I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

Regina Rini argues that ambiguity about whether behaviour instantiates oppression is constitutive of microaggression. I give reasons to doubt this: people can be clear that someone’s behaviour towards them instantiates oppression; ambiguity does not seem to feature centrally in apologies for microaggression; ambiguity can be present when someone is a victim of microaggression due to external causes such as fatigue; ambiguity can be introduced or dispelled by the corroborating input of third parties, some of whom have expertise as oppressed people (...) themselves. These points lend support to a structural account of microaggression where ambiguity is an optional aggravating feature of some microagressive behaviour. (shrink)

It is customarily assumed that paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions to liar paradoxes require a logical system weaker than classical logic. That is, if a logic is not fragile to liar paradoxes, it must be logically weaker than classical logic. Defenders of classical logic argue that the losses of weakening it outweigh the gains. Advocates of paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions disagree. We articulate the notion of fragility with respect to the liar paradox and show that it can be disentangled from logical (...) strength. Strength and resilience to paradox do not force a trade-off with respect to liars: there can be logics which are not weaker than classical logic and are solid to the liar. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

Rational Sentimentalism By D’ArmsJustin and JacobsonDanielOxford University Press, 2023. 256 pp.

I identify two kinds of failure in joint action. First, we can fail to ‘do our part’, that is, fail to contribute to fulfilling the joint intention. Second, we can fail to respect our collaborators. Recognizing the distinct natures of both normative relations helps us overcome a key challenge to a reductionist theory of collective intentionality posed by Margaret Gilbert. According to this objection, we have obligations towards others even in immoral joint actions – a claim that was recently supported (...) experimentally. Except for a handful of experimental papers, work on the normativity in joint intention has stagnated. I hope the distinction breathes fresh air into the theoretical and empirical debate. (shrink)

When I intend to J, I may be wrong about what I intend but not about who intends it. In this sense, action intentions appear immune to error. A standard explanation of this immunity is that the subject of the intention is not represented in the content of the intention in the first place. When I think that we intend to J, it seems obvious that I can misjudge who ‘we’ are. This may seem to indicate that the ‘we’ must (...) be represented in the content of the intention. This argument from misidentification is an objection against purely perspectival accounts of the distinction between I- and we-intentions. However, in several relevant respects we-intentions and I-intentions are on a par in relation to errors in identification, and the argument from misidentification against the perspectival account of the distinction backfires. (shrink)

Critical Notice on Organizations as Wrongdoers By Stephanie Collins Oxford University Press, 2023. -/- Extract: What, if any, role does metaphysics have to play in addressing moral questions? When answering questions about moral responsibility, many theories rely on answers to questions about the nature of agency and agents, the persistence of persons and the existence and nature of free will. In recent work in social ontology, philosophers have argued for views of social categories or identities that take ethical and social–political (...) desiderata into consideration in several ways. Some argue for views of gender identities that depend on epistemic and ethical considerations (Bettcher, 2009). Others develop views of gender categories in ways they take to be metaphysically realist, tracking robust explanatory patterns in the world. For instance, Barnes (2017) argues for this interpretation of Haslanger’s views of racial and gender categories. Others argue that injustice and oppression are reflected in the nature of social categories. For instance, while it ought not to be this way, some gender categories are, for instance, trans-exclusionary (Ásta 2018). Indeed, one might even argue that social categories can involve a distinctively metaphysical form of oppression (Jenkins 2020, 2023). It is clear that many philosophers argue in ways that draw close connections between metaphysical and moral theorizing. ... (shrink)

Relationalism about colour (as described in Cohen’s 2004 article on colour properties and his 2009 book The Red and the Real) is motivated by the thought that by identifying colours with relations between objects, subjects and viewing circumstances we can provide the best realist, general, ecumenical accommodation of perceptual variation data. This ‘best’-claim is supported by the charge that one of the view’s ecumenical rivals does uniquely badly in respect of fit with mainstream psychosemantics. This case for relationalism is complicated (...) by Cohen’s later acknowledgement that relationalism has psychosemantic ills of its own. In this paper I argue that Cohen’s proposed remedying of those ills fails. (shrink)

