The guiding aim of this piece is to illuminate the topic of morality and diachronic choice by revealing its connections to two closely related topics that have received significantly more attention in philosophy, namely that of morality and collective action problems and that of rationality and diachronic choice. A further, related aim is to chime in on a key point of contention relevant to debates on morality and diachronic choice that centers around the marginalized but, in my view, compelling idea (...) that appropriate diachronic choice can involve passing up a preferable option. Ultimately, I will suggest that, although the idea is initially counterintuitive, it is philosophically powerful and very much worthy of continued investigation. Relatedly, I will consider the possibility of preferability cycles—which can, if they exist, make sense of passing up a preferable option—and suggest that there remain reasons for pause in relation to the widespread rejection of such cycles. (shrink)

Recent works in theology—including Beall (The Contradictory Christ and Divine Contradiction) and essays in Rutledge (Paradox and Contradiction in Theology)—have articulated or defended contradictory or contradictory-like theologies. Given the use of contemporary formal logic in setting out these theologies, a natural question concerning the existence of historical precedents to contradictory or contradictory-like theologies has arisen. In this article we present a short, accessible overview of contradictory and contradictory-like theologies alongside an attempt to address the question of historical precedents for such (...) views. (shrink)

Theoretical underdetermination is a central issue in the Philosophy of Science, having been discussed and debated since the early 20th century. The so-called “Duhem-Quine problem” has been used as an umbrella term to refer to a number of problematic features that arise from the lack of a biunivocal correspondence between theory and evidence. However, the now familiar idea that the detection of an empirical phenomenon is inferred from a complex collection of data entails the recognition that not only theories, but (...) also the description of empirical phenomena are underdetermined by evidence. Empirical underdetermination, understood as the underdetermination of evidence (or assumed empirical phenomena) by data, emerges as a major challenge that has yet to be fully recognized and carefully addressed in the philosophy of science. The paper summarizes the distinction between empirical and theoretical underdetermination as it implicitly appears in the literature to date. It presents them as instances of a more general type, both of which arise from the same basic problems, albeit at different levels and with different implications. Important but often overlooked aspects of the empirical/theoretical distinction, the notion of background assumption, and the different roles of evidence will be clarified. (shrink)

Groups are viewpoint diverse when their members think about the same problem in different ways. There exists a multi-disciplinary literature arguing that viewpoint diversity improves a group's epistemic outcomes. But within that literature, the concept of a viewpoint goes unanalyzed. This paper builds on work by the political philosopher Gerald Gaus to develop an analysis of a problem-specific viewpoint. It considers two cases where viewpoint diversity improves decision-making quality. In the first case, group members all share criteria for evaluating solutions (...) to their problem, such that all agree on which solution is “best” when they find it. In the second case, group members do not share these criteria because the evaluation of solutions is essentially contestable. Although the existing evidence is not decisive, we have reason to believe that viewpoint diversity, when properly harnessed, improves epistemic outcomes in both cases. (shrink)

Many traditions and worldviews have held that patience is a virtue—a habit that is morally praiseworthy. In this essay we orient readers to recent work on what patience is and what patience does. What are the distinctive markers of the disposition of patience? And why have people regarded it as so important to living well? We outline four contemporary views all anchored in historical philosophical traditions and then suggest future directions for work on patience in normative ethics and political philosophy.

The mass‐count distinction is a morpho‐syntactic distinction among nouns in English and many other languages. Tree, chair, person, group, and portion are count nouns, which come with the plural and accept numerals such as one and first; water, rice, furniture, silverware, and law enforcement are mass nouns, which lack the plural and do not accept numerals. The morpho‐syntactic distinction is generally taken to have semantic content or reflect a semantic mass‐count distinction. At the center of the semantic mass‐count distinction is, (...) in some way or another, a notion of being one or being a single entity, the basis of countability. There is little unanimity, however, of how the notion of being a single entity is to be understood and thus what the semantic mass‐count distinction consists in. The question of the content of the mass‐count distinction and thus the notion of a single object relates to broader philosophical issues, such as the question whether predicates apply to things as such or things under a part‐structure related perspective, the question whether language involves an ontology at an intermediary level distinct from that of reality or even nonlinguistic cognition, and the question whether the semantics of mass nouns requires different logical tools than the ones used in standard semantic analyses (as has been argued for plurals by proponents of plural logics). In what follows, I will give a general presentation of the phenomenon of the mass‐count distinction as well as an outline of current approaches to the mass‐count distinction that ought to be of particular interest to philosophers. The focus will be on very general features and motivations of semantic theories of the mass‐count distinction which lend themselves to more philosophical discussions, rather than the details of the various formal developments. I will mainly discuss extension‐based and integrity‐based approaches, which have been most widely adopted, but which both face significant challenges. I will briefly mention a third approach, the reference‐based approach, whose aim is to overcome those challenges, by taking mass reference to be more primitive than singular and plural reference and not to be reducible to the latter. (shrink)

