofar as its creator intends it to. This is due to the way in which these images are produced, which involves a degree of intentional control similar to that (...)
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  121.  13
    Argumentum Ad Alia: argument structure of arguing about what others have said.Chris Reed & Katarzyna Budzynska - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-29.
    Expertise, authority, and testimony refer to aspects of one of the most important elements of communication and cognition. Argumentation theory recognises various forms of what we call the argumentum ad alia pattern, in which speakers appeal to what others have said, including Position to Know scheme, Witness Testimony scheme, Expert Opinion scheme and the classical ad verecundiam. In this paper we show that ad alia involves more than merely an inferential step from what others (a person in position to know, (...)
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  122.  20
    Introduction to the topical Collection: Concept formation in the natural and social sciences: empirical and normative aspects.Kevin Reuter, Catherine Herfeld & Georg Brun - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-10.
    Concept formation has recently become a widely discussed topic in philosophy under the headings of “conceptual engineering”, “conceptual ethics”, and “ameliorative analysis”. Much of this work has been inspired either by the method of explication or by ameliorative projects. In the former case, concept formation is usually seen as a tool of the sciences, of formal disciplines, and of philosophy. In the latter case, concept formation is seen as a tool in the service of social progress. While recent philosophical discussions (...)
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  123.  9
    Two approaches to naturalistic social ontology.Matti Sarkia & Tuukka Kaidesoja - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-28.
    Social ontological inquiry has been pursued in analytic philosophy as well as in the social scientific tradition of critical realism. These traditions have remained largely separate despite partly overlapping concerns and similar underlying strategies of argumentation. They have also both been the subject of similar criticisms based on naturalistic approaches to the philosophy of science, which have addressed their apparent reliance on a transcendental mode of reasoning, their seeming distance from social scientific practice, and their (erroneous?) tendency to advocate global (...)
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  124.  11
    Quasi-Conventions.Brian Skyrms - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-16.
    I consider a generalizarion of Vanderschraaf's correlated conventions to Quasi-Conventions, using the concept of coarse correlated equilibria. I discuss the possibility of improved payoffs and the question of learnability by simple uncoupled learning dynamics. Laboratory experiments are surveyed. The generalization introduces strains of commitment, which can be see from different points of view. I conclude that the strains of commitment preclude using the generalization as a stand-alone definition of convention, but that in certain settings Quasi-Conventions can be important modules within (...)
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  125.  15
    Realist dependence and irrealist butterflies.Caj Strandberg - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-23.
    In this paper, I argue that a realist account of the modality of moral supervenience is superior to a non-cognitivist account. According to the recommended realist account, moral supervenience amounts to strong supervenience where the outer ‘necessary’ is conceptual and the inner metaphysical. It is argued that non-cognitivism faces a critical choice between weak and strong supervenience where both options are implausible on this view. However, non-cognitivism seems to have an important advantage: It can explain why the outer ‘necessary’ is (...)
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  126.  11
    The subject of knowledge in collaborative science.Duygu Uygun Tunç - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-26.
    The epistemic subject of collective scientific knowledge has been a matter of dispute in recent philosophy of science and epistemology. Following the distributed cognition framework, both collective-subject accounts (most notably by Knorr-Cetina, in _Epistemic Cultures_, Harvard University Press, 1999) as well as no-subject accounts of collective scientific knowledge (most notably by Giere, Social Epistemology 21:313–320, 2007; in Carruthers, Stich, Siegal (eds), _The Cognitive Basis of Science_, Cambridge University Press, 2002a) have been offered. Both strategies of accounting for collective knowledge are (...)
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  127.  14
    Introducing a four-fold way to conceptualize artificial agency.Maud van Lier - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-28.
    Recent developments in AI-research suggest that an AI-driven science might not be that far off. The research of for Melnikov et al. (2018) and that of Evans et al. (2018) show that automated systems can already have a distinctive role in the design of experiments and in directing future research. Common practice in many of the papers devoted to the automation of basic research is to refer to these automated systems as ‘agents’. What is this attribution of agency based on (...)
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  128.  11
    Rational transformative decision-making.Daniel Villiger - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-20.
    According to L. A. Paul (2014), transformative experiences pose a challenge for decision theory, as their subjective value is not epistemically accessible. However, several authors propose that the subjective values of options are often irrelevant to their ranking; in many cases, all we need for rational transformative decision-making are the known non-subjective values. This stance is in conflict with Paul’s argument that the subjective value can always swamp the non-subjective value. The approach presented in this paper takes Paul’s argument into (...)
