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Metanormative regress: an escape plan Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Christian Tarsney
How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some “second-order” norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a
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Indiscernibility and the grounds of identity Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Samuel Z. Elgin
I provide a theory of the metaphysical foundations of identity: an account of what grounds facts of the form \(a=b\). In particular, I defend the claim that indiscernibility grounds identity. This is typically rejected because it is viciously circular; plausible assumptions about the logic of ground entail that the fact that \(a=b\) partially grounds itself. The theory I defend is immune to this circularity
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Incommensurability and hardness Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Chrisoula Andreou
There is growing support for the view that there can be cases of incommensurability, understood as cases in which two alternatives, X and Y, are such that X is not better than Y, Y is not better than X, and X and Y are not equally good. This paper assumes that alternatives can be incommensurable and explores the prominent idea that, insofar as choice situations that agents face qua rational agents
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Proximal intentions intentionalism Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Victor Tamburini
According to a family of metasemantics for demonstratives called intentionalism, the intentions of speakers determine the reference of demonstratives. And according to a sub-family I call proximal intentions (PI) intentionalism, the intention that determines reference is one that occupies a certain place—the proximal one—in a structure of intentions. PI intentionalism is thought to make correct predictions
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Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Robert Weston Siscoe
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Who’s afraid of common knowledge? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Giorgio Sbardolini
Some arguments against the assumption that ordinary people may share common knowledge are sound. The apparent cost of such arguments is the rejection of scientific theories that appeal to common knowledge. My proposal is to accept the arguments without rejecting the theories. On my proposal, common knowledge is shared by ideally rational people, who are not just mathematically simple versions of ordinary
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Rights reclamation Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-03
Abstract According to a rights forfeiture theory of punishment, liability to punishment hinges upon the notion that criminals forfeit their rights against hard treatment. In this paper, I assume the success of rights forfeiture theory in establishing the permissibility of punishment but aim to develop the view by considering how forfeited rights might be reclaimed. Built into the very notion of proportionate
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Superconditioning Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Simon M. Huttegger
When can a shift from a prior to a posterior be represented by conditionalization? A well-known result, known as “superconditioning” and going back to work by Diaconis and Zabell, gives a sharp answer. This paper extends the result and connects it to the reflection principle and common priors. I show that a shift from a prior to a set of posteriors can be represented within a conditioning model if
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Mind the gap: noncausal explanations of dual properties Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Sorin Bangu
I identify and characterize a type of noncausal explanation in physics. I first introduce a distinction, between the physical properties of a system, and the representational properties of the mathematical expressions of the system’s physical properties. Then I introduce a novel kind of property, which I shall call a dual property. This is a special kind of representational property, one for which
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Why, Delilah? When music and lyrics move us in different directions Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Laura Sizer, Eva M. Dadlez
Songs that combine happy music and sad, violent, or morally disturbing lyrics raise questions about the relationship between music and lyrics in song, including the question of how such songs affect the listener, and of the ethical implications of listening – and perhaps singing along with – such songs. To explore those perplexing cases in which the affective impact of music and lyrics seem entirely
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Nativism and empiricism in artificial intelligence Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Robert Long
Historically, the dispute between empiricists and nativists in philosophy and cognitive science has concerned human and animal minds (Margolis and Laurence in Philos Stud: An Int J Philos Anal Tradit 165(2): 693-718, 2013, Ritchie in Synthese 199(Suppl 1): 159–176, 2021, Colombo in Synthese 195: 4817–4838, 2018). But recent progress has highlighted how empiricist and nativist concerns arise in the
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Quine, evidence, and our science Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Gary Kemp
As is reasonably well-appreciated, Quine struggled with his definition of the all-important notion of an observation sentence; especially in order to make them bear out his commitment to language’s being a ‘social art’. In an earlier article (Mind 131(523):805–825, 2022), I proposed a certain repair, which here I will explain, justify and articulate further. But it also infects the definition of observation
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Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition account Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Michael Strevens
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The semantics of deadnames Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Taylor Koles
Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views