There is a theorem that shows that it is impossible for an algorithm to jointly satisfy the statistical fairness criteria of Calibration and Equalized Odds non-trivially. But what about the recently advocated alternative to Calibration, Base Rate Tracking? Here we show that Base Rate Tracking is strictly weaker than Calibration, and then take up the question of whether it is possible to jointly satisfy Base Rate Tracking and Equalized Odds in non-trivial scenarios. We show that it is not, thereby establishing (...) an even more general impossibility theorem. (shrink)

Affirming the consequent is an inferential pattern in which one infers the antecedent of a given conditional from its consequent. Abductive inference is structurally similar: given some evidence, one infers a hypothesis that explains the evidence. I show that a Bayesian analysis of affirming the consequent helps us understand under which conditions abduction may be justified. This provides a Bayesian vindication of explanatory inference.

In a recent article, David Builes (forthcoming, Analysis) argues that one should not try to combine a Platonic account of properties with the recently popular grounding theory of powers, as proposed in Tugby’s Putting Properties First. According to Builes, Aristotelian or nominalist theories of properties are better placed to meet the explanatory demands of the grounding theory of powers. In this reply, I cast doubt on Builes’s argument.

Conferralism is the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. We argue that conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.

A common argument for favouring Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) over Causal Decision Theory (CDT) is that EDT has predictably higher expected returns in Newcomb Problems. But this does not show much. For almost any pair of theories, you can come up with cases where one does, on average, better than the other. Here I describe a case involving dynamic choice where EDT predictably does worse than CDT.

According to a widely held norm of rationality, one should not change prior credences without new evidence. An important argument for this norm appeals to accuracy considerations, which say that changing priors does not maximize expected accuracy. This is because accuracy measures are strictly proper, and thus any probabilistically coherent person regards her own priors as uniquely maximizing expected accuracy compared with other priors. This paper attempts to resist the accuracy argument against changing priors. We argue that even if rational (...) epistemic decisions maximize expected accuracy according to strictly proper accuracy measures, it can still be rational to change priors sometimes. The core idea of our argument is that changing priors can be rational if one wants to maximize not just one’s current, short-term accuracy but also future, long-term accuracy. Our argument, if successful, shows that considering long-term accuracy has significant ramifications for the accuracy-first project. (shrink)

Crispin Wright and Filippo Ferrari have accused relativism of not accounting for ‘parity’ – the idea that, when we argue over matters of taste, we take our opponents’ opinions to be ‘as good as ours’ from our own committed perspective. In this paper, I show that (i) explaining parity has not been taken to be a desideratum by relativists and thus they cannot be accused of failing to fulfil a promise; (ii) Wright’s and Ferrari’s reasons for claiming that parity should (...) be a desideratum are unconvincing. (shrink)

This paper develops a hybridization of Newcomb’s Problem and the Frustrater (Spencer and Wells’s 2019 paper ‘Why take both boxes?’), underscoring how difficult it is to reconcile the rationality of taking both boxes in Newcomb’s Problem and the rationality of taking the envelope in the Frustrater.

Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World is extraordinarily wide-ranging and ambitious, developing and arguing for a unified account of education.

Surprisingly, the dimples on a golf ball (typically around 300-400) cannot be spaced evenly on the surface. I will explain how this is connected to the Platonic solids. The example is interesting, because it illustrates a difference between efficient and formal causation and explanation. I will discuss a few interesting consequences.

In Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Robert Nozick presents what he calls ‘the model of possible worlds’ (307) to examine the formal properties of utopia, defined as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (298). The basic idea is that each person is given the power to create any possible world and its inhabitants by imagining them. Two definitions of stability have been proposed: (a) the non-circular definition according to which a world is stable if and only if (...) nobody can imagine a better world and (b) the circular definition according to which a world is stable if and only if nobody can imagine a better world that is also stable. In this paper, we prove four theorems (namely, the indeterminacy theorem, the stable dystopia theorem, the nobody’s utopia theorem and the redundancy theorem) that provide us with decisive reasons to reject the circular definition and opt for the non-circular definition of stability to analyse Nozick’s theory of utopia. (shrink)

We all want to find a way to live fulfilling lives together in spite of our differences. What beliefs must be held in common if we are to do so? What beliefs must be excluded? And what are the implications for religion’s place in society? Philip Kitcher recognises that our answers to these questions have important implications for education, and he devotes a chapter of 'The Main Enterprise of the World' to the role of religion in education and wider society. (...) This paper is a critical response to that chapter. I argue that Kitcher is right to recognise that religious beliefs cannot be confined to the private sphere and thus they are a matter of educational concern. However, I question whether Kitcher makes an adequate case for the distinctive harmfulness of the beliefs that he wishes to exclude. I also question Kitcher’s suggestion that students be taught that all religions are ‘on a par’, epistemically speaking. I finish by shining a light on Kitcher’s proposal that education should aim for students to develop specific beliefs about religion, clarifying the proposal and highlighting some implications for education in practice. (shrink)

In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...) puzzle. I propose that ‘ought’ is evaluated relative to contextual parameters (e.g. Kratzer’s conversational backgrounds, Finlay and Snedegar’s alternative sets) and those contextual parameters are sensitive to agents as well as possible worlds. (shrink)

This is a review of Jessica Keiser’s Non-Ideal Foundations of Language.

We show that there is a simple derivation of triviality with very few assumptions involving the formula that the negated conditional entails the antecedent of the conditional.

In recent work Philip Goff has defended the thesis of subjecthood transparency: someone possessing the concept ‘subjecthood’ is thereby in a position to know, a priori, what it is for an entity to be a subject of experiences. Kevin Morris has criticized a specific argument that Goff provides for subjecthood transparency. I will argue that Morris’s criticism of Goff’s argument does not succeed. I will then present an alternative criticism of Goff’s argument, one that also applies to the thesis of (...) subjecthood transparency itself. (shrink)

Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy—it concerns a power that God neither has nor lacks. Yet this ends (...) up being inconsistent, for it implies that God definitely lacks that power. Following Aquinas, perhaps Beall & Cotnoir could accept this lack and still uphold omnipotence, suggesting that the power to avoid gaps is impossible for God. Yet the Aquinian stratagem is enough to block the original paradox, which saps the motivation to proffer truth-value gaps in addition. I conclude that the gappy solution is either inadequate or insufficiently motivated. (shrink)

Some considerations are urgent and others are not. Sometimes we invite criticism if we neglect the urgency of our situation, even if our action seems adequate to respond to it. Despite this significance, the literature does not offer a satisfactory analysis of the normative structure of urgency. I examine three views of urgency, drawn from philosophical and adjacent literature, which fail to explain the distinctive criticism we face when we neglect the urgency of our reasons. Instead I argue that urgent (...) considerations pre-empt our deliberation about less urgent considerations. Urgency, then, is a meta-normative phenomenon, setting standards for how we handle and respond to first-order considerations, requiring that we close deliberation. In the face of urgency, appropriate action is not enough: commitment is called for. This is how we enact appreciation of our practical reasons, independently of our carrying out the action they call for. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, Neil Tennant has defended a proof-theoretic criterion of self-referential paradoxicality. According to this criterion, the defining characteristic of paradoxes is that, when formulated within a natural deduction system, they produce derivations that cannot be normalized. This paper raises doubts about Tennant’s approach. Recently, Tennant has suggested that Russell’s paradox might not truly fit his criterion. I will argue that the reasoning that rules out Russell’s paradox can similarly be applied to some semantic paradoxes. Therefore, if (...) Tennant’s assessment of Russell’s paradox holds, few cases may genuinely qualify as paradoxes by his standards. (shrink)

