The fact that someone is generous is a reason to admire them. The fact that someone will pay you to admire them is also a reason to admire them. But there is a difference in kind between these two reasons: the former seems to be the ‘right’ kind of reason to admire, whereas the latter seems to be the ‘wrong’ kind of reason to admire. The Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem is the problem of explaining the difference between the ‘right’ (...) and the ‘wrong’ kind of reasons wherever it appears. In this article I argue that two recent proposals for solving the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem do not work. I then offer an alternative solution that provides a unified, systematic explanation of the difference between the two kinds of reasons. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists face a puzzle. In brief, the puzzle is that if the reason there is to believe in accord with the evidence depends, as the instrumentalist says it does, on agents’ idiosyncratic interests, then there is no reason to expect that this reason is universal. Here, I identify and explain two strategies instrumentalists have used to try and solve this puzzle. I then argue that we should find these strategies wanting. Faced with the failure of these strategies, I articulate (...) a heretofore neglected solution on behalf of instrumentalism. (shrink)

Do epistemic requirements vary along with facts about what promotes agents' well-being? Epistemic instrumentalists say 'yes', and thereby earn a lot of contempt. This contempt is a mistake on two counts. First, it is incorrectly based: the reasons typically given for it are misguided. Second, it fails to distinguish between first- and second-order epistemic instrumentalism; and, it happens, only the former is contemptible. In this book, Nathaniel P. Sharadin argues for rejecting epistemic instrumentalism as a first-order view not (...) because it suffers extensional failures, but because it suffers explanatory ones. By contrast, he argues that epistemic instrumentalism offers a natural, straightforward explanation of why being epistemically correct matters. What emerges is a second-order instrumentalist explanation for epistemic authority that is neutral between competing first-order epistemic theories. This neutrality is an advantage. But, drawing on work from cognitive science and psychology, Sharadin argues that instrumentalists can abandon that neutrality in order to adopt a view he calls epistemic ecologism. Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has recently offered a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the so-called " right " and " wrong " kinds of reasons for attitudes like belief and admiration. Schroeder tries out two different strategies for making his solution work: the alethic strategy and the background-facts strategy. In this paper I argue that neither of Schroeder's two strategies will do the trick. We are still left with the problem of distinguishing the right from the wrong kinds of reasons.

L.A. Paul has argued that an ordinary, natural way of making a decision -- by reflecting on the phenomenal character of the experiences one will have as a result of that decision -- cannot yield rational decision in certain cases. Paul's argument turns on the (in principle) epistemically inaccessible phenomenal character of certain experiences. In this paper I argue that, even granting Paul a range of assumptions, her argument doesn't work to establish its conclusion. This is because, as I argue, (...) the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on epistemically accessible facts about its non-phenomenal character plus what the deciding agent is like. Because there are principles that link the non-phenomenal character of experiences (together with what a particular agent is like) to the phenomenal character of experiences, agents can reasonably form expectations about the valence of the phenomenal character of the experiences that they are deciding whether to undergo. These reasonable expectations are, I argue, enough to make the ordinary, natural way of making a decision yield rational decision. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have claimed that non-evidential considerations cannot play a role in doxastic deliberation as motivating reasons to believe a proposition. This claim, interesting in its own right, naturally lends itself to use in a range of arguments for a wide array of substantive philosophical theses. I argue, by way of a counterexample, that the claim to which all these arguments appeal is false. I then consider, and reply to, seven objections to my counterexample. Finally, as a way (...) of softening the blow, I show how the counterexample itself suggests a plausible diagnosis of why this claim has seemed so plausible to so many. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have claimed that non-evidential considerations cannot play a role in doxastic deliberation as motivating reasons to believe a proposition. This claim, interesting in its own right, naturally lends itself to use in a range of arguments for a wide array of substantive philosophical theses. I argue, by way of a counterexample, that the claim to which all these arguments appeal is false. I then consider, and reply to, seven objections to my counterexample. Finally, as a way (...) of softening the blow, I show how the counterexample itself suggests a plausible diagnosis of why this claim has seemed so plausible to so many. (shrink)

