Oppressive ideology regularly misrepresents features of structural injustice as normal or appropriate. I argue that resisting such injustice therefore requires critical examination of the evaluative judgments encoded in shared concepts. I diagnose a mechanism of ideological misevaluation, which I call hermeneutical misfit. Hermeneutical misfit occurs when thick concepts, or concepts which both describe and evaluate, mobilise ideologically warped evaluative judgments which do not fit the facts (e.g. slutty). These ill-fitted thick concepts in turn are regularly deployed as if they merely (...) describe (hence ‘just the facts’). I argue that, via this descriptive masquerade, ill-fitted thick concepts smuggle in warped evaluative judgments alongside apparently value-neutral ‘mere facts’, a process which both reinforces those judgments and increases the difficulty of critique. I suggest that, to resist this process, we should develop collective consciousness and articulate ‘meta-hermeneutical resources,’ or thick concepts which encode critique of other, ill-fitted concepts (e.g. slut-shaming). (shrink)

Benjamin Matheson has recently argued that blameworthiness is terminable: in at least some cases, one's blameworthiness for a given offense can be diminished or even eliminated. Although Matheson presents a forceful challenge to those who deny this view—interminability theorists, he calls them—he misconstrues their position and fails to come to grips with several considerations that favor it. This paper aims to clarify key aspects of the debate and defend the claim that blameworthiness is interminable.

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

What role does audience uptake play in determining whether a speaker refuses or consents to sex? Proponents of constitution theories of uptake argue that which speech act a speaker performs is largely determined by their addressee's uptake. However, this appears to entail a troubling result: a speaker might be made to perform a speech act of consent against her will. In response, we develop a Social Constitution Theory of uptake. We argue that addressee uptake can constitute a speaker's utterance of (...) ‘no’ as a speech act of consent under some conditions, but that this does not prevent us from judging that an addressee committed rape. Second, we claim that addressee uptake is not the only form of uptake that matters—the uptake of other members of the discursive community matters too, and can override the addressee's uptake, constituting the speaker's utterance as the speech act it was intended to be. (shrink)

I defend against a salient objection the thesis that practical rationality requires us to perform intentional actions. The objection is that if rationality requires the performance of intentional actions, then agents are irrational for failing to succeed in what they intend to do. I reply to this objection by hewing closely to the principle that the rational ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. We are rationally required not to successfully realize the content of our intentions but to exercise the fallible abilities in our (...) possession. Taking this line permits us to agree that we are not irrational for failing to succeed, while also endorsing the anti-Internalist claim that practical rationality embraces intentional actions themselves, rather than merely the beliefs and intentions that prompt and sustain them. (shrink)

The Curry–Howard correspondence, according to which propositions are types, suggests that every paradox formulable in natural deduction has a type-theoretical counterpart. I will give a purely type-theoretical formulation of Curry’s paradox. On the basis of the definition of a type, Γ(A), Curry’s reasoning can be adapted to show the existence of an object of the arbitrary type A. This is paradoxical for several reasons, among others that A might be an empty type. The solution to the paradox consists in seeing (...) that Γ(A) is not a well-defined type. (shrink)

It is impossible to study philosophical methodology without being struck by the state of absolute chaos of the field’s methodological practices, methodological norms, and metaphilosophical beliefs. Not only are the methods of formal epistemology nothing like the methods of aesthetics, but even within specific debates and subfields, there are often significant disagreements about standards of proof, to say nothing about disagreements about the ultimate nature of the debate. The question facing metaphilosophers is whether this chaos is a feature or a (...) bug. Is the chaos a part of philosophy’s value as an incubator for new ideas or a sign that many philosophers have lost their way and are holding back philosophical progress? (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one's intention appropriately causing a motion of one's body, placing the latter (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here, I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this alleged developmental (...) priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel's argument, canvassing extant objections todo both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me, in the second part of the paper, to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY. (shrink)