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  129.  15
    Natural Law, the modeling relation, and two roots of perspectivism.Markus Mikael Weckström - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-35.
    Scientific perspectivism, or perspectival realism, is a view according to which scientific knowledge is neither utterly objective nor independent of the world “as it is”, but always tied to some particular ways of conceptualization and interaction with Nature. In the present paper, I employ Robert Rosen’s concept of the modeling relation for arguing that there are two basic reasons why our knowledge of natural systems is perspectival in this sense. The first of these pertains to the dualism between a system (...)
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  130.  12
    Coordination and obsolescence: a response on behalf of measurement realism.J. E. Wolff - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-20.
    Measurement realism, the view that measurement targets quantitative attributes and that not all attributes are quantitative, has come under attack both from metrologists and philosophers. In this paper, I take a close look at two influential arguments against measurement realism: the argument from obsolescence and the argument from coordination. I concede that these arguments do challenge the epistemological position traditionally taken by measurement realists, but argue that the metaphysical core of measurement realism survives the challenge posed by these arguments. This (...)
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  131.  1
    Truetemp cooled down: The stability of Truetemp intuitions.Adrian Ziółkowski, Alex Wiegmann, Joachim Horvath & Edouard Machery - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-19.
    In this paper, we report the results of three high-powered replication studies in experimental philosophy, which bear on an alleged instability of folk philosophical intuitions: the purported susceptibility of epistemic intuitions about the Truetemp case (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge. Westview Press, Boulder, 1990) to order effects. Evidence for this susceptibility was first reported by Swain et al. (Philos Phenomenol Res 76(1):138–155, 2008); further evidence was then found in two studies by Wright (Cognition 115(3):491–503, 2010) and Weinberg et al. (Monist 95(2):200–222, (...)
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  132.  12
    Epistemic deontology, epistemic trade-offs, and Kant’s formula of humanity.James Andow - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-21.
    An epistemic deontology modelled on Kant’s ethics—in particular the humanity formula of the categorical imperative—is a promising alternative to epistemic consequentialism because it can forbid intuitively impermissible epistemic trade-offs which epistemic consequentialism seems doomed to permit and, most importantly, it can do so in a way that is not ad hoc.
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  133.  41
    Aphantasia demystified.Margherita Arcangeli - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-20.
    Aphantasia, a recently labelled spectrum condition affecting mental imagery, has brought to the fore the centrality of imagination in our lives. Intuitively it may seem that we cannot have a normal life without the possession of imaginative abilities. Yet, aphantasics do not seem to be much affected by their condition. Can aphantasia tell us anything about the nature and role of our imaginative abilities? I contend that an important distinction that can shed light on this question has been largely overlooked, (...)
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  134. Presentism and representation: saying it without words.Sam Baron, Kristie Miller & Jonathan Tallant - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-33.
    The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguistically represent presentism is no big deal. It certainly shouldn’t lead us to (...)
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  135.  3
    How to approximate fuzzy sets: mind-changes and the Ershov Hierarchy.Nikolay Bazhenov, Manat Mustafa, Sergei Ospichev & Luca San Mauro - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-25.
    Computability theorists have introduced multiple hierarchies to measure the complexity of sets of natural numbers. The Kleene Hierarchy classifies sets according to the first-order complexity of their defining formulas. The Ershov Hierarchy classifies limit computable sets with respect to the number of mistakes that are needed to approximate them. Biacino and Gerla extended the Kleene Hierarchy to the realm of fuzzy sets, whose membership functions range in a complete lattice. In this paper, we combine the Ershov Hierarchy and fuzzy set (...)
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  136.  7
    Ludwik Fleck’s reasonable relativism about science.Nicholas Binney - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    An ongoing project in the philosophy of science and medicine is the effort to articulate a form of relativism about science that can find a path between strongly realist and pernicious relativist poles. Recent scholarship on relativism has described the characteristics a philosophy must have in order to be considered a thoroughgoing relativism. These include non-absolutism, multiplicity, dependence, incompatibility, equal validity and non-neutrality. Critics of relativism maintain that these requirements cannot be met without collapsing into a pernicious form of relativism (...)
