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Meaning, purpose, and narrative Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-21 Michael Zhao
According to many philosophers, “the meaning of life” refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our
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Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-18 Tom Ralston
Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that
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Testimonial liberalism and the balance of epistemic goals Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-18 Ross F. Patrizio
There are two broad views in the epistemology of testimony, conservatism and liberalism. The two views disagree over a particular necessary condition on testimonial justification: the positive reasons requirement (PRR). Perhaps the most prominent objection levelled at liberalism from the conservative camp stems from gullibility; without PRR, the thought goes, an objectionable form of gullibility looms
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Incommensurability and population-level bioethics Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-18 Anders Herlitz
This paper introduces incommensurability, its potential relevance to population-level bioethics, and thecontributions to the special issue. It provides an overview of recent research on incommensurability, outlines somereasons to believe in its possibility and relevance, and presents some problems and opportunities that arise onceone accepts that incommensurability is possible.
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What motivates humeanism? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-18 Harjit Bhogal
The ‘great divide’ in the metaphysics of science is between Humean approaches—which reduce scientific laws (and related modalities) to patterns of occurrent facts—and anti-Humean approaches—where laws stand apart from the patterns of events, making those events hold. There is a vast literature on this debate, with many problems raised for the Humean. But a major problem comes right at the start—what’s
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Humes definitions of virtue Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-19 Hsueh Qu
Hume offers not one, but two definitions of virtue: a more famous one in terms of usefulness or agreeability to the self or to others, and a second in terms of eliciting approbation or disapprobation from spectators. Some scholars endorse the former definition as the more fundamental one; others endorse the latter as more fundamental. This paper argues that neither definition is more fundamental than
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Conceptual Decolonization, Conceptual Justice, and Religious Concepts Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-17 Mikel Burley
Calls for decolonization are on the rise in social and academic life, but ‘decolonization’ can mean various things. This article expounds and critically evaluates the programme of conceptual decolonization, chiefly as promulgated in relation to African philosophy by Kwasi Wiredu. The programme involves both resisting the unreflective acceptance of non-indigenous concepts and constructively utilizing
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Flummoxing expectations Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-17 Hayden Wilkinson
Expected utility theory often falls silent, even in cases where the correct rankings of options seems obvious. For instance, it fails to compare the Pasadena game to the Altadena game, despite the latter turning out better in every state. Decision theorists have attempted to fill these silences by proposing various extensions to expected utility theory. As I show in this paper, such extensions often
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Kantian Naturalism Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-10-13 E. Sonny Elizondo
I offer a qualified defence of Kant’s natural teleological argument, that is, his inference from the (un)naturalness of an act to its (im)morality. Though I reject many of Kant’s conclusions, I thi...
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Symmetry, Invariance, and Imprecise Probability Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-16 Zachary Goodsell, Jacob M Nebel
It is tempting to think that a process of choosing a point at random from the surface of a sphere can be probabilistically symmetric, in the sense that any two regions of the sphere which differ by a rotation are equally likely to include the chosen point. Isaacs, Hájek and Hawthorne (2022) argue from such symmetry principles and the mathematical paradoxes of measure to the existence of imprecise chances
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Bilateralism, coherence, and incoherence Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-10-16 Rea Golan
Bilateralism is the view that the speech act of denial is as primitive as that of assertion. Bilateralism has proved helpful in providing an intuitive interpretation of formalisms that, prima facie, look counterintuitive, namely, multiple‐conclusion sequent calculi. Under this interpretation, a sequent of the form is regarded as the statement that it is incoherent, according to our conversational norms
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Heidegger's argument for fascism Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-10-16 Neil Sinhababu
Heidegger's ontological theories, his observations about liberalism and fascism, and his evaluation of Being are three premises of an argument for fascism. The ontological premise is that integrated wholes and instruments or objects of will are ontologically superior, as Being and Time suggests in discussing Being‐a‐whole and using tools. The social premise is that fascist societies are wholes integrated
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Communicative Gaslighting Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Lucy McDonald
In this paper I identify a distinctive kind of gaslighting: communicative gaslighting. Communicative gaslighters intentionally misrepresent the communicative properties of an utterance—their own or...
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It Can Be Irrational to Knowingly Choose the Best Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-10-10 J. Dmitri Gallow
In this journal, Jack Spencer argues that we should reject a decision rule called MaxRat because it is incompatible with this principle: if you know that you will choose x, and you know that x is b...
