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14115.397337
Anyone who has lived abroad knows the frustration of being held liable for the misdeeds of your country. Israelis get grilled about Palestine, Chinese receive disbelief over Xinjiang, Britons are berated for colonialism. ‘It’s not my fault!’ some are tempted to reply. ‘I attend protests; or I am politically repressed; or I wasn’t even born yet!’ Sometimes, the effects of our states’ wrongdoings hit us materially. When states pay compensation to the victims of their wrongdoings, these payments almost always detract from what would otherwise be enjoyed by those living in the state. Is this effect justified?
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18601.397465
Scientific reasoning represents complex argumentation patterns that eventually lead to scientific discoveries. Social epistemology of science provides a perspective on the scientific community as a whole and on its collective knowledge acquisition. Different techniques have been employed with the goal of maximization of scientific knowledge on the group level. These techniques include formal models and computer simulations of scientific reasoning and interaction. Still, these models have tested mainly abstract hypothetical scenarios. The present thesis instead presents data-driven approaches in social epistemology of science. A data-driven approach requires data collection and curation for its further usage, which can include creating empirically calibrated models and simulations of scientific inquiry, performing statistical analyses, or employing data-mining techniques and other procedures.
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19635.397483
Iemand die geen formele academische opleiding had, gruwde van het academisch bedrijf en tegelijkertijd jarenlang hoogleraar was in Cambridge, voor velen de archetypische vrijplaats voor academisch onderzoek. Een denker die zich in zijn eerste werk bezighield met de meest abstracte logische problemen, en die later een filosofische pointe illustreerde met de opmerking: ‘Beschrijf het aroma van koffie.’ Een man die geboren werd in een van de rijkste families van Oostenrijk, en die later jarenlang in uiterste eenvoud leefde, in een zelfgebouwde hut in Noorwegen, als leraar aan een dorpsschool in de Oostenrijkse Alpen. Een mecenas die de avant-garde van zijn tijd kende en ondersteunde, maar wiens persoonlijke artistieke voorkeuren uitgingen naar klassieke auteurs en componisten als Goethe en Beethoven. Een auteur die het logische werk van Frege en Russell met evenveel passie en intensiteit las als de religieuze geschriften van Tolstoi en Augustinus. Een filosoof die geldt als een van de belangrijkste van de twintigste eeuw: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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19679.397495
Allereerst wil ik mijn dank uitspreken aan Benjamin De Mesel, Michiel Meijer, Hans Radder, Marc Slors, Michel ter Hark, en Guido Vanheeswijck, die mijn stuk van zulk gedetailleerd en stimulerend commentaar hebben willen voorzien. Het is mij maar zelden overkomen dat ik van zo’n grote groep van experts zoveel inhoudelijk commentaar heb gekregen op iets dat ik heb geschreven. Het is aanleiding tot kritische herbezinning en geeft veel stof tot verder nadenken over de materie die in het stuk aan de orde is gesteld. Mijn reactie hier is dan ook een eerste reactie, ik ben er zeker van dat ik de vruchten van deze commentaren pas later zal kunnen pluk-ken.
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19979.397506
The paper addresses the way in which modern linguistics, − in particular, but not exclusively, the generative tradition − , has constructed its core concepts. It argues that a particular form of construction, reminiscent of, but crucially different from, abstraction, which is dubbed ‘idealisation’, plays a central role here. The resemblances and differences between abstractions and idealisations are investigated, and consequences of the reliance on idealisations are reviewed.
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28285.397534
Suppose that a fair coin has been flipped in my absence. If it’s heads, there is an independent 50% chance that I will be irresistably brainwashed tonight after I go to bed in a way that permanently forces my credence in heads to zero. …
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33831.397576
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License <www.philosophersimprint.org/000000/> This can be pronounced as the claim that necessarily everything necessarily exists, if it is kept in mind that ‘exists’ is understood in terms of quantification and identity. The position is called first-order necessitism because the quantification in question is first-order, i.e. quantification into the syntactic position of singular terms. First-order contingentism is the view that it is a contingent matter what individuals there are. Thus, first-order contingentists assert the negation of (Nec), which amounts to the claim that possibly something could have failed to exist. Of course, most first-order contingentists also believe the stronger claim that in fact (not merely possibly) many (not just some) individuals could have failed to exist.
