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On testimony in scenarios with Wigner and Friend Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Tomasz Placek
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Staying on-shell: manifest properties and reformulations in particle physics Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Josh Hunt
The empirical success of particle physics rests largely on an approximation method: perturbation theory. Yet even within perturbative quantum field theory, there are a variety of different formulations. This variety teaches us that reformulating approximation methods can provide a tremendous source of progress in science. Along with enabling the solution of otherwise intractable problems, reformulations
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What we mean as what we said or would have said Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Martin L. Jönsson, Hubert Hågemark
We usually mean what we say, but sometimes we do not. When I ironically utter ‘What lovely weather’ on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter ‘Jim is a barn door’ instead of ‘Jim is a darn bore’, I say one thing and mean another. However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of ‘There is wine in the fridge’ or ‘I really like nachos’
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Epistemic instrumentalism and the problem of epistemic blame Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-15 Michelle M. Dyke
In this paper, I draw attention to the phenomenon of warranted epistemic blame in order to pose a challenge for most forms of epistemic instrumentalism, which is the view that all of the demands of epistemic normativity are requirements of instrumental rationality. Because of the way in which the instrumentalist takes the force of one’s epistemic reasons to derive from one’s own individually held ends
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Person-first and identity-first approaches to Autism: metaphysical and linguistic implications Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-15 Marta Jorba, Valentina Petrolini, Bianca Cepollaro
Over the past few years, there has been much debate about how autistic people should be described and labeled. Two main tendencies have emerged in this discussion, usually known as the person-first approach and the identity-first approach. While the former proposes to talk about ‘person(s) with autism’, the latter claims that ‘autistic person’ is more adequate. We first discuss person-first and identity-first
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For values in science: Assessing recent arguments for the ideal of value-free science Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-16 Matthew J. Brown
There is a near consensus among philosophers of science whose research focuses on science and values that the ideal of value-free science is untenable, and that science not only is, but normatively must be, value-laden in some respect. The consensus is far from complete; with some regularity, defenses of the value-free ideal (VFI) as well as critiques of major arguments against the VFI surface in the
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Shared emotion without togetherness: the case of shared grief Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-16 Louise Richardson
I offer a philosophical account of shared grief, on which it is a process, undergone by a group, of recognising and accommodating significant possibilities that are lost to that group. In setting out from an understanding of grief’s distinctive characteristics, a philosophically interesting, metaphysically undemanding, and practically useful account of shared grief comes into view, that has broader
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Skilled metacognitive self-regulation toward interpretive norms: a non-relativist basis for the social constitution of mental health and illness Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-15 Tadeusz Wiesław Zawidzki
There is evidence that mental illness is partly socially constituted: diagnoses are historically “transient” (Hacking, Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University Press, 1998a; Mad travelers. University of Virginia, 1998b) and culturally variable (Toh, Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(2), 72–86, 2022). However, this view risks pernicious relativism. On most
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A dispositional account of technical functions Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-10 Mitchell Roberts
It is commonly held that technical artifacts have a “dual nature.” On the one hand, technical artifacts are material objects–they are constituted by their physical components and structures. On the other hand, technical artifacts are intentional objects in virtue of their teleological nature—they are for some purpose that is contingent on the intentional states of agents. I argue that this view is
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The exactness of communication Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Torfinn Thomesen Huvenes
According to a widely held view, successful communication does not require the speaker and the hearer to grasp the same proposition. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss an argument for the thesis that an instance of communication is successful only if the speaker and the hearer grasp the same proposition. The argument is based on the idea that there is a connection between successful
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Life, sense-making, and subjectivity. Why the enactive conception of life and mind requires phenomenology Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Juan Diego Bogotá
One of the ideas that characterises the enactive approach to cognition is that life and mind are deeply continuous, which means that both phenomena share the same basic set of organisational and phenomenological properties. The appeal to phenomenology to address life and basic cognition is controversial. It has been argued that, because of its reliance on phenomenological categories, enactivism may
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The normativity objection and the coloring strategy Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Xinkan Zhao
The normativity objection challenges normative naturalism by arguing that we have a distinctive cognitive experience when making normative judgements, finding ourselves in touch with some action-guiding authority issuing demands from outside, and that this cannot be explained naturalistically. An increasing number of naturalists have defended their position by adopting the coloring strategy, which
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What’s wrong with the counterfactual-based objection to CORNEA? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Pedro Merlussi, Sérgio Ricardo Neves de Miranda
One important objection to the Condition Of ReasonNable Epistemic Access (CORNEA) is that it is incompatible with inductive evidence. This objection, however, relies on a counterfactual interpretation of CORNEA, and Wykstra and Perrine have shown that CORNEA need not be interpreted in that way, but rather in terms of conditional probability. Here, we show that there is an important gap in this recent