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  137.  7
    Functionspaces, simplicity and curve fitting.Thomas Bonk - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-14.
    The number of adjustable parameters in a model or hypothesis is often taken as the formal expression of its simplicity. I take issue with this `definition´ and argue that comparative simplicity has a quasi-empirical measure, reflecting experts’ judgements who track past use of a model-type in or across domains. Since models are represented by restricted sets of functions in a suitable space, formally speaking, a general `measure of simplicity´ may be defined implicitly for the elements of a function space. This (...)
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  138.  8
    Expertise and information: an epistemic logic perspective.Richard Booth & Joseph Singleton - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    In this paper we present a modal logic framework to reason about the expertise of information sources. A source is considered an expert on a proposition φ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi $$\end{document} if they are able to correctly refute φ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi $$\end{document} in any possible world where φ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi $$\end{document} is false. Closely connected with expertise is a notion of (...)
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  139. Theoretical virtues and the methodological analogy between science and metaphysics.Andrew Brenner - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    Metaphysicians often claim that some metaphysical theory should (or shouldn’t) be believed because it exhibits (or fails to exhibit) theoretical virtues such as simplicity. Metaphysicians also sometimes claim that the legitimacy of these sorts of appeals to theoretical virtues are vindicated by the similar appeals to theoretical virtues which scientists make in scientific theory choice. One objection to this methodological move is to claim that the metaphysician misdescribes the role that theoretical virtues play within science. In this paper I defend (...)
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  140.  10
    Categorial modal realism.Tyler D. P. Brunet - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-29.
    The current conception of the plurality of worlds is founded on a set theoretic understanding of possibilia. This paper provides an alternative category theoretic conception and argues that it is at least as serviceable for our understanding of possibilia. In addition to or instead of the notion of possibilia conceived as possible objects or possible individuals, this alternative to set theoretic modal realism requires the notion of possible morphisms, conceived as possible changes, processes or transformations. To support this alternative conception (...)
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  141.  10
    (Joint) achievements and the value problem.Laura Frances Callahan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-16.
    In The Transmission of Knowledge (2021), Greco departs significantly from his earlier view of all knowledge as an individual achievement of the knower, allowing that in some testimonial knowledge cases (cases of “transmission”), a hearer’s believing truly will be due to competent joint agency, between herself and the speaker. Greco argues that the new, hybrid view of knowledge as individual or joint achievement is still sufficiently unified and – importantly – still provides a satisfying answer to the value problem for (...)
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  142.  32
    The Metaphysical Neutrality of Cognitive Science.Kuei-Chen Chen & Jeff Yoshimi - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):63.
    Progress in psychology and the cognitive sciences is often taken to vindicate physicalism and cast doubt on such extravagant metaphysical theses as dualism and idealism. The goal of this paper is to argue that cognitive science has no such implications—rather, evidence from cognitive science is largely (but not wholly) irrelevant to the mind-body problem. Our argument begins with the observation that data from cognitive science can be modeled by supervenience relations. We then show that supervenience relations are neutral, by showing (...)
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  143.  10
    Conditionals, curry, and consequence: embracing deduction.Roy T. Cook & Nicholas Tourville - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    We extend the Embracing Revenge account of the semantic paradoxes by constructing two distinct consequence relations that reflect, in different ways, the transfinitely-many-valued semantics developed in earlier work. In particular, we adapt the underlying ideas of “gappy” approaches based on K3, and “glutty” approaches based on LP, to the Embracing Revenge framework, by treating the infinitely many non-classical truth values as infinitely many ways that a sentence might fail to receive a classical truth value in the former case, and as (...)
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  144.  13
    Someone knows that local reasoning on hypergraphs is a weakly aggregative modal logic.Yifeng Ding, Jixin Liu & Yanjing Wang - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    This paper connects the following four topics: a class of generalized graphs whose relations do not have fixed arities called hypergraphs, a family of non-normal modal logics rejecting the aggregative axiom, an epistemic framework fighting logical omniscience, and the classical group knowledge modality of ‘someone knows’. Through neighborhood frames as their meeting point, we show that, among many completeness results obtained in this paper, the limit of a family of weakly aggregative logics is both exactly the modal logic of hypergraphs (...)
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  145.  18
    Anti-exceptionalism about logic: an overview.Maria Paola Fogliani Sforza, Ben Martin & Filippo Ferrari - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-9.