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KK is Wrong Because We Say So Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-15 Simon Goldstein, John Hawthorne
This paper offers a new argument against the KK thesis, which says that if you know p, then you know that you know p. We argue that KK is inconsistent with the fact that anyone denies the KK thesis: imagine that Dudley says he knows p but that he does not have 100 iterations of knowledge about p. If KK were true, Dudley would know that he has 100 iterations of knowledge about p, and so he wouldn’t
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Two approaches to grounding moral standing: interests-first or value-first? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Daniel Elbro
Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of
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On the manipulator-focused response to manipulation cases Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Gabriel De Marco, Taylor W. Cyr
In this paper, we identify a class of responses to cases of manipulation that we label manipulator-focused views. The key insight of such views is that being subject to the will of another agent significantly affects our freedom and moral responsibility. Though different authors take this key insight in different directions, and the mechanics of their views are quite different, these views turn out
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Explaining social kinds: the role of covert normativity Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Rachel Katherine Cooper
The goal of the debunking social constructionist is to reveal as social kinds that are widely held to be natural (or, in some cases, to reveal as more deeply social kinds that are already widely recognized to be social). The prominent approach to such debunking has been to make a case for thinking that the individuation conditions for membership in the kinds in question are in fact social (or in fact
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How do you assert a graph? Towards an account of depictions in scientific testimony Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Corey Dethier
I extend the literature on norms of assertion to the ubiquitous use of graphs in scientific papers and presentations, which I term “graphical testimony.” On my account, the testimonial presentation of a graph involves commitment to both (a) the in‐context reliability of the graph's framing devices and (b) the perspective‐relative accuracy of the graph's content. Despite apparent disagreements between
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Change Don’t Come Easy: Nonnegotiable Meanings Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Una Stojnić, Ernie Lepore
We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic...
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Taking motivating reasons’ deliberative role seriously Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-10 Levy Wang
A motivating reason is a reason an agent acts for. There are two pre-theoretical intuitions about motivating reasons that seem irreconcilable. One intuition suggests that motivating reasons are factive, and the other says the opposite. As a result, a divide exists between philosophers, each side prioritizing one intuition to the detriment of the other. In this essay, I present the deliberate theory
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The perceptual learning of socially constructed kinds: how culture biases and shapes perception Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-10 Madeleine Ransom
Some kinds are both socially constructed and perceptible, such as gender and race. However, this gives rise to a puzzle that has been largely neglected in social constructionist accounts: how does culture shape and bias what we perceive? I argue that perceptual learning is the best explanation of our ability to perceive social kinds, in comparison to accounts that require a person acquire beliefs,
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Using the Ideal/Nonideal Distinction in Philosophy of Language (and Elsewhere) Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-10-10 Jeff Engelhardt, Molly Moran
Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever (C&D) have recently argued that the ideal/non-ideal distinction is ‘useless’ in philosophy of language. This paper responds to C&D’s argument, develops an account of ...
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In search of lost principles: generic generalism in aesthetics and ethics Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-08 Errol Lord
I defend a form of generalism in ethics and aesthetics. Generalism about a domain D is the view that there are principles that play an explanatory role in the metaphysics of D and can be used in reasoning when thinking about D. I argue that in both aesthetics and ethics, there are generic generalizations that are principles. I do this by (i) explaining the nature of a particularly important kind of
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Intellectual humility without limits: Magnanimous humility, disagreement and the epistemology of resistance Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-10-09 Brandon Yip
In this paper, I provide a characterisation of a neglected form of humility: magnanimous humility. Unlike most contemporary analyses of humility, magnanimous humility is not about limitations but instead presupposes that one possesses some entitlement in a context. I suggest that magnanimous intellectual humility (IH) consists in a disposition to appropriately refrain from exercising one's legitimate
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Not Quite Yet a Hazy Limbo of Mystery: Intuition in Russell’s An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-08 Tyke Nunez
I argue that in Bertrand Russell’s An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), his forms of externality serve the same fundamental role in grounding the possibility of geometry that Immanuel Kant’s forms of intuition serve in grounding geometry in his critical philosophy. Specifically, both provide knowledge of bare numerical difference, where we have no concept of this difference. Because geometry
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Moral agency under oppression Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-10-08 Sukaina Hirji
In Huckleberry Finn, a thirteen‐year old white boy in antebellum Missouri escapes from his abusive father and befriends a runaway slave named Jim. On a familiar reading of the novel, both Huck and Jim are, in their own ways, morally impressive, transcending the unjust circumstances in which they find themselves in to treat each other as equals. Huck saves Jim's life from two men looking for runaway
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The alchemists: on Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson’s rational sentimentalism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-05 Oded Na’aman
D’Arms and Jacobson’s Rational Sentimentalism promises an alchemy: a view that grounds certain values and reasons in facts about human sentiments but also treats the very same facts about values and reasons as fundamental. I examine how they attempt to deliver on the promise, doubt that they succeed, consider their motivations, and offer an alternative interpretation of what they might be doing.