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Remembering as the same Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Víctor M. Verdejo
One may not only represent the same objects of one’s past, but also represent them as the same objects across time. I call this phenomenon “Remembering as the Same” (RaS). In this article, I aim to bring out the connection between the simulationist model of cognitive memory and this underexplored aspect of memory experience. I shall suggest that, unlike the causalist contender, the simulationist is
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Naïve realism and sensorimotor theory Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Daniel S H Kim
How can we have a sense of the presence of ordinary three-dimensional objects (e.g., an apple on my desk, a partially occluded cat behind a picket fence) when we are only presented with some parts of objects perceived from a particular egocentric viewpoint (e.g., the facing side of the apple, the unoccluded parts of the cat)? This paper presents and defends a novel answer to this question by incorporating
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Two kinds of drift? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Ciprian Jeler
Philosophers of biology have recently been debating about whether random genetic drift is a distinct process from that of natural selection. One camp argues that drift is a process of “indiscriminate sampling” that is logically and ontologically distinct from the “discriminate sampling” process that is natural selection. The other camp argues that, rather than being two autonomous processes, natural
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The epistemic objection against perdurantism Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Emanuele Tullio, Tommaso Soriani
According to Perdurantism, persons are identical to maximal aggregates of appropriately interrelated temporal parts. Within the Perdurantist framework, an epistemic concern arises, targeting the perduring persons’ belief that they are persons, suggesting that, ultimately, they are not in a position to know that they are persons as opposed to temporal parts. Despite the consideration it has received
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Affective injustice, sanism and psychiatry Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Zoey Lavallee, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien
Psychiatric language and concepts, and the norms they embed, have come to influence more and more areas of our daily lives. This has recently been described as a feature of the ‘psychiatrization of society.’ This paper looks at one aspect of psychiatrization that is still little studied in the literature: the psychiatrization of our emotional lives. The paper develops an extended account of emotion
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Macrostructural explanation in the social sciences Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Richard Lauer
Several philosophers have attempted to identify how it is that “social structure” can explain phenomena. Some of the most prominent of these philosophers have posited that what we call “social structures” are sets of constraints acting on individuals that guide and regulate their actions, either coercing agents into making choices, raising the probability that they will make certain choices, or making
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Gricean insinuation and the fake one-way mirror effect Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-30 Maciej Witek
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Partners in crime? Radical scepticism and malevolent global conspiracy theories Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-30 Genia Schönbaumsfeld
Although academic work on conspiracy theory has taken off in the last two decades, both in other disciplines as well as in epistemology, the similarities between global sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories have not been the focus of attention. The main reason for this lacuna probably stems from the fact that most philosophers take radical scepticism very seriously, while, for the most
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Persistence conditions: what they are, and what it is to have them Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-28 Dirk Franken
It is common among metaphysicians to talk about objects having persistence conditions or, equivalently, about the persistence conditions of objects. However, as frequent as these statements are, as rare are the attempts to clarify their meaning in a systematic manner. In the present paper, I try to provide such an explanation by considering in detail the question of what it is for an object to have
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Do opaque algorithms have functions? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Clint Hurshman
The functions of technical artifacts are closely associated with design. Increasingly, however, we depend on technologies that are not designed: algorithms produced using machine learning (ML). Machine learning uses automated optimization processes to produce algorithms that are often opaque even to developers. I argue that these opaque ML models cannot be ascribed functions on the leading design-based
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Epistemic logic with partial grasp Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Francisca Silva
We have to gain from recognizing a relation between epistemic agents and the parts of subject matters that play a role in their cognitive lives. I call this relation “grasping”. Namely, I zone in on one notion of having a partial grasp of a subject matter—that of agents grasping part of the subject matter that they are attending to—and characterize it. I propose that giving up the idealization that
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Authenticity in algorithm-aided decision-making Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Brett Karlan
I identify an undertheorized problem with decisions we make with the aid of algorithms: the problem of inauthenticity. When we make decisions with the aid of algorithms, we can make ones that go against our commitments and values in a normatively important way. In this paper, I present a framework for algorithm-aided decision-making that can lead to inauthenticity. I then construct a taxonomy of the
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A non-causalist account of the explanatory autonomy in the psychological sciences Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 José Díez, David Pineda
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Must depression be irrational? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Dan Cavedon-Taylor
The received view about depression in the philosophical literature is that it is defined, in part, by epistemic irrationality. This status is undeserved. The received view does not fully reflect current clinical thinking and is motivated by an overly simplistic, if not false, account of depression’s phenomenal character. Equally attractive, if not more so, is a view that says depression can be instantiated