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Zetetic indispensability and epistemic justification Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Mikayla Kelley
Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful
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Policing, undercover policing and ‘dirty hands’: the case of state entrapment Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Daniel J. Hill, Stephen K. McLeod, Attila Tanyi
Under a ‘dirty hands’ model of undercover policing, it inevitably involves situations where whatever the state agent does is morally problematic. Christopher Nathan argues against this model. Nathan’s criticism of the model is predicated on the contention that it entails the view, which he considers objectionable, that morally wrongful acts are central to undercover policing. We address this criticism
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Relevant entailment and logical ground Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Pierre Saint-Germier, Peter Verdée, Pilar Terrés Villalonga
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Why Is Oppression Wrong? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Serene J. Khader
It is often argued that oppression reduces freedom. I argue against the view that oppression is wrong because it reduces freedom. Conceiving oppression as wrong because it reduces freedom is at odds with recognizing structural cases of oppression, because (a) many cases of oppression, including many structural ones, do not reduce agents’ freedom, and (b) the type of freedom reduction involved in many
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Inquiry and trust: An epistemic balancing act Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Heather Rabenberg
It might initially appear impossible to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p. At the very least, it might appear that doing so would be irrational. In this paper, I shall argue that things are not as they appear. Not only is it possible for a person to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p, it is very often rational. Indeed, combining inquiry and trust in this way is
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Still no lie detector for language models: probing empirical and conceptual roadblocks Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-17
Abstract We consider the questions of whether or not large language models (LLMs) have beliefs, and, if they do, how we might measure them. First, we consider whether or not we should expect LLMs to have something like beliefs in the first place. We consider some recent arguments aiming to show that LLMs cannot have beliefs. We show that these arguments are misguided. We provide a more productive framing
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Contingentism and paraphrase Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Jonas Werner
One important challenge for contingentists is that they seem to be unable to account for the meaning of some apparently meaningful modal discourse that is perfectly intelligible for necessitists. This worry is particularly pressing for higher-order contingentists, contingentists who hold that it is not only contingent which objects there are, but also contingent which semantic values there are for
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Two-step approaches to healthcare allocation: how helpful is parity in selecting eligible options? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-12
Abstract Priority setting in healthcare is a highly contentious area of public decision making, in which different values often support incompatible policy options and compromise can be elusive. One promising approach to resolving priority-setting conflicts divides the decision-making process into two steps. In the first, a set of eligible options is identified; in the second, one of those options
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Pitcovski’s explanation-based account of harm Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Erik Carlson, Jens Johansson, Olle Risberg
In a recent article in this journal, Eli Pitcovski puts forward a novel, explanation-based account of harm. We seek to show that Pitcovski’s account, and his arguments in favor of it, can be substantially improved. However, we also argue that, even thus improved, the account faces a dilemma. The dilemma concerns the question of what it takes for an event, E, to explain why a state, P, does not obtain
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Proportionality and combat trauma Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09
Abstract The principle of proportionality demands that a war (or action in war) achieve more goods than bads. In the philosophical literature there has been a wealth of work examining precisely which goods and bads may count toward this evaluation. However, in all of these discussions there is no mention of one of the most certain bads of war, namely the psychological harm(s) likely to be suffered
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In defence of object-given reasons Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Michael Vollmer
One recurrent objection to the idea that the right kind of reasons for or against an attitude are object-given reasons for or against that attitude is that object-given reasons for or against belief and disbelief are incapable of explaining certain features of epistemic normativity. Prohibitive balancing, the behaviour of bare statistical evidence, information about future or easily available evidence
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Structuring embodied minds: attention and perceptual agency Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Jelle Bruineberg, Odysseus Stone
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Algorithmic profiling as a source of hermeneutical injustice Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-05
Abstract It is well-established that algorithms can be instruments of injustice. It is less frequently discussed, however, how current modes of AI deployment often make the very discovery of injustice difficult, if not impossible. In this article, we focus on the effects of algorithmic profiling on epistemic agency. We show how algorithmic profiling can give rise to epistemic injustice through the
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Taught rules: Instruction and the evolution of norms Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Camilo Martinez