It is generally recognized that friendship justifies a particular set of special permissions and responsibilities. However, a compelling debate has emerged regarding the question of whether we ought to believe claims about our friends that strangers would not. Advocates of epistemic partialism, such as Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller, argue that friendship ought to sometimes lead us to form beliefs that are inconsistent with what is justified from an impartial perspective. In this paper, I identify a puzzle for epistemic partialism (...) that has not received attention. The puzzle is that epistemic partialism fails to meet a publicity condition for agents to transparently endorse the doxastic practices the position recommends. If epistemic partialism is widely acknowledged as true, the goods it produces become more difficult to secure. This is not a decisive objection to epistemic partialism, but it may leave the view less convincing than alternatives. (shrink)

In ‘The logic of partial supposition’, Eva and Hartmann present a dilemma for a normative account of partial subjunctive supposition: the natural subjunctive analogue of Jeffrey conditionalization is Jeffrey imaging, but this rule violates a natural monotonicity constraint. This paper offers a partial defence of Jeffrey imaging against Eva and Hartmann’s objection. I show that, although Jeffrey imaging is non-monotonic in Eva and Hartmann’s sense, it is what I call status quo monotonic. A status quo monotonic credal revision rule is (...) monotonic in Eva and Hartmann’s sense if it is conservative in the sense of Meehan and Zhang (‘Jeffrey meets Kolmogorov’), but Jeffrey imaging is in general non-conservative. On the other hand, Jeffrey imaging satisfies a different constraint that I call convexity, and the only rule that is both convex and conservative is Jeffrey conditionalization. To this extent, the real dilemma for a normative account of partial subjunctive supposition is not between monotonicity (broadly construed) and Jeffrey imaging, but between convexity and conservativeness. (shrink)

Moral error theory has been criticized on formal grounds for lacking a coherent semantics of moral sentences. In this paper, I provide a truthmaker-based semantics of moral sentences that is compatible with moral error theory. The hyperintensional account draws attention to the exact truth- and falsemakers of moral propositions. Error theorists must assume that propositions that have only moral truthmakers have at least one non-moral falsemaker. A central consequence of the discussion is that moral error theory is compatible with a (...) classical logic of moral notions. (shrink)

According to the grounding theory of powers, fundamental physical properties should be thought of as qualities that ground dispositions. Although this view has recently been defended by many different philosophers, there is no consensus for how the view should be developed within a broader metaphysics of properties. Recently, Tugby has argued that the view should be developed in the context of a Platonic theory of properties, where properties are abstract universals. I will argue that the view should not be developed (...) within such a framework. Either the view should be developed with an ontology of Aristotelian properties, or it should be developed in a Nominalist framework that contains no properties at all. (shrink)

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental (...) results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

The experience machine poses the most important problem for hedonist theories of well-being. I argue that desire satisfactionism about well-being faces a similar problem: the desire machine. Upon entering this machine, your desires are altered through some minor neurosurgery. In particular, the machine causes you to desire everything that actually happens. The experience machine constructs a simulated world that matches your preexisting desires. The desire machine reconstructs your conative state to match the preexisting world. Desire satisfactionism recommends entering the desire (...) machine because you will then have more satisfied desires, but this seems wrong. -/- In this paper, I consider how desire satisfactionists might avoid the result that entering the desire machine increases one’s well-being. First, I further motivate why this problem arises. Second, I consider coherence-based norms of rational desire change. Finally, I argue that introducing a substantive account of fitting desire is the only plausible solution, but that this response requires abandoning pure subjectivism about well-being. (shrink)

This paper presents a new puzzle for limited aggregation. Unlike other recent puzzles, this one arises independently of the issue of rational aversion to risk. Some possible responses are laid out and explored.