The question of whether machines can be creative has been at the centre of debates among scholars and practitioners well before the inception of artificial intelligence (AI) as a recognised field of research. This paper reviews how some of the key thinkers in the fields of creativity and AI have approached this question, contextualising their views within the ebbs and flows of AI technological developments, from the 1950s until now. The thread of this overview is Margaret Boden's identification of novelty, (...) surprisingness and value, as the three cardinal features of creativity. This review will retrace the steps of the quest of artificial intelligence researchers as they strive to replicate each of these three properties within human-made machines. The paper closes with a reflection on how the third of these properties, value, prompts us to consider societal challenges raised by the widespread adoption of AI for creativity that transcend the question: ‘Can AI be creative?’. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a rise in the engagement with empirical methods in philosophy. However, explicit discussion of the method and methodology behind such approaches is scarce, in particular for engagement with qualitative ethnographic styles of empirical research. This entry gathers debates from various philosophical subfields where ethnography has found a philosophical use. First, I introduce ethnography and highlight different versions through examples from phenomenology, political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of science. Then, I address three common challenges raised against the (...) relevance and legitimacy of ethnographic philosophy, some specific to ethnography, others shared with experimental philosophy and integrated history and philosophy of science. The entry ends by suggesting some benefits of ethnographic philosophy, including a potential for genuine surprise, the opportunity to fine-tune and enrichen concepts and a better grasp at philosophical significance in human lives. In addition, I note that ethnography encourages more thoroughgoing philosophical self-reflection about contextual and situational features of philosophical theories and about the particularities of the philosophers developing them, introducing the idea of ‘naturalising the philosopher’. (shrink)

In the philosophy of logic, the Adoption Problem is a challenge to the claim that reasoners can, in certain ways, rationally change which logic they use. The (alleged) problem is that if someone does not already infer in accordance with some fundamental logical principles (such as Universal Instantiation or Modus Ponens), then they cannot rationally begin to do so: the “adoption” of these principles is either unnecessary or impossible. In the literature, three issues have emerged as especially contentious: (1) How (...) should we understand the argument for the Adoption Problem? What exactly is the argument’s conclusion, and how is it established, if at all? (2) How could someone who thinks that the rational adoption of logic is possible respond to the Adoption Problem? (3) What are the consequences of the Adoption Problem for related issues in the philosophy of logic? In this paper, we address each question in turn. We suggest that the Adoption Problem is best understood in the form of an inconsistent quartet of theses regarding logical inference. We classify positions on logical adoption in terms of which of these theses is abandoned, and we show that such a taxonomy of positions is useful for delineating the scope and consequences of the Adoption Problem. (shrink)

According to anti‐exceptionalism about logic (AEL), logic is not as exceptional in terms of its subject matter and epistemology as has been conventionally thought. As such, AEL either outright rejects certain traditional properties of logic, such as its formality, apriority, or necessity, or rather proposes that while logic possesses these properties, it does so in a similar way to other research areas. In this second part of a two‐part entry on AEL, we focus on contemporary proposals for Methodological AEL, the (...) view that the mechanisms of theory‐choice in logic are similar to those in the sciences. Firstly, we consider the various contemporary motivations for Methodological AEL and highlight how these motivations need not equally motivate Evidential AEL, the view that the sources of logical evidence are the same as the sources of evidence within the sciences. Secondly, we discuss the two most prominent versions of Methodological AEL in the literature, logical abductivism and predictivism, and end by briefly outlining some of the important challenges presently facing Methodological AEL. (shrink)

The debate about the impact and desirability of automizing labor is one that emerges alongside every major technological development. In recent years, attention for the potential ethical and social implications of automizing labor increased once again, in response to the successes and promises of artificial intelligence (AI) and other modern technologies. The aim of this article is, first and foremost, to introduce the reader to recent work on the desirability of automizing labor. The article distinguishes two philosophical debates about replacing (...) human jobs with AI systems or robots. The first debate has to do with questions of distributive justice, in light of the prospect of structural technological unemployment. The second debate has to do with questions about the relation between a job and a meaningful life. In addition to sketching these debates, the article highlights environmental concerns regarding automation as a possible future direction for research on the future of work. (shrink)