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Collective procedural memory Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Sean Donahue
Collective procedural memory is a group’s memory of how to do things, as opposed to a group’s memory of facts. It enables groups to mount effective responses to periodic events (e.g., natural hazards) and to sustain collective projects (e.g., combatting climate change). This article presents an account of collective procedural memory called the Ability Conception. The Ability Conception has various
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A trilemma for the lexical utility model of the precautionary principle Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 H. Orri Stefánsson
Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory
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Attention, moral skill, and algorithmic recommendation Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Nick Schuster, Seth Lazar
Recommender systems are artificial intelligence technologies, deployed by online platforms, that model our individual preferences and direct our attention to content we’re likely to engage with. As the digital world has become increasingly saturated with information, we’ve become ever more reliant on these tools to efficiently allocate our attention. And our reliance on algorithmic recommendation may
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Ground by Status Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Lisa Vogt
What is the explanatory role of ‘status-truths’ such as essence-truths, necessity-truths and law-truths? A plausible principle, suggested by various authors, is Ground by Status, according to which status truths ground their prejacents. For instance, if it is essential to a that p, then this grounds the fact that p. But Ground by Status faces a forceful objection: it is inconsistent with widely accepted
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Why bother with so what? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-16 N. D. Cannon
I address a family of objections I label the So What? objection to robust non-naturalist realism (or, just non-naturalism). This objection concludes that non-naturalism fails to identify the moral properties in virtue of failing to explain why non-natural properties would have all the features we expect moral properties to have and can be extended to provide the conclusion that the non-naturalist is
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Epistemic blame as relationship modification: reply to Smartt Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-06 Cameron Boult
I respond to Tim Smartt’s (2023) skepticism about epistemic blame. Smartt’s skepticism is based on the claims that (i) mere negative epistemic evaluation can better explain everything proponents of epistemic blame say we need epistemic blame to explain; and (ii) no existing account of epistemic blame provides a plausible account of the putative force that any response deserving the label “blame” ought
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Broad, subjective, relative: the surprising folk concept of basic needs Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Thomas Pölzler, Tobu Tomabechi, Ivar R. Hannikainen
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Implicating fictional truth Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Nils Franzén
Some things that we take to be the case in a fictional work are never made explicit by the work itself. For instance, we assume that Sherlock Holmes does not have a third nostril, that he wears underpants and that he has never solved a case with a purple gnome, even though neither of these things is ever mentioned in the narration. This article argues that examples like these can be accounted for through
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Raz’s appeal to law’s authority Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Ben Martin
Joseph Raz’s Argument from Authority is one of the most famous defences of exclusive positivism in jurisprudence, the position that the existence and content of the law in a society is a wholly social fact, which can be established without the need to engage in moral analysis. According to Raz’s argument, legal systems are de facto practical authorities that, like all de facto authorities, must claim
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Humean learning (how to learn) Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19
Abstract David Hume’s skeptical solution to the problem of induction was grounded in his belief that we learn by means of custom . We consider here how a form of reinforcement learning like custom may allow an agent to learn how to learn in other ways as well. Specifically, an agent may learn by simple reinforcement to adopt new forms of learning that work better than simple reinforcement in the context
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Predicative subject matter Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Matteo Plebani, Giuseppe Spolaore
The notions of subject matter and aboutness have been objects of considerable attention among philosophers over the last few years. Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: “sentences have aboutness properties if anything has” (Yablo, Aboutness, Princeton University Press, 2014). However, some subsentential expressions can also be thought of as
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Hylemorphic animalism and conjoined twins Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-18
Abstract Animalism is the doctrine that you and I are animals. Like any substantive philosophical position, animalism faces objections. For example, imagine a case of conjoined twins, where there are two heads, but only one “body,” and where each head seems to have its own typically human and fully discrete mental life. It would be natural to assume that each of the twins is a thing like you and me—each
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Vindicating the verifiability criterion Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Hannes Leitgeb
The aim of this paper is to argue for a revised and precisified version of the infamous Verifiability Criterion for the meaningfulness of declarative sentences. The argument is based on independently plausible premises concerning probabilistic confirmation and meaning as context-change potential, it is shown to be logically valid, and its ramifications for potential applications of the criterion are