This paper rejects an argument defending the view that the boundary between deception and manipulation is such that some manipulations intended to cause false beliefs count as non-deceptive. On the strongest version of this argument, if a specific behaviour involves compromising the victim’s reasoning, then the behaviour is manipulative but not deceptive, and if it involves exposing the victim to misleading evidence that justifies her false belief, then it is deceptive but not manipulative. This argument has been consistently used as (...) a reason to reject the traditional analysis of human deception, according to which intentionally causing someone to acquire a false belief is sufficient for deception. And because the traditional analysis is also consistent with our most basic intuitions about deception, it does matter whether this argument succeeds. (shrink)

I make a point concerning the construction ‘A or B or both’ in English, to the effect that if the connective ‘or’ is understood exclusively across the board then this familiar construction cannot convey the intended inclusive sense of disjunction. If we take ‘or’ inclusively, ‘A or B or both’ has the function of emphasizing that the disjunction is inclusive; taking ‘or’ exclusively, it does nothing.

Weak enough relevant logics are often closed under depth substitutions. To determine the breadth of logics with this feature, we show there is a largest sublogic of R closed under depth substitutions and that this logic can be recursively axiomatized.

Class, race and gender are three of the most salient factors in society. They determine to an important extent the opportunities we have, e.g. to access public.

Philosophers do not have a reputation for being pragmatic. When offered a chance to avoid execution, Socrates used his window of escape to deliver a series.

In this paper, I respond to three critical notices of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, written by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth, respectively. After contrasting genealogical conceptual reverse-engineering with conceptual reverse-engineering, I discuss pragmatic genealogy’s relation to history. I argue that it would be a mistake to understand pragmatic genealogy as a fiction (or a model, or an idealization) as opposed to a form of historical explanation. That would be to rely on precisely the (...) stark dichotomy between idealization and history that I propose to call into question. Just as some historical explanations begin with a functional hypothesis arrived at through idealization as abstraction, some pragmatic genealogies embody an abstract form of historiography, stringing together, in a way that is loosely indexed to certain times and places, the most salient needs responsible for giving a concept the contours it now has. I then describe the naturalistic stance that I find expressed in the pragmatic genealogies I consider in the book before examining the evaluative standard at work in those genealogies, defusing the charge that they involve a commitment to a ‘stingy axiology’. (shrink)

In this précis of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (OUP 2021), I summarize the key claims of the book. The book describes, develops, and defends an underappreciated methodological tradition: the tradition of pragmatic genealogy, which aims to identify what our loftiest and most inscrutable conceptual practices do for us by telling strongly idealized, but still historically informed stories about what might have driven people to adopt and elaborate them as they did. What marks out this methodological (...) tradition, I argue, is that it synthesizes two genres of philosophical genealogy that are standardly set against each other: state-of-nature fictions on the one hand and patiently documentary historiography on the other. These two genres of genealogy are usually taken to be mutually exclusive and to answer to radically different philosophical interests and temperaments. But I offer a systematic account of a tradition that combines both genres into a single genealogical method, augmenting genealogy’s power and range by harnessing the strengths and possibilities of both genres. (shrink)

This article shows that there is a liar-like paradox that arises for rational credence that relies only on very weak logical and credal principles. The paradox depends on a weak rational reflection principle, logical principles governing conjunction, and principles governing the relationship between rational credence and proof. To respond to this paradox, we must either reject even very weak rational reflection principles or reject some highly plausible logical or credal principle.