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Intentions and Inquiry Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-10-01 Daniel C Friedman
This paper defends the Intention Account of Individual Inquiry. On this account, inquiry is best understood by appeal to a ‘question-directed intention’ (QDI), an intention to answer a question broadly construed. This account’s core commitments help meet recent challenges plaguing extant approaches to characterizing inquiry. First, QDIs are the type of mental state central to inquiry, not attitudes
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Save the five: Meeting Taurek's challenge Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-10-01 Zach Barnett
Six people are in trouble. We can save five of them or just the sixth. What should we do? John Taurek defends a radical view: We are not required to save the greater number. Taurek has persuaded some. But even the unpersuaded agree that Taurek poses a deep and important challenge: From where does the priority of the many derive? It seems difficult, or even impossible, to convince someone who denies
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Epistemic normativity without epistemic teleology Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-30 Benjamin Kiesewetter
This article is concerned with a puzzle that arises from three initially plausible assumptions that form an inconsistent triad: (i) Epistemic reasons are normative reasons (normativism); (ii) reasons are normative only if conformity with them is good (the reasons/value‐link); (iii) conformity with epistemic reasons need not be good (the nihilist assumption). I start by defending the reasons/value‐link
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Remembering is an imaginative project Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-28 Seth Goldwasser
This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally
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Abstraction, truth, and free logic Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-27 Bahram Assadian
ionism is the view that Fregean abstraction principles underlie our knowledge of the existence of mathematical objects. It is often assumed that the abstractionist proof for the existence of such objects requires ‘negative free logic’ in which all atomic sentences with empty terms are false. I argue that while negative free logic is not indispensably needed for the proof of abstract existence, there
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A framework for the metaphysics of race Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-26 Daniel Z Korman
Philosophers have appealed to a wide variety of different factors in providing a metaphysics of race: appearance, ancestry, systems of oppression, shared ways of life, and so-called ‘racial essences’. I distinguish four importantly different questions about racial groups that one may be answering in appealing these factors. I then show that marking these distinctions proves quite fruitful, revealing
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The selfish machine? On the power and limitation of natural selection to understand the development of advanced AI Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-24 Maarten Boudry, Simon Friederich
Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives
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Natural kind reasoning in consciousness science: An alternative to theory testing Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Andy Mckilliam
It is often suggested that to make progress in consciousness science we need a theory of consciousness—one that tells us what consciousness is and what kinds of systems can have it. But this may be putting the cart before the horse. There are currently a wide range of very different theories all claiming to be theories of consciousness. How are we to decide between them if we do not already know which
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Kant's nutshell argument for idealism Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Desmond Hogan
The significance or vacuity of the statement, “Everything has just doubled in size,” attracted considerable attention last century from scientists and philosophers. Presenting his conventionalism in geometry, Poincaré insisted on the emptiness of a hypothesis that all objects have doubled in size overnight. Such expansion could have meaning, he argued, “only for those who reason as if space were absolute
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I expect you to be happy, so I see you smile: A multidimensional account of emotion attribution Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Leda Berio, Albert Newen
Constructivist theories of emotions and empirical studies have been increasingly stressing the role of contextual information and cultural conventions in emotion recognition. We propose a new account of emotion recognition and attribution that systematically integrates these aspects, and argue that emotion recognition is part of the general process of person impression formation. To describe the structural
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Welfare and autonomy under risk Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Pietro Cibinel
This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non‐welfarist theories of social choice
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Growing the image: Generative AI and the medium of gardening Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Nick Young, Enrico Terrone
In this paper, we argue that Midjourney—a generative AI program that transforms text prompts into images—should be understood not as an agent or a tool, but as a new type of artistic medium. We first examine the view of Midjourney as an agent, considering whether it could be seen as an artist or co-author. This perspective proves unsatisfactory, as Midjourney lacks intentionality and mental states
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Reasons and belief Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-25 Daniel Fogal
Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect
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Every History Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-24 Jonathan Knutzen
This paper focuses on an underexplored challenge in infinite ethics. On realistic assumptions, if our universe is infinite, every nomologically possible history is actual and nothing we ever do makes a difference to the moral quality of the world as a whole. Call this thought Every History. This paper unpacks Every History and explores some of its ethical implications. Specifically, I argue that if
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The relational foundations of epistemic normativity Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-24 Cameron Boult
Why comply with epistemic norms? In this paper, I argue that complying with epistemic norms, engaging in epistemically responsible conduct, and being epistemically trustworthy are constitutive elements of maintaining good epistemic relations with oneself and others. Good epistemic relations are in turn both instrumentally and finally valuable: they enable the kind of coordination and knowledge acquisition
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The limits of experience: Dogmatism and moral epistemology Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-24 Uriah Kriegel