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35704.397597
Alice is confused about the nature of practical rationality and asks wrong philosopher about it. She is given this advice:
- For each of your options consider all the potential pleasures and pains for you that could result from the option. …
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39295.397609
Commentary from Tina Röck on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). One way to read this book is to consider it a discussion of the limitations in our ability to understand hyper-complex, dynamic objects like the brain. …
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53554.397626
Post 5 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). The last of this series of posts summarises the conclusions regarding philosophy of science more generally that emerge from this study of simplification in neuroscience. …
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77250.397638
In this chapter, I discuss time in nonrelativistic quantum theories. Within an instrumentalist theory like von Neumann’s axiomatic quantum mechanics, I focus on the meaning of time as an observable quantity, on the idea of time quantization, and whether the wavefunction collapse suggests that there is a preferred temporal direction. I explore this last issue within realist quantum theories as well, focusing on time reversal symmetry, and I analyze whether some theories are more hospitable for time travel than others.
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77284.39765
This is a brief review of the history and development of quantum theories. Starting from the experimental findings and theoretical results which marked the crisis of the classical framework, I overview the rise of axiomatic quantum mechanics through matrix and wave mechanics. I discuss conceptual problems such as the measurement problem that led scientific realists to explore other, more satisfactory, quantum theories, as well as Bell’s theorem and quantum nonlocality, concluding with a short review of relativistic theories.
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92221.397661
Pain, Ross; University of Bristol, Philosophy interventionism, transitions in human evolution, cultural complexity, causation, single-factor explanations Transitions in human evolution (e.g., the appearance of a novel technological industry) are typically complex events involving change at both spatial and temporal scales. As such, we expect them to have multiple causes. Yet it is commonplace for theorists to prioritise a single causal factor (e.g., cognitive change) in explaining these events. One rationale for this is pragmatic: theorists are specialised in a particular area—say, lithics or cognitive psychology—and so focus on one particular cause, holding all others equal. But could single-factor explanations ever be justified on objective grounds? In this article, we explore this latter idea using a highly influential theory of causation from the philosophy of science literature; namely, interventionism. This theory defines causation in a minimal way, and then draws a range of distinctions among causes, producing a range of different causal concepts. We outline some of these distinctions and show how they can be used to articulate when privileging one cause among many is objectively justified—and, by extension, when it is not. We suggest the interventionist theory of causation is thus a useful tool for theorists developing causal explanations for human behavioural evolution.
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92263.397672
We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan’s teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to which the predictive processing framework might be successfully applied. This because our pluralism is practice-oriented. A range of different notions of content are used in the cognitive sciences to explain behaviour, and some of these cases look to employ teleosemantic notions. As a result, our pluralism gives predictive processing the scope to cover these cases.
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92328.397683
Drew Leder’s new book, The Healing Body, provides rich descriptions and analyses of ways to live well when faced with bodily afflictions, such as pain, illness, impairment, and aging. “Healing,” in Leder’s sense, goes beyond medical “treatment” of bodily dysfunctions as it aspires to regain existential wholeness “with reintegration of various dimensions of life that have been torn asunder by bodily breakdown” (2024, 27). The book belongs to a broader stream of phenomenological accounts of embodiment and illness that has thrived over the last few decades. In contrast to most contributions in this field that focus on bodily breakdowns, sometimes providing alternative understandings to biomedical accounts, Leder’s new book looks to the possibilities of existential recovery, especially where medical treatment has nothing more to offer. To anyone acquainted with this field, Leder should already be well known. In fact, the present book completes the trilogy that he has been working on for more than thirty years. Leder’s most famous book, The Absent Body (1990), is the first book in the trilogy and is a phenomenological account of the absence and presence of our lived bodies. Twenty-six years later, the second book appeared, The Distressed Body (2016), which circles in on chronic pain, illness, and incarceration. Turning to healing in his third book, Leder ends his trilogy in a hopeful key.