Pluralistic theories of well-being might appear unable to accommodate just how important pleasure and pain are to well-being. Intuitively, there is a finite limit to how well your life can go for you if it goes badly enough hedonically (e.g. because you never feel any pleasure and you spend two years in unrelenting agony). But if there is some basic good distinct from pleasure, as any pluralistic theory must claim, then it seems that you could be made arbitrarily well off (...) by being given enough of that good even if your life is hedonically terrible. My aim is to defend pluralistic theories against this objection. After replying to the simplest version of it, I will answer a more sophisticated version of it that has recently been leveled by Theron Pummer. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline and defend a view on which in olfactory experience we can, and often do, smell ordinary things of various kinds—for instance, cookies, coffee, and cake burnings—and the olfactory properties they have. A challenge to this view are cases of smelling in the absence of the source of a smell, such as when a fishy smell lingers after the fish is gone. Such cases, many philosophers argue, show that what we perceive in olfactory experience are odour (...) objects, and not ordinary things. On behalf of our opponent, we articulate a screening-off argument based on cases of lingering smells for the thesis that we do not smell ordinary things. We then develop an alternative account of these cases that is consistent with our view. In doing so, we call into question two claims that are typically built into the notion of an odour object. (shrink)

I argue that an act can be wrong _because_ it wrongs a particular person. I then show how this thesis serves as a constraint on moral theories, using Kantian ethics as a case study.

The alienation constraint on theories of well-being has been influentially expressed thus: 'what is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive …. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him' (Railton 1986: 9). Many agree this claim expresses something true, but there is little consensus on how exactly the constraint is to be (...) understood. Here, I clarify the sense in which the quote offers a basic constraint on theories of well-being—a constraint that should be adopted by (e.g.) hedonists, desire satisfactionists, and objective list theorists alike. This constraint focuses on affective engagement, or positive affective stances in connection with a proposed good. I show that the constraint explains a near-universal intuition, and rules out a number of well-known theories of well-being. (shrink)

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

An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...) relations ‘for free,’ and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject’s antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject’s antecedent evidence. (shrink)

The claim that perfect hallucination is introspectively indistinguishable from perception has been a centrepiece of philosophical theorizing about sense experience. The most common interpretation of the indistinguishability claim is modal: that it is impossible to distinguish perfect hallucination from perception through introspection alone. I run through various models of introspection and show that none of them can accommodate the modal interpretation. Rejecting the modal interpretation opens up two alternative interpretations of the indistinguishability claim. According to the generic interpretation, hallucination is (...) indistinguishable from perception despite the existence of possible exceptions, while according to the actuality interpretation, the indistinguishability of hallucination from perception consists in the actual failure to distinguish hallucination from perception. These alternative understandings of the indistinguishability claim have a number of significant implications for the problem of perception, including the rejection of perfect hallucination and illusion in favour of our ordinary, non-philosophical concepts of these states. (shrink)

I present two arguments that aim to establish logical limits on what we can know. More specifically, I argue for two results concerning what we can know about questions that we cannot answer. I also discuss a line of thought, found in the writings of Pierce and of Rescher, in support of the idea that we cannot identify specific scientific questions that will never be answered.

A speaker’s use of a sentence does more than contribute a content to a conversation. It also expresses the speaker’s attitude. This essay is about which attitude or attitudes are expressed by using an interrogative sentence to ask a question. With reference to eight lines of data about how questions are circulated in conversation, it is argued that a desire to know the question’s answer(s) is expressed.

Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose an (...) explanation for the phenomenology of such experiences in terms of an imaginative activity that represents what an object is historically connected with as part of the object in the present. One imagines of the site of Becket’s murder Becket being murdered. According to my account, objects that embody their histories are representations in Kendall Walton’s sense: they have the function of serving as props in games of make-believe. (shrink)

I describe respects in which an over-emphasis on the role of consent in sexual ethics gives rise to hermeneutical injustices. Although consent is widely invoked with feminist motivations to combat rape culture, the role to which it is often put, I argue, is often antithetical to its laudable feminist aims. Various influential stereotypes about consent and sex influence the public imagination, interacting to produce and reinforce harmful "inference tickets" that impede public and individual understanding of important positive and negative kinds (...) of sexual interactions. Rather than trying to replace inadequate conceptions of consent with more inflationary ones, feminists should use different language and frameworks to express their critiques and motivate positive cultural change. (shrink)