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  146.  19
    How good is an explanation?David H. Glass - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-26.
    How good is an explanation and when is one explanation better than another? In this paper, I address these questions by exploring probabilistic measures of explanatory power in order to defend a particular Bayesian account of explanatory goodness. Critical to this discussion is a distinction between weak and strong measures of explanatory power due to Good (Br J Philos Sci 19:123–143, 1968). In particular, I argue that if one is interested in the overall goodness of an explanation, an appropriate balance (...)
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  147.  18
    Memberless social groups.Jason Hanschmann - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-15.
    Many philosophers maintain that an adequate metaphysical theory of social groups (e.g., baseball teams, rock bands, committees, and courts) will be one that is capable of accommodating social groups that may exist despite having no members. In this paper, I examine cases that motivate this position, cases where a social group seems to persist at some time despite having no members at that time. My aim here is twofold. First, I aim to show that we may accept that these motivating (...)
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  148.  9
    The importance of expert knowledge in big data and machine learning.Jens Ulrik Hansen & Paula Quinon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-21.
    According to popular belief, big data and machine learning provide a wholly novel approach to science that has the potential to revolutionise scientific progress and will ultimately lead to the ‘end of theory’. Proponents of this view argue that advanced algorithms are able to mine vast amounts of data relating to a given problem without any prior knowledge and that we do not need to concern ourselves with causality, as correlation is sufficient for handling complex issues. Consequently, the human contribution (...)
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  149.  34
    Framed and framing inquiry: a pragmatist proposal.Céline Henne - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-25.
    In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the (...)
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  150.  18
    Intuitions are never used as evidence in ethics.Tomasz Herok - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-35.
    One can often hear that intuitions are standardly “appealed to”, “relied on”, “accounted for”, or “used as evidence” in ethics. How should we interpret these claims? I argue that the typical understanding is what Bernard Molyneux calls “descriptive evidentialism”: the idea that intuition-states are treated as evidence of their propositional contents in the context of justification. I then argue that descriptive evidentialism is false- on any account of what intuitions are. That said, I admit that ethicists frequently rely on intuitions (...)
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  151.  12
    Evidence, justification, and epistemic standards.Franklin Jacoby - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-18.
    Epistemic standards purport to tell us under what conditions we should adopt specific beliefs. In the scientific case, we might understand an epistemic standard as telling us what beliefs we should or even must adopt when faced with such-and-such evidence. It is an open question whether and to what extent science, or scientists, form beliefs based upon standards so construed. Epistemic relativism gives two strong arguments against a robust role for epistemic standards in science. This paper assesses these arguments and (...)
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  152. Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophy.Arnon Keren - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-22.
    Modest pessimism about philosophical progress is the view that while philosophy may sometimes make some progress, philosophy has made, and can be expected to make, only very little progress (where the extent of philosophical progress is typically judged against progress in the hard sciences). The paper argues against recent attempts to defend this view on the basis of the pervasiveness of disagreement within philosophy. The argument from disagreement for modest pessimism assumes a teleological conception of progress, according to which the (...)
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  153.  6
    A coherent trio of, distance and size based, measures for nomic and actual truthlikeness.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-31.
    So far, the most prominent measure for actual truthlikeness, i.e. the likeness of a theory to the actual truth, is Ilkka Niiniluoto’s minsum definition, which is purely based on distances. A competing definition is the average distance measure proposed by Pavel Tichy and Graham Oddie. We will define three related, distance and size based, measures for actual truthlikeness and compare them with the two well-known options. However, we will start, Sect. 2, from a trio of such measures for nomic truthlikeness. (...)
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  154.  81
    Deepfakes, Fake Barns, and Knowledge from Videos.Taylor Matthews - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-18.
    Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...)
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  155.  76
    Unspeakable names.Eliot Michaelson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. (...)
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  156.  41
    Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder.Janko Nešić - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-22.
    Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. To build an ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the affordance-based approach of the skilled intentionality framework (SIF). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances in the sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. The human econiche offers a whole landscape (...)
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  157.  15
    Why I am not an Anti-Haecceitist.Matteo Nizzardo - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-14.
    In this paper I argue that if the Identity of Indiscernibles is not necessarily true, then Haecceitism ensues—where Haecceitism is the view that there are maximal possibilities that include all the same qualitative possibilities, and yet differ with respect to the non-qualitative possibilities they include. This goes against the common intuition that Anti-Haecceitism is compatible with the Identity of Indiscernibles being only contingently true. My argument is interesting in many respects. First, it shows that in any modal framework there is (...)