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92359.397694
Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023) charts thinking about normality and pathology, showing how both have links to the historical conditions set by capitalism. The book also outlines a Marxist notion of neurodiversity, which rejects liberal capitalism. In this review, I outline Chapman’s argument and highlight its strengths. I also explore a potential consequence of what Chapman does not explore in their book, which is significant for notions of neurodiversity: if we reject liberal capitalism, we might also need to reject a key assumption of liberal capitalism; namely, that people have good self-understanding.
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92389.397705
Advocates of philosophy in science and biomedicine argue that philosophers can embed their ideas into scientific research in order to help solve scientific problems (Pradeu et al. 2021). One successful example of this is the philosopher Thomas Pradeu’s essay, with Sébastien Jaeger and Eric Vivier, titled “The Speed of Change: Towards a Discontinuity Theory of Immunity?” published in Nature Reviews Immunology (2013). For my PhD in philosophy of science on Alzheimer’s disease embedded in a neurology environment, I was interested in the relationship between theory and practice, with a particular focus on the dominant “amyloid cascade hypothesis” of Alzheimer’s disease that has existed since the turn of the 1990s (Hardy and Higgins 1992; Hardy 2006; Herrup 2015; Kepp et al. 2023). According to this hypothesis, one of the brain proteins that defines Alzheimer’s disease—beta-amyloid—also causes it when it accumulates (Hardy and Higgins 1992). Thus, according to the hypothesis’s proponents, removing amyloid from the brain should be the priority for developing therapeutics. However, given the absence of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease based on this strategy, I was interested in whether this hypothesis represented a premature convergence of consensus around an untrue idea of what causes disease.
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92429.397716
It is impossible to deduce the properties of a strongly emergent whole from a complete knowledge of the properties of its constituents, according to C. D. Broad, when those constituents are isolated from the whole or when they are constituents of other wholes. Elanor Taylor proposes the Collapse Problem. Macro-level property p supposedly emerges when its micro-level components combine in relation r. However, each component has the property that it can combine with the others in r to produce p. Broad’s nondeducibility criterion is not met. This article argues that the amount of information required for r is physically impossible. Strong Emergence does not collapse. But the Collapse Problem does. Belief in Strong Emergence is strongly warranted. Strong Emergence occurs whenever it is physically impossible to deduce how components, in a specific relation, would combine to produce a whole with p. Almost always, that is impossible. Strong Emergence is ubiquitous.
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92473.397729
Information is a unique resource. Asymmetries that arise out of information access or processing capacities, therefore, enable a distinctive form of injustice. This paper builds a working conception of such injustice and explores it further. Let us call it informational injustice. Informational injustice is a consequence of informational asymmetries between at least two agents, which are deeply exacerbated due to modern information and communication technologies but do not necessarily originate with them. Informational injustice is the injustice of having information from an informational surplus being used to disadvantage the agent with less information.
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92579.397741
I present and defend a new ontology for quantum theories (or “interpretations” of quantum theory) called Generative Quantum Theory (GQT). GQT postulates different sets of features, and the combination of these different features can help generate different quantum theories. Furthermore, this ontology makes quantum indeterminacy and determinacy play an important explanatory role in accounting for when quantum systems whose values of their properties are indeterminate become determinate. The process via which determinate values arise varies between the different quantum theories. Moreover, quantum states represent quantum properties and structures that give rise to determinacy, and each quantum theory specifies a structure with certain features. I will focus on the following quantum theories: GRW, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, single-world relationalist theories, Bohmian Mechanics, hybrid classical-quantum theories, and Environmental Determinacy-based (EnD) Quantum Theory. I will argue that GQT should be taken seriously because it provides a series of important benefits that current widely discussed ontologies lack, namely, wavefunction realism and primitive ontology, without some of their costs. For instance, it helps generate quantum theories that are clearly compatible with relativistic causality, such as EnD Quantum Theory. Also, GQT has the benefit of providing new ways to compare and evaluate quantum theories.
