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30077.371737
I want to comment on an old objection to the “similarity analysis” of counterfactuals, and on a more recent, but related, argument for counterfactual skepticism. According to the similarity analysis, a counterfactual ? > ? is true iff ? is true at all ? worlds that are most similar, in certain respects, to the actual world. The old objection that I have in mind is that the similarity analysis fails to validate Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents (SDA), the inference from (? ∨ ?) > ? to ? > ? and ? > ?. Imagine someone utters (1a) on a hot summer day.
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37275.371846
Jc Beall’s Divine Contradiction is a fascinating defence of the idea that contradictions are true of the tri-personal God. This project requires a logic that avoids the consequence that every proposition follows from a contradiction. Beall presents such a logic. This ‘gap/glut’ logic is the topic of this article. A gap/glut logic presupposes that falsity is not simply the absence of truth – for a proposition that is true may also be false. This article is essentially an examination of the idea that falsity is not simply untruth. The author rejects this position but does not claim to have an argument against it. In lieu of an argument, he presents three ‘considerations’. First, it is possible to give an intuitive semantics for the language of sentential logic that yields ‘classical’ sentential logic (including ‘p, ¬ p ⊢ q’) and which makes no mention of truth-values. Second, it is possible to imagine a race who manage their affairs very well without having the concept ‘falsity’. Third, it is possible to construct a semantics that yields a logic identical with the dialetheist logic and which makes no mention of truth-values – and which, far from being plausible, seems pointless.
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64434.37186
A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering.
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92158.37187
This analysis shows Cantor's diagonal definition in his 1891 paper was not compatible with his horizontal enumeration of the infinite set M. The diagonal sequence was a counterfeit which he used to produce an apparent exclusion of a single sequence to prove the cardinality of M is greater than the cardinality of the set of integers N.
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103981.37188
Dignity is an essential property of anything that has it. Necessarily, something has dignity if and only if it is a person. Therefore, personhood is an essential property of anything that has it. Now, suppose the standard philosophical pro-choice view that
- Personhood consists in developed sophisticated cognitive faculties of the sort that fetuses and newborns lack but typical toddlers have. …
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126476.371891
"Anarchy, State, and Utopia" after 50 Years
Preliminary Note: I’ve just finished writing the first draft of a working paper titled “Complexity and the Case for Liberal Neutrality and Skepticism. Aron, Hayek, and Gaus on the Limits of Political Knowledge” which I will present at the 7th Economic Philosophy International Conference at the end of this month. …
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126478.371903
At some point in pregnancy it is widely acknowledged that fetuses start to feel pain. Estimates of this point vary from around seven to thirty weeks of gestation. We cannot directly conclude from the fact that some fetus can feel pain that killing that fetus is impermissible. …
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139507.371914
What is the proper role for scientists in policymaking? This paper explores various roles that scientists can play, with an eye to questions that these roles raise about value-neutrality and technocracy. Where much philosophical literature is concerned with the conduct of research or the transmission of research results to policymakers, I am interested in various non-research roles that scientists take on in policymaking. These include raising the alarm on issues, framing and conceptualising problems, formulating potential policies, assessing policy options for expected efficacy, and more. I consider examples from climate change and Covid- 19 policymaking. My intention is to encourage philosophers to expand their interest in values in science out from the conduct of research to the wide array of roles that scientists play in policymaking. The paper is therefore an overview of the landscape of potential research questions, rather than a presentation of a single argument.
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139535.371943
Realism about quantum theory naturally leads to realism about the quantum state of the universe. It leaves open whether it is a pure state represented by a wave function, or an impure one represented by a density matrix. I characterize and elaborate on Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the universal quantum state is objective but can be impure. To clarify the thesis, I compare it with Wave Function Realism, explain the conditions under which they are empirically equivalent, consider two generalizations of Density Matrix Realism, and answer some frequently asked questions. I end by highlighting an implication for scientific realism.
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254896.371953
Alonzo Church proposed a theory of sequences of functions and their arguments as surrogates for Russellian singular propositions and singular concepts. Church’s proposed theory accords with his Alternative (0), the strictest of his three competing criteria for strict synonymy. The currently popular objection to strict criteria like (0) on the basis of the Russell-Myhill antinomy is rebutted. Russell-Myhill is not a problem specifically for 1 ACKOWLEDGMENTS: This essay is dedicated to the memory of the great philosopher and logician, Alonzo Church. I had the good fortune to study under Prof. Church (among others) through the 1970s. Years later he read my Frege’s Puzzle (1986), in which I defend what is now called a Millian theory of semantic content. In May 1989, Prof. Church sent me a pair of manuscripts, then not yet published, in which he independently proposed similar ways of developing a theory of n–tuple surrogates for singular propositions. Church’s cover letter began “Just to prove that great minds run in the same channel.” Although his throwaway remark did not reflect a genuine assessment—of me or of himself—it was exceedingly generous, and the memory of it can still cause me to blush. The present essay is in part a much delayed result of careful study of Church’s excellent papers. I am profoundly in his debt.