Humean promotionalists about reasons think that whether there is a reason for an agent to ϕ depends on whether her ϕ-ing promotes the satisfaction of at least one of her desires. Several authors have recently defended probabilistic accounts of promotion, according to which an agent’s ϕ-ing promotes the satisfaction of one of her desires just in case her ϕ-ing makes the satisfaction of that desire more probable relative to some baseline. In this paper I do three things. First, I formalize (...) an argument, due to Jeff Behrends and Joshua DiPaolo, to the effect that Mark Schroeder’s and Stephen Finlay’s probabilistic accounts of promotion cannot be correct. Next, I extend this argument to a recent alternative offered by D. Justin Coates and show how Coates’ attempt to avoid the argument by introducing a distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ probability doesn’t help. Finally, I suggest an alternative way of understanding promotion in terms of increase in degree of fit between the causal upshot of an action and the content of a desire. I show how this view, disjunctively paired with probabilism about promotion, solves the problems with previous accounts. (shrink)

What is required for an action to promote the satisfaction of a desire? We reject extant answers and propose an alternative. Our account differs from competing answers in two ways: first, it is contrastive, in that actions promote the satisfaction of desires only as contrasted with other possible actions. Second, it employs a notion of expected fit between desire and world, defined as the weighted sum of the fit between the desire and the world in all possible outcomes, where each (...) weight is given by the probability of the agent’s obtaining the relevant outcome. According to our proposal, then, an action promotes a desire when the expected fit for the desire given that the agent performs the action is greater than the expected fit of the desire given that the agent performs the contrasting action. We highlight this account’s attractive features and explain how it improves on its competitors. (shrink)

Patient preference predictors (PPPs) promise to provide medical professionals with a new solution to the problem of making treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients. I show that the use of PPPs faces a version of a normative problem familiar from legal scholarship: the problem of naked statistical evidence. I sketch two sorts of possible reply, vindicating and debunking, and suggest that our reply to the problem in the one domain ought to mirror our reply in the other. The conclusion (...) is thus conditional: if we think the problem of naked statistical evidence is a serious problem in the legal domain, then we should be concerned about the symmetrical problem for PPPs. (shrink)

Permissivism is the view that sometimes an agent's total evidential state entails both that she is epistemically permitted to believe that P and that she is epistemically permitted to believe that Q, where P and Q are contradictories. Uniqueness is the denial of Permissivism. Permissivism has recently come under attack on several fronts. If these attacks are successful, then we may be forced to accept an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. In this essay I clarify the debate by (...) distinguishing two versions of Permissiveness and Uniqueness. I then respond to several recent challenges to Permissivism in an attempt to even the score between Permissivism and Uniqueness. I will also respond to a worry – arising out of my discussion – that a defense of Permissivism itself introduces an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. (shrink)

Permissivism is the view that sometimes an agent's total evidential state entails both that she is epistemically permitted to believe that P and that she is epistemically permitted to believe that Q, where P and Q are contradictories. Uniqueness is the denial of Permissivism. Permissivism has recently come under attack on several fronts. If these attacks are successful, then we may be forced to accept an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. In this essay I clarify the debate by (...) distinguishing two versions of Permissiveness and Uniqueness. I then respond to several recent challenges to Permissivism in an attempt to even the score between Permissivism and Uniqueness. I will also respond to a worry – arising out of my discussion – that a defense of Permissivism itself introduces an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. (shrink)

It’s possible to accept or to reject a promise. According to a new proposal by Abraham Roth, accepting a promise involves intending that the promisee perform the promised action. According to Roth, this view is supported by rational symmetries between promissory acceptance and intention. Here, I show how these symmetries actually generate two problems for the view.