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Can we compare health states when our standards change? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Krister Bykvist
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Generics and social justice Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Samia Hesni
Is it harmful to make generic claims about social groups? Those who say yes cite the reinforcement of oppressive stereotypes and cognitive bias. Those who say no cite the potential of generics to do good, rather than harm, by taking advantage of the same mechanisms that perpetuate the harms. This paper analyzes generic utterances in the context of social justice efforts to weigh in on the debate about
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Difference-making and the control relation that grounds responsibility in hierarchical groups Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Johannes Himmelreich
Hierarchical groups shape social, political, and personal life. This paper concerns the question of how individuals within such groups can be responsible. The paper explores how individual responsibility can be partially grounded in difference-making. The paper concentrates on the control condition of responsibility and takes into view three distinct phenomena of responsibility in hierarchical groups
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On fellowship Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Dale Dorsey
This paper explores a form of communion between persons that the philosophy of value has a tendency to ignore. In discussions of interpersonal relationships and experiences, focus is almost always directed to the phenomenon of friendship and family: two or more individuals that share a history, have longstanding relationships of mutual care. Friendship is said, among other things, to be of intrinsic
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Kamm’s modified causative principle Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Michael Rabenberg
I raise a question concerning Frances Kamm’s Modified Causative Principle and briefly say how I think its defender ought to answer it.
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Epistemic characterizations of validity and level-bridging principles Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Joshua Schechter
How should we understand validity? A standard way to characterize validity is in terms of the preservation of truth (or truth in a model). But there are several problems facing such characterizations. An alternative approach is to characterize validity epistemically, for instance in terms of the preservation of an epistemic status. In this paper, I raise a problem for such views. First, I argue that
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Argumentation-induced rational issue polarisation Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-02 Felix Kopecky
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Three sources of social indeterminacy Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Johan Brännmark
Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a
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Standpoint moral epistemology: the epistemic advantage thesis Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Nicole Dular
One of standpoint theory’s main claims is the thesis of epistemic advantage, which holds that marginalized agents have epistemic advantages due to their social disadvantage as marginalized. The epistemic advantage thesis has been argued to be true with respect to knowledge about particular dominant ideologies like classism and sexism, as well as knowledge within fields as diverse as sociology and economics
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The politics of past and future: synthetic media, showing, and telling Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Megan Hyska
Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those
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Response to commentary on “Allocation of scarce resources, disability, and parity” Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-20 F. M. Kamm
This response to a commentary on “Allocation of scarce resources, disability, and parity” considers whether a difference that would be morally relevant when choosing which of two people to save retains its relevance if this would affect other people’s chances of being saved.
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Mutual entailment between causation and responsibility Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Justin Sytsma, Pascale Willemsen, Kevin Reuter
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Remembering requires no reliability Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Changsheng Lai
I argue against mnemic reliabilism, an influential view that successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I refute mnemic reliabilism by demonstrating that: (1) patients with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) can also successfully remember the past despite the unreliability of their corresponding memory
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No foundations for metaphysical coherentism Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Ralf Busse
Recently, metaphysical coherentism has been propounded as an alternative to metaphysical foundationalism and infinitism. The view replaces the picture of reality as a hierarchy of levels with that of a network of objects or facts standing in symmetric or, more generally, cyclic relations of metaphysical dependence. This paper defends the orthodox picture of a well-founded hierarchy against the claimed
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Allocation of scarce resources, disability, and parity Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-14 F. M. Kamm
This article considers the possible relation between the idea of parity and some past work on the allocation of scarce resources. Parity of value is first connected with the idea of some goods being irrelevant in interpersonal comparisons. The notion of moral parity is introduced to describe the recognition that people who are moral equals (even when they are not on a par in terms of value) as not