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Quantum field theory and the limits of reductionism Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Emily Adlam
I suggest that the current situation in quantum field theory (QFT) provides some reason to question the universal validity of ontological reductionism. I argue that the renormalization group flow is reversible except at fixed points, which makes the relation between large and small distance scales quite symmetric in QFT, opening up at least the technical possibility of a non-reductionist approach to
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I am no abstract object: a novel challenge to mind uploading Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Xinyi Zhan
Mind uploading—the transference of mind from a biological brain to a computer—offers the alluring possibility of immortality. This paper provides a novel challenge to mind uploading, focusing on the distinction between abstract objects and concrete individuals. Uploads are abstract objects, while currently, persons are concrete individuals. This presents a dilemma: if the mind is concrete, uploading
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Realism and the detection of dark matter Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Eugene Vaynberg
A number of philosophers claim that realism about dark matter in cosmology is unwarranted because there has been no empirical confirmation of a dark matter particle. This demand is misguided. I argue that we should take the theoretical concept of dark matter as described in our best cosmological model (ΛCDM) at face value. Since there is no theoretical or nomological requirement that dark matter be
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Just pluralism: thinking about concepts of mental disorder in global context Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Elena Popa
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Breaking the stigma around autism: moving away from neuronormativity using epistemic justice and 4E cognition Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Mylène Legault, Amandine Catala, Pierre Poirier
Autistic people continue to face considerable stigmatization. Much work remains to be done to identify and tackle the causes of this stigmatization. We identify two related assumptions that generate and perpetuate this stigmatization: one ontological; one epistemic. We argue that breaking the stigma around autism requires addressing these twin assumptions. The ontological assumption presupposes the
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Making sense of the doxastic approach to thought insertion Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Pablo López-Silva
With a higher prevalence in schizophrenia, delusions of thought insertion (TI) are regarded as one of the most severe symptoms of psychosis. Patients suffering from TI report that external agents are able to place thoughts into their minds or skulls. A version of the doxastic approach characterizes delusions as abnormal beliefs rooted in anomalous experiences. Nonetheless, the exact role of these experiences
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Seeking a reflective equilibrium in the face of disagreement Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Folke Tersman
How is someone who seeks a reflective equilibrium to respond upon learning that others disagree with her? Regrettably, not much attention has been devoted to that question despite the extensive general discussion about the epistemic significance of disagreement that has taken place in recent years. This paper helps fill the lacuna by exploring possible connections between the relevant bodies of literature
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Polarization is epistemically innocuous Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Mason Westfall
People are manifestly polarized. On many topics, extreme perspectives are much easier to find than ‘reasonable’, ‘moderate’ perspectives. A natural reaction to this situation is that something epistemically irrational is afoot. Here, I question this natural reaction. I argue that often polarization is epistemically innocuous. In particular, I argue that certain mechanisms that underlie polarization
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Computational psychiatry and the evolving concept of a mental disorder Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Konstantin Genin, Thomas Grote, Thomas Wolfers
As a discipline, psychiatry is in the process of finding the right set of concepts to organize research and guide treatment. Dissatisfaction with the status quo as expressed in standard manuals has animated a number of computational paradigms, each proposing to rectify the received concept of mental disorder. We explore how different computational paradigms: normative modeling, network theory and learning-theoretic
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Event completion: a test case for theories of reference in memory Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Michael Murez, Brent Strickland
Although we encounter objects from a particular perspective, what we perceive and remember are typically whole objects. In ‘amodal completion’ our mind automatically fills in objects’ spatially occluded parts, and our memory then often discards information about the orientation from which the objects were perceived. An analogous phenomenon of ‘event completion’ has been demonstrated, which may be understood
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Physical vs. numerical approximation in Isaac Newton’s Principia Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-13 George E. Smith
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Origins of biological teleology: how constraints represent ends Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Miguel García-Valdecasas, Terrence W. Deacon
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Knowing how and being able Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Beth Barker
Intellectualists about know-how tend to deny that knowing how to ϕ requires the corresponding ability to ϕ. So, it’s supposed to be an attractive feature of intellectualism that it can explain cases of knowing how without ability, while anti-intellectualism—roughly, the view that knowing how is a kind of ability—cannot. I show that intellectualism fails to explain the very cases that are supposed to
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Why and how to construct an epistemic justification of machine learning? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Petr Spelda, Vit Stritecky
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Deep disagreement across moral revolutions Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-07 Benedict Lane
Moral revolutions are rightly coming to be recognised as a philosophically interesting and historically important mode of moral change. What is less often acknowledged is that the very characteristics that make a moral change revolutionary pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of moral progress. This is because moral revolutions are characterised by a diachronic form of deep moral disagreement:
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Credo in unam credentiam: religious beliefs are standard beliefs Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-08 Liam D. Ryan