In previous work I argued that purely probabilistic accounts of what it takes to promote a desire are mistaken. This is because, I argued, there are desires that it is possible to promote but impossible to probabilistically promote. In a recent article critical of my account, Joshua DiPaolo and Jeffrey Behrends articulate a methodological principle -- Check the Neighborhood -- and claim that respecting this principle rescues pure probabilism from my argument. In this reply, I accept the methodological principle and (...) show that, despite rendering the original argument invalid, there remains a neighboring argument against purely probabilistic accounts of promotion. (shrink)

John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength of each claimant's claim. (...) In this journal, James Kirkpatrick and Nick Eastwood have objected that the use of weighted lotteries in the case of indivisible goods is unacceptable. In this article, I explain why Kirkpatrick and Eastwood's objection misses its mark. (shrink)

The use of machine learning, or “artificial intelligence” (AI) in medicine is widespread and growing. In this paper, I focus on a specific proposed clinical application of AI: using models to predict incapacitated patients’ treatment preferences. Drawing on results from machine learning, I argue this proposal faces a special moral problem. Machine learning researchers owe us assurance on this front before experimental research can proceed. In my conclusion I connect this concern to broader issues in AI safety.

Patient preference predictors aim to solve the moral problem of making treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients. This commentary on a case of an unrepresented patient at the end of life considers 3 related problems of such predictors: the problem of restricting the scope of inputs to the models (the “scope” problem), the problem of weighing inputs against one another (the “weight” problem), and the problem of multiple reasonable solutions to the scope and weight problems (the “multiple reasonable models” (...) problem). Each of these problems poses challenges to reliably implementing patient preference predictors in important, high-stakes health care decision making. This commentary also suggests a way forward. (shrink)

The moral of Buridan's Ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be (...) explained by the difference between rational intentions and rational actions. Thus, it turns out, Buridan's Ass-style cases do not indicate an asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality as such. (shrink)

According to extant versions of epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic reasons are instrumental reasons. Epistemic instrumentalism is unpopular. I think it’s just misunderstood. Rather than saying epistemic reasons are instrumental reasons, epistemic instrumentalists should only say that if there is an epistemic reason, there is also an instrumental reason. This is the view I call ecumenical epistemic instrumentalism. In this paper, I first motivate, next sketch, and finally highlight the advantages of this version of epistemic instrumentalism.

A number of philosophers accept promotionalism, the view that whether there is a normative reason for an agent to perform an action or have an attitude depends on whether her doing so promotes a value, desire, interest, goal, or end. I show that promotionalism faces a prima facie problem when it comes to reasons for belief: it looks extensionally inadequate. I then articulate two general strategies promotionalists can used to solve this problem and argue that, even if one of these (...) two strategies can successfully solve the problem with reasons for belief, promotionalists face a symmetrical problem in a range of structurally similar cases. As I'll argue, the problem is that promotionalism cannot account for reasons grounded in the ‘fit’ between an attitude and its object. I offer an alternative to promotionalism and explain how adopting this alternative solves the problems with promotionalism while preserving much of what made promotionalism attractive in the first place. (shrink)

Epistemic consequentialism has been charged with ignoring the epistemic separateness of propositions and with (thereby) allowing trade-offs between propositions. Here, I do two things. First, I investigate the metaphor of the epistemic separateness of propositions. I argue that either (i) the metaphor is meaningfully unpacked in a way that is modeled on the moral separateness of persons, in which case it doesn’t support a ban on trade-offs or (ii) it isn’t meaningfully unpacked, in which case it really doesn’t support a (...) ban on trade-offs. Second, I consider the strategy of arguing against the trade-off permitting conception of epistemic rationality that is central to epistemic consequentialism on the basis of our intuitive verdicts about the permissibility of trade-offs in cases. I argue the execution of this strategy suffers a methodological mistake that, once corrected, vitiates the probative value of those intuitive verdicts. Hence the conclusion: the separateness of propositions provides no support for a ban on trade-offs, and an influential independent argument for such a ban is flawed. (shrink)

Developers of generative machine learning models have pledged to enable users to identify model-generated content -- that is, to "spot the bot". In this short note, I explain why this promise is based on a bait and switch.