When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-level phenomena is not its instantaneous behaviour but its stable (...) fixed points (those in the vicinity of which it spends most of the time, after comparatively short transitory periods), and stable fixed points can change abruptly as a result of infinitesimal changes of the low-level phenomenon. We illustrate this potential gradualist trap by showing that Chalmers’ fading qualia argument falls into it. (shrink)

For philosophers, rights against the world are equivalent to rights in rem. Contrary to what Hart thought, however, this does not make them equivalent to general rights. Rights in rem contrast with rights in personam, whereas general rights contrast with special rights. As I explain, rights against the world can be either general rights or special rights. My explanation follows Waldron’s strategy of exhibiting property rights as justified by Locke’s theory of property as a case of rights in rem that (...) are also special rights. Moreover, despite what ‘in rem’ means in Latin, rights against the world include more than property rights. For example, they also include moral human rights. With moral human rights and property rights alike, the correlative duties are borne by ‘everyone’, understood in a dynamic sense I undertake to specify. (shrink)

A critical notice of Erich Hatala Matthes' 'Drawing the Line'.

The aim of this article is to show that, just as in recent years Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij have provided a non-transitive counterpart of classical logic (i.e. one in which all classically acceptable inferences are valid but Cut and other metainferences are not), the same can be done for every Tarskian logic, with full generality. To establish this fact, a semantic approach is taken by showing that appropriate structures can be devised to characterize a non-transitive counterpart of every (...) Tarskian logic, starting from the logical matrices that are usually taken to render them. (shrink)

I discuss a puzzle that arises as an apparent tension between plausible theories of good guessing and intuitive constraints on rational inquiry. Clearly, our best guess at a question should reflect the likelihoods we assign to its possible answers. Your best guess is the answer you judge most likely. Additionally, it seems like a requirement of rational inquiry that our guesses be coherent. Thus, our best guess to a constituent (wh-) questions should cohere with our best guess to a polar (...) (yes/no) question whenever answers to the former entail answers to the latter. I argue that these requirements are in conflict and that a familiar form of contextualism doesn’t resolve the issue. The puzzle stands as a challenge to existing accounts of rational inquiry and question directed attitudes like guessing. (shrink)

Collin (2022) attempts to break the symmetry between the modal ontological argument for the existence of God and the reverse modal ontological argument against the existence of God by drawing on some Kripkean lessons about a posteriori necessity. He argues that there is an undercutting defeater for taking God’s non-existence to be possible. In this paper, I reply that taking the Kripkean considerations about a posteriori necessity into account does not help break the symmetry. For we can argue in a (...) similar way that there is an undercutting defeater for taking God’s existence to be possible. (shrink)

Avia Pasternak’s admirably clearly and tightly argued book defends four broad theses. First, it argues that contemporary states are appropriately regarded.

Causal decision theory is often motivated as a ‘revision of [decision theory] intended to solve Newcomb’s problem’ (Bacon 2022). In this paper, I give a direct argument for CDT by deriving it from a venerable decision-theoretic principle: the value of knowledge principle. The general framework that I use to deliver this result also supports a new argument for conditionalization.

States act wrongly. Sometimes, they are held responsible, or take responsibility of their own accord, to remediate their wrongdoing: they cease to act wron.

What is it that makes us as citizens liable for the actions – including the wrongdoings – of our state? Answering this question is part of the larger debate on the nature of complicity and collective action. When are we connected to joint endeavours and collective outcomes in a way that makes us (on some level) responsible for them? -/- Of particular interest within this debate is the normative relationship of citizens to their state. For instance, when states pay reparations (...) for past crimes the costs are – one way or another – borne by their citizens. In Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States (OUP 2021), Avia Pasternak examines with admirable clarity and circumspection if states are justified in imposing the cost of their past wrongdoings on all of their citizens, including those who played no obvious part in those crimes. (shrink)

Rowe has recently argued that pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm. I respond to Rowe and argue that given an appropriate understanding of objective probabilities, pure objective risk of harm can itself be a harm.