Does religious belief differ in any interesting way from other kinds of belief? For now, take ‘belief' to mean how one takes the world to be, on the basis of which they act. Call beliefs like this ‘ordinary beliefs'. There are also more complicated, or abstract, beliefs. Call such beliefs ‘non-ordinary beliefs’. Are religious beliefs different in any significant or interesting way from what we call
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Memory-based reference and immunity to error through misidentification Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-06 Manuel García-Carpintero
Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of ‘I’, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (‘IEM’); in their use “as subject”, first-personal claims are IEM, but not in their use “as object”. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are only de facto IEM
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Large language models and linguistic intentionality Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-06 Jumbly Grindrod
Do large language models like Chat-GPT or Claude meaningfully use the words they produce? Or are they merely clever prediction machines, simulating language use by producing statistically plausible text? There have already been some initial attempts to answer this question by showing that these models meet the criteria for entering meaningful states according to metasemantic theories of mental content
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Smellscapes and diachronic olfaction Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-05 Błażej Skrzypulec
According to a common view, olfactory experiences lack well-developed spatial content. Nevertheless, there is also an important opposition to such a restricted perspective on olfactory spatiality, which claims that a view ascribing only rudimentary spatial content to olfaction arises from a narrow focus on short and passive olfactory experiences. In particular, it is claimed that due to the active
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Category theory in consciousness science: going beyond the correlational project Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-05 Robert Prentner
We discuss the potential of applying category theory to the study of consciousness. We first review a recent proposal from the neurosciences of consciousness to illustrate the “correlational project”, using the integrated information theory of consciousness as an example. We then discuss some technical preliminaries related to categories and in particular to the notion of a functor, which carries the
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Scientific understanding in biomedical research Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-02 Somogy Varga
Motivated by a recent trend that advocates a reassessment of the aim of medical science and clinical practice, this paper investigates the epistemic aims of biomedical research. Drawing on contemporary discussions in epistemology and the philosophy of science, along with a recent study on scurvy, this paper (1) explores the concept of understanding as the aim of scientific inquiry and (2) establishes
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Intentional action, knowledge, and cognitive extension Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-02 J. Adam Carter, Gloria Andrada
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The private life of the brain: issues and promises in the neuroscientific study of internal states Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Héloïse Athéa, Nicolas Heck, Denis Forest
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Time traveler confirms five minute hypothesis! Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Roy Sorensen
Conclusion: What matters for any norm is personal time rather than time. Personal time is a time-like relation (roughly, the time measured by your wristwatch) that knits together scattered temporal parts so that they conform to familiar patterns. David Lewis introduced personal time as an interpretive fiction that allows readers to consistently read fictions about time travelers. Inadvertently, Lewis
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Remote possibilities in branching time structures Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Sylvia Wenmackers
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What does it mean for a duty to be directed in joint action? Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Guido Löhr
It is often stated that joint actions are linked to so-called directed duties. It is not just that we should “do our part” in a joint action simply because it is the right thing to do or because it is in our best interest. Instead, we “owe” it to the other participants. Despite its prima facie plausibility, this claim is not well understood. Is it true that duties in joint action are directed? Which
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Deferred reference, meaning transfer or coercion? Toward a new principle of accounting for systematic uses of proper names Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-29 Katarzyna Kijania-Placek
Proper names are typically considered to be devices of individual reference. Since Frege (1882), the debate has mainly concerned the proper semantic characteristics of this individual reference. Burge (J Philos 70:425–439, 1973) challenged this focus by highlighting the predicative uses of proper names and proposed that names are predicates even if they appear as bare singulars in the argument position
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Inquiry and reasons Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-27 Artūrs Logins
Knowledge, certainty, and understanding are all plausible candidates for constituting aims and setting the norms for genuine inquiry. However, a mere pluralist account of aims and norms of inquiry that lacks a more fundamental theoretical motivation might strike us as ad hoc. The aim of this paper is to provide further motivation for a pluralist approach. The key to the solution is to regard finding
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More than just principles: revisiting epistemic systems Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Sophie Juliane Veigl
Epistemic relativism rests on the existence of a plurality of epistemic systems. There is, however, no consensus on what epistemic systems actually are. Critics argue that epistemic relativism fails because its proponents cannot convincingly show the possibility of two mutually exclusive epistemic systems. Their accounts of epistemic systems are, however, highly idealized, conceptualizing them as sets
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Journalism and public trust in science Synthese (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Vanessa Schipani
Journalists are often the adult public’s central source of scientific information, which means that their reporting shapes the relationship the public has with science. Yet philosophers of science largely ignore journalistic communication in their inquiries about trust in science. This paper aims to help fill this gap in research by comparing journalistic norm conflicts that arose when reporting on