Sometimes, agents do the right thing for the right reason. What’s the normative significance of this phenomenon? According to proponents of the special status view, when an agent acts for the right reason, her actions enjoy a special normative status, namely, worthiness. Proponents of this view claim that self-effacing forms of consequentialism cannot say this plausible thing, and, worse, are blocked from having a perspicuous view of matters by the self-effacing nature of their consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that (...) this claim is based on an illicit assumption. I show that whatever version of the special status view proponents of that view prefer, self-effacing consequentialists can adopt a version of it. Moreover, I show that proponents of extant versions of the special status view have reason to prefer the specific version of that view I articulate on behalf of self-effacing consequentialists. (shrink)

Jokes are sometimes morally objectionable, and sometimes they are not. What’s the relationship between a joke’s being morally objectionable and its being funny? Philosophers’ answers to this question run the gamut. In this paper I present a new argument for the view that the negative moral value of a joke can affect its comedic value both positively and negatively.

Many philosophers think the distinctive function of deontic evaluation is to guide action. This idea is used in arguments for a range of substantive claims. In this paper, we entirely do one completely destructive thing and partly do one not entirely constructive thing. The first thing: we argue that there is an unrecognized gap between the claim that the function of deontic evaluation is to guide action and attempts to put that claim to use. We consider and reject four arguments (...) intended to bridge this gap. The interim conclusion is thus that arguments starting with the claim that the function of deontic evaluation is to guide action have a lacuna. The second thing: we consider a different tack for making arguments of this sort work. We sketch a methodology one could accept that would do the trick. Unfortunately, as we’ll explain, although this methodology would bridge the gap in arguments that put claims about the function of deontic evaluation to work, it would do so in a way that vitiates any interest we might have in such arguments. As an aside, we’ll also point out how epistemologists, who have recently become interested in the function of epistemic evaluation, appear to already recognize this fact. The conclusion is hence a dilemma: either arguments from deontic function to substance have a lacuna or such arguments lack teeth. (shrink)

In his "May Belief Outstrip Evidence?" (1916) Durant Drake argues that beliefs may sometimes permissibly outstrip evidence. Drake's novel idea is that epistemic reasons are not the final arbiter of the justificatory status of beliefs. In this short note I motivate Drake's idea by suggesting an analogy between the epistemic justification of belief and the moral justification of intention.

Patient preference predictors take us from known demographic descriptors to unknown facts about patients’ preferences over treatment options. However, the use of PPPs to make treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients faces an apparent normative problem: their use in certain contexts appears to involve treating patients paternalistically. In this paper, I consider whether PPPs can find a home in the context of military medicine. On the assumptions that military organizations sometimes permissibly treat their members paternalistically, I identify the specific (...) circumstances in which PPPs can play a role in making treatment decisions on behalf of patients. I show that these circumstances are not only the natural home of PPPs, PPPs – or something very much like them – are precisely the sort of device required for it to be permissible to paternalistically override a patient’s expressed preferences. (shrink)

In June 2017, President Trump announced that the US intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The decision was widely viewed as an abrogation of US leadership in confronting a changing climate. I’m not interested here in the decision to withdraw from Paris per se. Instead, I’m interested in Paris as a useful contrast for the administration’s attitude towards a different international environmental agreement: the Montreal Protocol.