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  158.  32
    Synthetic proofs.Salman Panahy - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-25.
    This is a contribution to the idea that some proofs in first-order logic are synthetic. Syntheticity is understood here in its classical geometrical sense. Starting from Jaakko Hintikka’s original idea and Allen Hazen’s insights, this paper develops a method to define the ‘graphical form’ of formulae in monadic and dyadic fraction of first-order logic. Then a synthetic inferential step in Natural Deduction is defined. A proof is defined as synthetic if it includes at least one synthetic inferential step. Finally, it (...)
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  159.  11
    Correction to: On Alan Turing's anticipation of connectionism.Diane Proudfoot & B. Jack Copeland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-2.
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  160.  32
    How to do things with deepfakes.Tom Roberts - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-18.
    In this paper, I draw a distinction between two types of deepfake, and unpack the deceptive strategies that are made possible by the second. The first category, which has been the focus of existing literature on the topic, consists of those deepfakes that act as a fabricated record of events, talk, and action, where any utterances included in the footage are not addressed to the audience of the deepfake. For instance, a fake video of two politicians conversing with one another. (...)
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  161.  19
    In defence of PKF.Ian Rumfitt - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-21.
    I advance arguments in favour of PKF as an articulation of a central sense of the predicate ‘true’, and show how it illuminates the relationship between that sense and the ‘external’ notion of truth found in such claims as ‘An utterance of the Liar Sentence does not say anything, and so is not true’.
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  162.  41
    Extending Existential Feeling Through Sensory Substitution.Jussi A. Saarinen - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-24.
    In current philosophy of mind, there is lively debate over whether emotions, moods, and other affects can extend to comprise elements beyond one’s organismic boundaries. At the same time, there has been growing interest in the nature and significance of so-called existential feelings, which, as the term suggests, are feelings of one’s overall being in the world. In this article, I bring these two strands of investigation together to ask: Can the material underpinnings of existential feelings extend beyond one’s skull (...)
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  163.  56
    Putting the ‘Experiment’ back into the ‘Thought Experiment’.Lorenzo Sartori - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-36.
    Philosophers have debated at length the epistemological status of scientific thought experiments. I contend that the literature on this topic still lacks a common conceptual framework, a lacuna that produces radical disagreement among the participants in this debate. To remedy this problem, I suggest focusing on the distinction between the internal and the external validity of an experiment, which is also crucial for thought experiments. I then develop an account of both kinds of validity in the context of thought experiments. (...)
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  164.  19
    Machine understanding and deep learning representation.Elay Shech & Michael Tamir - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    Practical ability manifested through robust and reliable task performance, as well as information relevance and well-structured representation, are key factors indicative of understanding in the philosophical literature. We explore these factors in the context of deep learning, identifying prominent patterns in how the results of these algorithms represent information. While the estimation applications of modern neural networks do not qualify as the mental activity of persons, we argue that coupling analyses from philosophical accounts with the empirical and theoretical basis for (...)
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  165.  26
    Being called.Una Stojnić - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-20.
    The dominant view maintains that names are directly referring, rigid terms, the primary function of which is to designate an individual. But, as has long been noted, proper names also allow for predicative uses and combine with quantifiers and definite, indefinite, and numerical determiners. Any adequate semantic account of proper names thus must make sense not just of their referential uses but also of their seemingly predicative ones. Predicativists maintain that such uses manifest a name’s semantically encoded, predicative meaning, while (...)
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  166.  15
    Interdisciplinary model transfer and realism about physical analogy.Peter Tan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    Model transfer is the scientific practice of taking a model which was initially applied in one particular kind of target system in some particular scientific domain and applying it to represent a novel target system in a novel scientific domain. This paper motivates a realist interpretation of empirically successful model transfers and the implications of such an interpretation for the metaphysics of science. The paper uses two examples of empirically successful model transfer, the first of which is a strikingly successful (...)
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  167.  11
    Abducting the a priori.Célia Teixeira - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-26.
    Intuition-based accounts of the a priori are criticised for appealing to a “mysterious” faculty of rational intuition to explain how a priori knowledge is possible. Analyticity-based accounts are typically motivated by opposition to them, offering a purportedly “non-mysterious” account of the a priori. In this paper, I argue that analyticity-based accounts are in no better position to explain the a priori than intuition-based accounts, and that we have good reason to doubt the explanation they offer. To do this, I focus (...)