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254921.371962
I propose an approach to liar and Curry paradoxes inspired by the work of Roger Swyneshed in his treatise on insolubles (1330-1335). The keystone of the account is the idea that liar sentences and their ilk are false (and only false) and that the so-called “capture” direction of the T-schema should be restricted. The proposed account retains what I take to be the attractive features of Swyneshed’s approach without leading to some worrying consequences Swyneshed accepts. The approach and the resulting logic (called “Swynish Logic”) are non-classical, but are consistent and compatible with many elements of the classical picture including modus ponens, modus tollens, and double-negation elimination and introduction. It is also compatible with bivalence and contravalence. My approach to these paradoxes is also immune to an important kind of revenge challenge that plagues some of its rivals.
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276130.371971
I think it’s wrong for us to kill innocent people. Some fellow deontologists, however, think this prohibition should be restricted to say that it’s wrong for us to kill nonconsenting innocent people. These thinkers hold that it is both permissible to consent to being killed and to kill those who have given such consent (except in special cases, such as when the victim has overriding unfulfilled duties to others). …
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292144.37198
Naïve Instrumentalists are practically unconstrained in pursuit of their moral or political goals. If it seems to them, just based on the immediately legible evidence, that violence or deception would advance their goals, they won’t hesitate to act accordingly. …
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298574.37199
Leddington (2016) remains the leading contemporary philosophical account of magic, one that has been relatively unchallenged. In this discussion piece, I have three aims; namely, to (i) criticise Leddington’s attempt to explain the experience of magic in terms of belief-discordant alief; (ii) explore the possibility that much, if not all, of the experience of magic can be explained by mundane belief-discordant perception; and (iii) argue that make-believe is crucial to successful performances of magic in ways Leddington at best overlooks and at worst denies.
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311400.371999
Throughout the history of automated reasoning, mathematics has been viewed as a prototypical domain of application. It is therefore surprising that the technology has had almost no impact on mathematics to date and plays almost no role in the subject today. This article presents an optimistic view that the situation is about to change. It describes some recent developments in the Lean programming language and proof assistant that support this optimism, and it reflects on the role that automated reasoning can and should play in mathematics in the years to come.
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312668.372009
Empirical research provides striking examples of non-human animal responses to death, which look very much like manifestations of grief. However, recent philosophical work appears to challenge the idea that animals can grieve. Grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, has been taken to require potentially human-exclusive abilities like a fine-grained sense of particularity, an ability to project toward the distal future and the past, and an understanding of death or loss. This paper argues that these features do not rule out animal grief and are present in many animal loss responses. It argues that the principal kind of “understanding” involved in grief is not intellectual but is instead of a practical variety available to animals, and outlines ways that the disruption to an animal’s life following a loss can hinge upon a specific individual and involve a degree of temporal organisation.
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312703.372023
I reconstruct J. H. Lambert’s views on how practical grounds relate to epistemic features, such as certainty. I argue, first, that Lambert’s account of moral certainty does not involve any distinctively practical influence on theoretical belief. However, it does present an interesting form of fallibilism about justification as well as a denial of a tight link between knowledge and action. Second, I argue that for Lambert, the persistence principle that underwrites induction is supported by practical reasons to believe; this indicates that Lambert is a moderate pragmatist about reasons for theoretical belief.
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323036.372032
Physiology has produced a rich theoretical foundation that is now understood to apply to all known life forms from microbes to plants and animals, including humans. Physiological theories are equal in scope to evolutionary theories, but they have received much less attention and critical analysis from biologists and philosophers. Four Theories (Principles) are identified here. These are Homeostasis, Positive Feedback, Growth and Development, and Reproduction. These are undergirded by the universal biological property of Metabolism.
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323067.372041
There is solid consensus among physicists and philosophers that, in gauge field theory, for a quantity to be physically meaningful or real, it must be gauge-invariant. Yet, every “elementary” field in the Standard Model of particle physics is actually gauge-variant. This has led a number of researchers to insist that new manifestly gauge-invariant approaches must be established. Indeed, in the foundational literature, dissatisfaction with standard methods for reducing gauge symmetries has been expressed: Spontaneous symmetry breaking is deemed conceptually dubious, while gauge fixing suffers the same limitations and is subject to the same criticisms as coordinate choices in General Relativity.