We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...) controls on biomedical AI. We conclude with a suggestion about future research directions in bioethics. (shrink)

Motivational Internalism is a collection of thirteen new essays on exactly the topic you expect it to be, given the title. It also contains an introductory chapter, in which the editors attach an excellent overview of the current state of play to an intimidating bibliography. The essays in the volume are divided into three sections, each with its own, shorter, introduction by the editors. The first section concerns evidence for and against motivational internalism; the second concerns the relevance of internalism (...) for metaethics; the final section considers ways of bridging the gap between internalist and externalist accounts of moral motivation. In what follows I'll comment briefly on each of the essays in these sections before remarking on who, besides libraries, should buy this book. (shrink)

Marks individually or in combination constitute images that represent objects. How do those images represent those objects? Marks vary in style, both between and within images. Images also vary in style. How do those styles relate to each other and to the objects that those images represent? Referencing a diverse range of images, we answer the first question with a response-dependence theory of image representation derived from Mark Johnston, differentiating Lockean primary qualities of marks from secondary qualities of images. We (...) answer the second question with a perceptual theory of style derived from Paul Grice, differentiating physical style from image style, and representing conventionally from representing conversationally. (shrink)

The mesostriatal dopamine system is prominently implicated in model-free reinforcement learning, with fMRI BOLD signals in ventral striatum notably covarying with model-free prediction errors. However, latent learning and devaluation studies show that behavior also shows hallmarks of model-based planning, and the interaction between model-based and model-free values, prediction errors, and preferences is underexplored. We designed a multistep decision task in which model-based and model-free influences on human choice behavior could be distinguished. By showing that choices reflected both influences we could (...) then test the purity of the ventral striatal BOLD signal as a model-free report. Contrary to expectations, the signal reflected both model-free and model-based predictions in proportions matching those that best explained choice behavior. These results challenge the notion of a separate model-free learner and suggest a more integrated computational architecture for high-level human decision-making. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing (...) responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

BackgroundThe terminal illness of late-stage Alzheimer’s and related dementias is progressively cruel, burdensome, and can last years if caregivers assist oral feeding and hydrating. Options to avoid prolonged dying are limited since advanced dementia patients cannot qualify for Medical Aid in Dying. Physicians and judges can insist on clear and convincing evidence that the patient wants to die—which many advance directives cannot provide. Proxies/agents’ substituted judgment may not be concordant with patients’ requests. While advance directives can be patients’ last resort (...) to attain a peaceful and timely dying consistent with their lifelong values, success depends on their being effective and acceptable. A single flaw can provide opponents justification to refuse the directive’s requests to cease assisted feeding.AimThis article considers 24 common advance directive flaws in four categories. Process flaws focus on how patients express their end-of-life wishes. Content flaws reflect drafters’ selection of conditions and interventions, and how they are described. Inherent flaws can make advance directives unacceptable to authorities concerned about premature dying. Strategies are needed to compel physicians to write needed orders and to prevent third parties from sabotaging these orders after they are implemented. The article includes excerpts from “dementia-specific” directives or supplements that exemplify each flaw—mostly from the US and Europe. No directive critiqued here included an effective strategy to resolve this long-debated bioethical conflict: the past directive requests “Cease assisted feeding” but the incapacitated patient apparently expresses the desire to “Continue assisted feeding.” Some opponents to the controversial request, cease assisted feeding, use this conflict as a conceptual wedge to practice hard paternalism. This article proposes a protocol to prevent this conflict from emerging. These strategies may prevent authorities from requiring patients to fulfill authorities’ additional clinical criteria as a prerequisite to honor the requests in patients directives.ConclusionThis critique of flaws may serve as a guide to drafting and to selecting effective and acceptable advance directives for dementia. It also poses several bioethical and clinical questions to those in authority: Does your paternalistic refusal to honor patients’ wishes respect their self-determination? Protect vulnerable patients from harm? Force patients to endure prolonged suffering? Violate the principles of bioethics? Violate the very foundation of patient-centered care? (shrink)

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how the (...) most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1): 79-98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives. (shrink)