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  168.  10
    Through thick and thin: seamless metaconceptualism.Christine Tiefensee - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    One major insight derived from the moral twin earth debate is that evaluative and descriptive terms possess different levels of semantic stability, in that the meanings of the former but not the latter tend to remain constant over significant counterfactual variance in patterns of application. At the same time, it is common in metanormative debate to divide evaluative terms into those that are thin and those that are thick. In this paper, I combine debates about semantic stability and the distinction (...)
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  169. Ad hocness, accommodation and consilience: a Bayesian account.John Wilcox - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-42.
    All of us, including scientists, make judgments about what is true or false, probable or improbable. And in the process, we frequently appeal to concepts such as evidential support or explanation. Bayesian philosophers of science have given illuminating formal accounts of these concepts. This paper aims to follow in their footsteps, providing a novel formal account of various additional concepts: the likelihood-prior trade-off, successful accommodation of evidence, ad hocness, and, finally, consilience—sometimes also called “unification”. Using these accounts, I also provide (...)
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  170. Aptness and means-end coherence: a dominance argument for causal decision theory.J. Robert G. Williams - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    Why should we be means-end rational? Why care whether someone’s mental states exhibit certain formal patterns, like the ones formalized in causal decision theory? This paper establishes a dominance argument for these constraints in a finite setting. If you violate the norms of causal decision theory, then your desires will be aptness dominated. That is, there will be some alternative set of desires that you could have had, which would be more apt (closer to the actual values fixed by your (...)
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  171. How should we promote transient diversity in science?Jingyi Wu & Cailin O’Connor - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-24.
    Diversity of practice is widely recognized as crucial to scientific progress. If all scientists perform the same tests in their research, they might miss important insights that other tests would yield. If all scientists adhere to the same theories, they might fail to explore other options which, in turn, might be superior. But the mechanisms that lead to this sort of diversity can also generate epistemic harms when scientific communities fail to reach swift consensus on successful theories. In this paper, (...)
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  172.  5
    When iota meets lambda.Michał Zawidzki & Andrzej Indrzejczak - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-33.
    Definite descriptions are widely discussed in linguistics and formal semantics, but their formal treatment in logic is surprisingly modest. In this article we present a sound, complete, and cut-free tableau calculus TCRλ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\textbf{TC}}_{R_{\lambda }}$$\end{document} for the logic LRλ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\textbf{L}}_{R_{\lambda }}$$\end{document} being a formalisation of a Russell-style theory of definite descriptions with the iota-operator used to construct definite descriptions, the lambda-operator forming predicate-abstracts, and definite descriptions (...)
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  173.  8
    Where the social meets the biological: new ontologies of biosocial race.Jan Baedke & Azita Chellappoo - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-23.
    In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has been characterized (...)
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  174.  6
    Particles, fields, and the ontology of the standard model.Federico Benitez - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-26.
    In this work we discuss issues of ontological commitment towards one of the most important examples of contemporary fundamental science: the standard model of particle physics. We present a new form of selective structural realism, which uses as its basis the distinction between what have been called framework and interaction theories. This allows us to advance the ongoing debate about the ontological status of (quasi-)particles and quantum fields, by emphasising the distinction between quantum field theory serving as a framework, and (...)
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  175.  5
    What is a related work? A typology of relationships in research literature.Shayan Doroudi - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-27.
    An important part of research is situating one’s work in a body of existing literature, thereby connecting to existing ideas. Despite this, the various kinds of relationships that might exist among academic literature do not appear to have been formally studied. Here I present a graphical representation of academic work in terms of entities and relations, drawing on structure-mapping theory (used in the study of analogies). I then use this representation to present a typology of operations that could relate two (...)
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  176.  6
    Truth and Falsity in Buridan’s Bridge.Paul Égré - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-22.
    This paper revisits Buridan’s Bridge paradox (Sophismata, chapter 8, Sophism 17), itself close kin to the Liar paradox, a version of which also appears in Bradwardine’s Insolubilia. Prompted by the occurrence of the paradox in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, I discuss and compare four distinct solutions to the problem, namely Bradwardine’s “just false” conception, Buridan’s “contingently true/false” theory, Cervantes’s “both true and false” view, and then the “neither true simpliciter nor false simpliciter” account proposed more recently by Jacquette. All have in (...)