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122193.397754
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty ), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimum standard ones (dirty or open). Our findings suggest that both evaluative polarity and scale structure drive the asymmetric interpretation of gradable adjectives under negation. Overall, our work adds to the growing literature on the interplay between pragmatic inference, valence and semantic meaning.
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122206.397767
Faced with an intractable problem, some philosophers employ a singular strategy: their idea is to dismiss or dissolve the problem in some way, as opposed to meeting it head on with a proposed solution. Multiversism in many of its varieties has recently emerged as a popular application of this approach to the continuum problem: CH is true in some worlds, false in others; the effort to settle it one way or the other is misguided, a pseudo-problem. My goal here is to examine a few actual and possible implementations of this strategy, but first, in the interest of transparency, I should acknowledge a tendency toward the opposing view of CH. At least for now, I believe that one of the most pressing questions in the contemporary foundations of set theory is how to extend ZFC (or ZFC+LCs) in mathematically defensible ways so as to settle CH (and other independent questions) and to produce a more fruitful theory. It seems best to begin by sketching in my own peculiar take on this opposing view. Then, with this as backdrop, I’ll turn to multiversism.
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122440.39778
Seven years ago, Fossil Future author Alex Epstein posted this on Facebook. Seven years later, I still liked it so much that I got his permission to share it with the world. Enjoy, and be improved. One of my least favorite experiences short-term but most valuable experiences long-term is trying my best and not getting the results I want. …
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122503.397791
Philosopher Jimmy Licon wasn’t impressed with philosophers’ top arguments against my “Make Desertion Fast” proposal. With Jimmy’s kind permission, I’m cross-posting his critique here. At the start of the Russian war against Ukraine, the economist Bryan Caplan made an interesting proposal:
Enticement to desert should be a standard part of military strategy, but hardly ever is. …
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129799.397802
My previous post suggested a constraint on warranted hostility: the target must be ill-willed and/or unreasonable. This is why I’m so baffled by common hostility towards both utilitarianism and effective altruism. …
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138748.397813
Commentary from Dimitri Coelho Mollo on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). I was lucky to have had the chance to discuss this brilliant book with Mazviita Chirimuuta and others while it was still in preparation, and I’m looking forward to exchanging ideas about it once more over here at the BrainsBlog! …
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138748.397826
Post 4 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). A central claim of the book is that recognition of the challenge of brain complexity — how it places pressure on scientists to devise experimental methods, theories and models, which drastically cut down the apparent complexity of neural processes – is indispensable when evaluating the philosophical import of neuroscientific results, and more generally, in understanding the historical trajectory of research on the brain. …
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148349.397838
Does artificial intelligence (AI) pose existential risks to humanity? This question has been on some surprising tables lately – tables in the White House and 10 Downing Street, amongst other places. Some critics feel it is getting too much attention. They want to push it aside, or into the distant future, in favour of conversations about the immediate risks of AI.
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207850.397848
In this brief note I will try to develop the following thesis: Gödel’s program includes a rich and exciting task for the philosopher that has been overlooked by the majority of the philosophers of set theory (let alone set theorists). Gödel’s program intends, in a nutshell, to solve Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis (hereafter, CH) as legitimate problem by means of the addition of new axioms to ZFC that satisfy some criteria of naturalness and that, moreover, allow to derive either CH or its negation. Hence, the view encapsulated by such program clashes violently with other attitudes towards the status of CH, like those defending that CH is a problem but is solved by the independence phenomenon itself , those that argue that CH is a vague statement and therefore is ill-posed as a problem and, finally, those that regard the axiom-adding proposals as incapable of settling the question .
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208676.397859
An accuracy scoring rule is open-minded provided that the expected value of the score after a Bayesian update on a prospective observation is always greater than or equal to the current expected value of the score. …