Using the Public Value Mapping framework, I address the values successes and failures of chemistry as compared to the emerging field of green chemistry, in which the promoters attempt to incorporate new and expanded values, such as health, safety, and environmental sustainability, to the processes of prioritizing and conducting chemistry research. I document how such values are becoming increasingly public. Moreover, analysis of the relations among the multiple values associated with green chemistry displays a greater internal coherence and logic than (...) for conventional chemistry. Although traditional chemistry research has successfully contributed to both economic and values gains, there have been public values failures due to imperfect values articulations, failure to take a longer-term view, and inertia within a system that places too much emphasis on science values. Green chemistry, if implemented effectively, has potential to remedy these failures. (shrink)

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has developed a curriculum leading to a certificate in health care ethics consultation. A certification in ethics consultation initially seems to fit nicely into the biomedical model of clinical expertise espoused by modern biomedicine, but examining what exactly constitutes moral expertise, particularly for traditional Christians, reveals a significant problem: the certification relies on an implicit view of ethics as essentially procedural. It leaves virtually all serious moral content to be filled in, if at (...) all, after an ostensibly neutral scaffolding has been erected. Such an approach does not help answer deep moral questions about how one should live, and it is these questions that ought to be encouraged during some conflicts that result in requests for ethics consultations. This paper suggests that, in certain circumstances, and for a subset of patients, encouraging conversion can help remedy the deficiency of an overly mechanized approach. A system open to conversion would have more room for Traditional Christians, regardless of the outcome, as it would take morality as lived, communal experience more seriously and help others, if desired, to do so as well. (shrink)

Recent defenders of metaethical constructivism (like Christine Korsgaard, Sharon Street, Aaron James, and Carla Bagnoli) argue that this view can be shown to represent a new, free-standing alternative to familiar approaches in metaethics. If they are correct, traditional discussions in metaethics have overlooked an important position, one that is supposed to adequately explain the nature of our ethical thinking and practice while avoiding the kinds of objections that traditional views struggle with. However, what form constructivism should take and whether constructivists (...) can make good on this ambitious claim remains extremely controversial. This article starts out with a brief account of the origins of contemporary discussions of constructivism. It then moves on to canvass the main motivations and arguments for constructivism along with the various ways in which the view has been interpreted. In the second half of the article, it introduces a serious challenge to the ambitious claim that constructivism represents a new, free-standing approach in metaethics and concludes by entertaining a very recent proposal that this challenge might overlook. (shrink)

Neuroeconomics illustrates our deepening descent into the details of individual cognition. This descent is guided by the implicit assumption that “individual human” is the important “agent” of neoclassical economics. I argue here that this assumption is neither obviously correct, nor of primary importance to human economies. In particular I suggest that the main genius of the human species lies with its ability to distribute cognition across individuals, and to incrementally accumulate physical and social cognitive artifacts that largely obviate the innate (...) biological limitations of individuals. If this is largely why our economies grow, then we should be much more interested in distributed cognition in human groups, and correspondingly less interested in individual cognition. We should also be much more interested in the cultural accumulation of cognitive artefacts: computational devices and media, social structures and economic institutions. (shrink)

Memoirs of a twenty-year relationship between the author and Ayn Rand, who was his friend, mentor, lover, and enemy. No index. No bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

ABSTRACTEvidence suggests that older adults experience greater emotional well-being compared to younger adults. Appraisal theories of emotion posit that differences in emotional experience are the...

The philosopher Roberto Unger and the physicist Lee Smolin have recently argued that the current explanatory framework of cosmology, which presumes a timeless background of unchanging physical laws, should be replaced by a thoroughly relational framework in which time is fundamental and all laws are subject to change. Within this alternative framework, however, Unger and Smolin find themselves confronted by a dilemma: either the laws of nature evolve according to some higher set of “meta-laws,” which reinstates a timeless background at (...) a higher level, or the laws of nature evolve randomly and the path of inquiry is blocked. In response to this dilemma, the authors propose a theory of causal events as singular, freely chosen, and self-determined optimalities constrained only by their intrinsic relations to all other events. (shrink)