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  177.  37
    From contrastivism back to contextualism.Da Fan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-23.
    Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between an agent, a content proposition, and a contrast, and it explains that a binary knowledge ascription sentence appears to be context-sensitive because different contexts can implicitly fill the contrast with different values. This view is purportedly supported by certain linguistic evidence. An objective of this paper is to argue that contrastivism is not empirically adequate, as there are examples that favor its contextualist cousin. Thereafter, I shall develop a contextualist (...)
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  178.  10
    The risks of autonomous machines: from responsibility gaps to control gaps.Frank Hindriks & Herman Veluwenkamp - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-17.
    Responsibility gaps concern the attribution of blame for harms caused by autonomous machines. The worry has been that, because they are artificial agents, it is impossible to attribute blame, even though doing so would be appropriate given the harms they cause. We argue that there are no responsibility gaps. The harms can be blameless. And if they are not, the blame that is appropriate is indirect and can be attributed to designers, engineers, software developers, manufacturers or regulators. The real problem (...)
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  179. Ground first: against the proof-theoretic definition of ground.Jon Erling Litland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-26.
    This paper evaluates the proof-theoretic definition of ground developed by Poggiolesi in a range of recent publications and argues that her proposed definition fails. The paper then outlines an alternative approach where logical consequence relations and the logical operations are defined in terms of ground.
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  180.  8
    The metaphysical underdetermination of time-reversal invariance.Cristian López - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-21.
    In this paper I argue that the concept of time-reversal invariance in physics suffers from metaphysical underdetermination, that is, that the concept may be understood differently depending on one’s metaphysics about time, laws, and a theory’s basic properties. This metaphysical under-determinacy also affects subsidiary debates in philosophy of physics that rely on the concept of time-reversal invariance, paradigmatically the problem of the arrow of time. I bring up three cases that, I believe, fairly illustrate my point. I conclude, on the (...)
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  181.  62
    Towards the multileveled and processual conceptualisation of racialised individuals in biomedical research.Joanna Karolina Malinowska & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-36.
    In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with a discussion on (...)
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  182.  12
    Counterpossibles in science: an experimental study.Brian McLoone, Cassandra Grützner & Michael T. Stuart - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-20.
    A counterpossible is a counterfactual whose antecedent is impossible. The vacuity thesis says all counterpossibles are true solely because their antecedents are impossible. Recently, some have rejected the vacuity thesis by citing purported non-vacuous counterpossibles in science. One limitation of this work, however, is that it is not grounded in experimental data. Do scientists actually reason non-vacuously about counterpossibles? If so, what is their basis for doing so? We presented biologists (N = 86) with two counterfactual formulations of a well-known (...)
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  183.  8
    Correction to: What it takes to make a word (token).Wade Munroe - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-1.
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  184.  10
    The unreality of words.Roy W. Perrett - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-18.
    Philosophers of language and linguists need to be wary of generalizing from too small a sample of natural languages. They also need to be wary of neglecting possible insights from philosophical traditions that have focused on natural languages other than the most familiar Western ones. Take, for example, classical Indian philosophy, where philosophical concerns with language were very much involved with the early development of Sanskrit linguistics. Indian philosophers and linguists frequently discussed more general issues about semantics, often in ways (...)
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  185. Nudging for changing selves.Richard Pettigrew - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-21.
    When is it legitimate for a government to ‘nudge’ its citizens, in the sense described by Thaler and Sunstein (2008)? In their original work on the topic, Thaler and Sunstein developed the _‘as judged by themselves’ (or AJBT) test_ to answer this question (Thaler and Sunstein 2008, p. 5). In a recent paper, Paul and Sunstein (2019) raised a concern about this test: it often seems to give the wrong answer in cases in which we are nudged to make a (...)
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  186.  10
    Cryptomnesia: a three-factor account.André Sant’Anna & Christopher Jude McCarroll - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-24.
    Understood as a psychological phenomenon, there has been very little discussion of cryptomnesia in the philosophical literature. Cryptomnesia presents us with a strange phenomenon in which we take ourselves to be imagining, but the thought or idea that we entertain actually involves remembered content. In this paper, we argue for a three-factor account of cryptomnesia, according to which it is a mnemonic phenomenon that involves imagination. We provide an account of both the ‘mnemonic’ and ‘imaginative’ aspects of cryptomnesia in terms (...)