Let “phenomenal dogmatism” be the thesis that some experiences provide some beliefs with immediate prima facie justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. A basic question‐mark looms over phenomenal dogmatism: Why should the fact that a person is visited by some phenomenal feel suggest the likely truth of a belief? In this paper, I press this challenge, arguing that perceptually
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Slurring silences Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-23 A. G. Holdier
Silence can be a communicative act. Tanesini (2018) demonstrates how “eloquent” silences can virtuously indicate resistance and dissent; in this paper, I outline one way silence can also be used viciously to cause discursive harm, specifically by slurring victims. By distinguishing between eloquent and “signaling” silences (two kinds of what I call “performative” silences), I show how “slurring” silences
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What is social organizing? Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-23 Megan Hyska
While scholars of, and participants in, social movements, electoral politics, and organized labor are deeply engaged in contrasting different theories of how political actors should organize, little recent philosophical work has asked what social organizing is. This paper aims to answer this question in a way that can make sense of typical organizing‐related claims and debates. It is intuitive that
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Moral expertise as skilled practice Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-22 Sarah Stroud
Contemporary discussions of moral expertise have raised a host of problems for the very idea of a “moral expert.” This article interrogates the conception of moral expertise that such discussions seem to assume and proposes instead that we understand moral expertise as a species of practical skill. On this model, a skilled moral agent is more similar to a skilled pianist than she is to a theoretical
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The nature and value of firsthand insight Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-21 Elijah Chudnoff
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Incommensurability, the sequence argument, and the Pareto principle Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Gustaf Arrhenius, H. Orri Stefánsson
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The boundaries of gnoseology Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Jesús Navarro, Dani Pino
According to Sosa (2015, 2021), the domain of epistemic normativity divides into gnoseology and intellectual ethics, a boundary that results from the key notion that gnoseological assessments are telic. We share this view here and highlight the implications that the telic claim has for different debates in contemporary epistemology. However, we also raise the complaint that Sosa’s analogy of the archer
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The monotonicity of essence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 William Vincent
Kit Fine’s logic of essence and his reduction of modality crucially rely on a principle called the ‘monotonicity of essence’. This principle says that for all pluralities, xx and yy, if some xx belong to some yy, then if it is essential to xx that p, it is also essential to yy that p. I argue that on the constitutive notion of essence, this principle is false. In particular, I show that this principle
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The quest for a qualitative hedonism Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-20 Dale Dorsey
In this paper, I attempt to articulate a version of qualitative hedonism, grounded in the value theory of the British Moralists. I argue that this view is novel, presents substantial advantages over alternative hedonisms (including rival approaches to qualitative hedonism and its quantitative cousin), and can avoid classic challenges to qualitative hedonism that emerged in the post‐Mill era. If I succeed
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On Algebra Relativisation Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-20 Chloé de Canson
Katie Steele and H. Orri Stefánsson argue that, to reflect an agent’s limited awareness, the algebra of propositions on which that agent’s credences are defined should be relativised to their awareness state. I argue that this produces insurmountable difficulties. But the project of relativising the agent’s algebra to reflect their partial perspective need not be abandoned: the algebra can be relativised
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Implicit commitments of instrumental acceptance: A case study Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-20 Luca Castaldo, Maciej Głowacki
When accepting an axiomatic theory S, we are implicitly committed to various statements that are independent of its axioms. Examples of such implicit commitments include consistency statements and reflection principles for S. While foundational acceptance has received considerable attention in this context, the study of implicit commitments triggered by weaker notions remains underdeveloped. This article
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What do we do when we suspend judgement? Philosophical Issues (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-20 Anne Meylan
According to a classical view, suspension of judgement is, like belief and disbelief, a cognitive state. However, as some authors (Crawford 2022; Lord 2020; McGrath 2021a, 2021b; Sosa 2019, 2021) have pointed out, to suspend judgement is also to perform a certain mental action. The main goal of this article is to defend a precise account of the action that we take when we suspend our judgement: the
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Scientific understanding as narrative intelligibility Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Gabriel Siegel
When does a model explain? When does it promote understanding? A dominant approach to scientific explanation is the interventionist view. According to this view, when X explains Y, intervening on X can produce, prevent or alter Y in some predictable way. In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, I reject a position that many interventionist theorists endorse. This position is that to explain some
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Limited Aggregation’s Non-Fatal Non-Dilemma Australasian Journal of Philosophy (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 James Hart
Limited aggregationists argue that when deciding between competing claims to aid we are sometimes required and sometimes forbidden from aggregating weaker claims to outweigh stronger claims. Joe Ho...
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Perceiving secondary qualities Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Boyd Millar
Thomas Reid famously claimed that our perceptual experiences reveal what primary qualities are in themselves, while providing us with only an obscure notion of secondary qualities. I maintain that this claim is largely correct and that, consequently, any adequate theory of perception must explain the fact that perceptual experiences provide significantly less insight into the nature of secondary qualities