How might attention intersect with normative issues and the psychology surrounding them? I provide an empirically grounded framework integrating three attentional phenomena: salience, vigilance (or broadly attunement) and attentional character. Using this frame, I review recent philosophical work on attention and norms. -/- Section 1 establishes a common ground conception of attention no more controversial than the established experimental paradigms for attention. This conception explicates the concept of a bias, which explains core features of action and attention, one that intersects (...) biological, psychological and philosophical concerns. I emphasize historical biases associated with learning and experience. Section 2 presents an analysis of automaticity and control, concepts needed to fully characterize action. Historical biases are revealed as automatic. Specifically, the automatization of attention is central to acquiring skills and excellence in light of normative standards for a practice. Section 3 argues that salience involves the deployment of attention, while Section 4 characterizes vigilance not merely as a disposition but as an active orientation to attend. Vigilance is one type of attunement, and the set of attunements constitutes the agent’s varied orientations to deploy attention, part of their attentional character. As discussed in Section 5, shaping this character is a goal of a normatively sensitive upbringing where appropriate attention is automatized through proper practice. Section 6 examines a common epistemic bias in academia and subsequent attempts to debias. I conclude with an example of acquired epistemic skill to give hope that attentional excellence is achievable. (shrink)

Consider the claim that false beliefs can be justified (JFB). According to Williamson (forthcoming), the most promising argument for JFB is something like this: (1) if p is what one disposed to know or to believe truly would believe, then believing p is justified; (2) sometimes, one disposed to know or to believe truly would believe p even though p is false; so, JFB. But there are counterexamples to (1). I argue that this isn't the most promising argument for JFB. (...) Instead, the thought is that beliefs which manifest a disposition to know or to believe truly are justified. (1) should be replaced by: (1*) if believing p manifests a disposition to know or to believe truly then believing p is justified. (1*) is immune to the counterexamples. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy can be characterized along the lines of a profound and vigorous debate between the prevalent ideas of 20th century philosophy’s linguistic–conceptualist age, on the one hand, and the re-emergent field of what we might call ‘visualist’ philosophy on the other hand, which is experiencing a revival within the framework of the current visual turn in philosophy. Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy through Art by Thomas E. Wartenberg stands at the intersection of these two camps. The philosophical visual turn foregrounds (...) the importance of the visual sphere, and it is this sphere with which Wartenberg engages. Investigating the genre of philosophical images throughout history, Wartenberg’s significant book joins the controversy between the characterization of humans as linguistic–conceptual or rather as visual beings. Do we reach intellectual superiority only through linguistic–conceptual schemes, or, rather, is it the richness of visuality and its level of detail – which can never be fully captured by language – that allows us a true glimpse of our reality and our very selves? I shall later claim that Wartenberg falls on the linguistic–conceptualist side of the polemic. But, a concrete example that may actually support the visualist perspective is found in the book’s final chapter, which is devoted to what Wartenberg terms ‘graphic philosophy’. Here, Wartenberg analyses Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – a memoir produced through illustrations that address the philosophical question of scepticism via Bechdel’s ‘epistemological crisis’. Bechdel is overcome with doubt over the truth status and objectivity of her own personal diary entries. Wartenberg argues that ‘this is parallel to Descartes’s worry in the Meditations that he might be mistaken about everything he takes to be true’, and is knowingly resolved by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his On Certainty (Wartenberg 2023: 282). He emphasizes the centrality of images in the memoir to portray a conceptually life-changing event for Bechdel, namely an encounter with a woman in a restaurant whose appearance assists her in figuring out her own identity. Wartenberg notes that text itself is insufficient to express Bechdel’s ideas here, arguing that ‘the visual information … is essential to our understanding of this incident in the book. Bechdel here uses a picture to convey information quickly in a readily understood manner, something that could not be done as efficiently with words alone’ (281). (shrink)

Critical notice of Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion's _Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion_.

Philosophers sometimes refer to ‘moves’ made in the context of a philosophical debate. Once familiar with these recognizable tropes, we then possess them as tools – a suite of possible moves to make in novel contexts. In this paper, I outline three such philosophy moves, then demonstrate how moves can be combined. Examples of moves and some combinations feature throughout the paper.