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323095.372051
This paper challenges the soundness of the two-dimensional conceiv-ability argument against the derivation of phenomenal truths from physical truths (cf. Chalmers, 1996; 2010) in light of a hyperintensional regimentation of the ontology of consciousness. The regimentation demonstrates how ontological dependencies between truths about consciousness and about physics cannot be witnessed by epistemic constraints, when the latter are recorded by the conceivability – i.e., the epistemic possibility – thereof. Generalizations and other aspects of the philosophical significance of the hyperintensional regimentation are further examined.
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323122.372062
This paper aims to provide two abductive considerations adducing in favor of the thesis of Necessitism in modal ontology. I demonstrate how instances of the Barcan formula can be witnessed, when the modal operators are interpreted ‘naturally’ – i.e., as including geometric possibilities – and the quantifiers in the formula range over a domain of natural, or concrete, entities and their contingently non-concrete analogues. I argue that, because there are considerations within physics and metaphysical inquiry which corroborate modal relationalist claims concerning the possible geometric structures of spacetime, and dispositional properties are actual possible entities, the condition of being grounded in the concrete is consistent with the Barcan formula; and thus – in the geometric setting – merits adoption by the Necessitist.
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351413.372072
Black K-12 students are 4 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspension than their white peers; housing lenders are more likely to offer Black homebuyers subprime loans even when they qualify for prime loans; employers call back candidates for interviews with ‘white-sounding’ names 50% more often than candidates with ‘Black-sounding’ names. All these are said to be examples of systemic racism. But what does it mean to say that racism is systemic? Using the tools of social ontology, this essay explores the various ways that social systems can be racist.
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351440.372084
Two sorts of claims are ubiquitous in philosophy: claims that something is essentially the way it is and claims that something is socially constructed. The purpose of this essay is to explore the relation between essentialist and social constructionist claims. In particular, the focus will be on whether socially constructed items can have essences or essential properties. In section 1, I outline a number of views about the nature of social construction. In section 2, I outline a number of views about essence. In section 3, I consider ways in which certain claims about social construction may be thought to challenge certain claims about essences. Section 4 then offers rejoinders to these challenges and attempts to point the way toward reconciling constructionist and essentialist claims.
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351462.372098
Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, by Katharine Jenkins, is a wonderful and engaging book in social ontology. It perfectly weds a rigorous theoretical account of social kinds with a deep concern for oppressed people. I expect that Jenkins’ book will generate significant conversation about the nature of social kinds and the relation between social ontology (and philosophy in general) and efforts at achieving social justice.
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357689.372111
The term ‘physicalism’ was coined by Otto Neurath in the early 1930s and was quickly adopted by other members of the Vienna Circle, including most prominently by Rudolph Carnap. Neurath was a socialist who believed that enterprises like science and industrial production should be organized according to the results of collective deliberation. Such deliberation, he thought, required a common physicalist language that would permit communication across disciplines and languages in ways that were accessible to everyone. Physicalism focused on universally shared features of human life; it was meant to provide a thing-language which was directed towards empirically observable events and objects. By talking in concrete, pragmatic terms about the problems of ordinary life, Neurath thought physicalism could provide the basis for the unified sciences and for inclusive collective deliberation about research priorities and the allocation of resources. Physicalism was Neurath’s way of eliminating traditional philosophy, which he understood to pose barriers to communication and support to politically reactionary elements. In later decades, and contrary to Neurath’s intention, ‘physicalism’ came to designate an ontological position whose principal features are familiar parts of contemporary philosophy. We now think of physicalism as some version of the claim that all real things are identical with or in some sense necessitated by the basic stuff that physics reveals to us. This was not what Neurath had in mind.
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358466.372123
Boredom – that inescapable accoutrement of human existence – is more than a common affective encounter. It is an experience of key phenomenological significance. Boredom gives rise to perceptions of meaninglessness, difficulties in effective agency, lapses of attention, an altered perception of the passage of time, and to an impressively diverse array of behavioral outcomes. Above all, it shapes our world and lives.
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364750.372137
‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and confusions in Ashley’s paper.
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367451.372147
Social learning is a collective approach to decentralised decision-making and is comprised of two processes; evidence updating and belief fusion. In this paper we propose a social learning model in which agents’ beliefs are represented by a set of possible states, and where the evidence collected can vary in its level of imprecision. We investigate this model using multi-agent and multi-robot simulations and demonstrate that it is robust to imprecise evidence. Our results also show that certain kinds of imprecise evidence can enhance the efficacy of the learning process in the presence of sensor errors.
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370460.372158
An act type is something that an agent can do: walk to the store, climb Mount Everest, trip over a wire. Act types are ‘repeatables’: many have climbed Mount Everest. Act types are not events. If you climb Everest, an event occurs—your cold, brutal climb—but this event is not what you do. What you do is climb Everest.
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370483.372169
On April 19, 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was announced at the “Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” conference held at New York University. The New York Declaration is an effort to showcase a scientific consensus on the presence of conscious experiences across all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fish) and many invertebrates (at least including cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and insects).