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  187.  37
    Collective vice and collective self-knowledge.Lukas Schwengerer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-18.
    Groups can be epistemically vicious just like individuals. And just like individuals, groups sometimes want to do something about their vices. They want to change. However, intentionally combating one’s own vices seems impossible without detecting those vices first. Self-knowledge seems to provide a first step towards changing one’s own epistemic vices. I argue that groups can acquire self-knowledge about their epistemic vices and I propose an account of such collective self-knowledge. I suggest that collective self-knowledge of vices is partially based (...)
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  188.  12
    Reference the untouchable. On the limits of revising concepts using the method of cases.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-22.
    The paper investigates to what extent the method of cases can be interpreted as either a descriptive or a normative enterprise. I demonstrate that although most instances of the method of cases in most philosophical theories could be interpreted as being intended to either discover or revise the meaning of their target concepts, within a theory of reference this method cannot be used to shift the meaning of the concept of reference. The reason for this is that intuitions of extension (...)
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  189.  5
    Renouncing the attempt versus perpetration distinction.Izabela Skoczeń - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-29.
    Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper (...)
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  190.  8
    Realism, antirealism, and theoretical conservatism.Luca Tambolo & Gustavo Cevolani - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-18.
    This paper contributes to the debate on the question of whether a systematic connection obtains between one’s commitment to realism or antirealism and one’s attitude towards the possibility of radical theoretical novelty, namely, theory change affecting our best, most successful theories (see, e.g., Stanford in Synthese 196:3915–3932, 2019; Dellsén in Stud Hist Philos Sci 76:30–38, 2019). We argue that it is not allegiance to realism or antirealism as such that primarily dictates one’s response to the possibility of radical theoretical novelty: (...)
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  191.  16
    Designed to abuse? Deepfakes and the non-consensual diffusion of intimate images.Cristina Voto & Marco Viola - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-20.
    The illicit diffusion of intimate photographs or videos intended for private use is a troubling phenomenon known as the diffusion of Non-Consensual Intimate Images (NCII). Recently, it has been feared that the spread of deepfake technology, which allows users to fabricate fake intimate images or videos that are indistinguishable from genuine ones, may dramatically extend the scope of NCII. In the present essay, we counter this pessimistic view, arguing for qualified optimism instead. We hypothesize that the growing diffusion of deepfakes (...)
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  192. Predictive policing and algorithmic fairness.Tzu-Wei Hung & Chun-Ping Yen - 2023 - Synthese 201.
    This paper examines racial discrimination and algorithmic bias in predictive policing algorithms (PPAs), an emerging technology designed to predict threats and suggest solutions in law enforcement. We first describe what discrimination is in a case study of Chicago’s PPA. We then explain their causes with Broadbent’s contrastive model of causation and causal diagrams. Based on the cognitive science literature, we also explain why fairness is not an objective truth discoverable in laboratories but has context-sensitive social meanings that need to be (...)
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  193.  69
    Emergent Agent Causation.Juan Morales - 2023 - Synthese 201:138.
    In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According (...)
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  194.  20
    The meta-metaphysics of group beliefs: in search of alternatives.Krzysztof Poslajko - 2023 - Synthese 113 (4):1-18.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that our understanding of the issue of institutional group minds might be broadened if we consider alternative meta-metaphysical frameworks to those which are presently presupposed in the field. I argue that the two major camps in the contemporary philosophical debate about group beliefs, namely strong realism and eliminative reductionism, share a commitment to some form of meta-philosophical realism. Two alternative metaontological frameworks for the discussion of the issue of group belief are outlined: (...)
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  195.  28
    Realism, Antirealism, and Theoretical Conservatism.Luca Tambolo & Gustavo Cevolani - 2023 - Synthese 1 (201):1-18.
    This paper contributes to the debate on the question of whether a systematic connection obtains between one’s commitment to realism or antirealism and one’s attitude towards the possibility of radical theoretical novelty, namely, theory change affecting our best, most successful theories (see, e.g., Stanford in Synthese 196:3915–3932, 2019; Dellsén in Stud Hist Philos Sci 76:30–38, 2019). We argue that it is not allegiance to realism or antirealism as such that primarily dictates one’s response to the possibility of radical theoretical novelty: (...)
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