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The Complexity–Coherence Trade-Off in Cognition Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-04-18 David Thorstad
I present evidence for a systematic complexity–coherence trade-off in cognition. I show how feasible strategies for increasing cognitive complexity along three dimensions come at the expense of a heightened vulnerability to incoherence. I discuss two normative implications of the complexity–coherence trade-off: a novel challenge to coherence-based theories of bounded rationality and a new strategy
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Aphantasia reimagined Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-04-17 Ian Phillips
How is it that individuals who deny experiencing visual imagery nonetheless perform normally on tasks which seem to require it? This puzzle of aphantasia has perplexed philosophers and scientists since the late nineteenth century. Contemporary responses include: (i) idiosyncratic reporting, (ii) faulty introspection, (iii) unconscious imagery, and (iv) complete lack of imagery combined with the use
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What is knowledge by acquaintance? Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-04-17 Uriah Kriegel
Russell famously posited a type of knowledge distinct from and irreducible to propositional knowledge, which he called knowledge by acquaintance. In recent years, several epistemologists have reignited interest in knowledge by acquaintance, pointing out an array of theoretical jobs it is serviceable in performing. Nonetheless knowledge by acquaintance continues to be met with resistance and disregard
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Sakes exist Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-04-17 Tristan Grøtvedt Haze
Contemporary ontologists, almost unanimously, dismiss the idea that sakes (as in ‘I did it for her sake’) exist. Likewise with the kibosh, snooks, behalves, dints, and so on. In this essay, I argue that there is no good reason for this near consensus, I begin to make a case that sakes and the like do exist, and I consider what this means more broadly for ontology.
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Spectrum arguments are incredible Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-17 Michael Rabenberg
Some philosophers have presented arguments that the all-things-considered-better-than relation admits of cycles. The most prominent arguments for this conclusion are spectrum arguments. Whether or not any spectrum arguments are sound is a topic of debate among value theorists. In this paper, I consider whether they are credible or incredible, i.e., whether or not there is anything of a distinctively
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Free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-12 David John Baker
David Wallace has argued that there is no special problem for free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, beyond the well-known problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism. I argue to the contrary that, on the plausible and popular “deep self” approach to compatibilism, the many-worlds interpretation does face a special problem. It is not clear on the many-worlds
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Proactivity, Partiality, and Procreation Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-04-11 Hong Wai Cheong
Common‐sense morality has it that parents are morally justified in acting partially toward their own children. More controversial, however, is the form of partiality that obtains between prospective parents and their yet‐to‐be‐conceived future children – or ‘pre‐parental partiality’, for short. Is pre‐parental partiality morally justified? On one hand, our intuitions seem to tell us that it is. On
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In defence of fictional examples Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-11 Alex Fisher
This paper provides a novel defence of the philosophical use of examples drawn from literature, by comparison with thought experiments and real cases. Such fictional examples, subject to certain constraints, can play a similar role to real cases in establishing the generality of a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the distinct psychological vantage point offered by literature renders it a potent resource
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Neurodiversity, identity, and hypostatic abstraction Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-10 Sarah Arnaud, Quinn Hiroshi Gibson
The Neurodiversity (ND) movement demands that some psychiatric categories be de-pathologized. It has faced much criticism, leading some to despair whether it can ever be brought together with psychiatry. In this paper, we argue for a particular understanding of this central demand of the ND movement. We argue that the demand for de-pathologizing is the rejection of (paradigmatically) autism as a hypostatic
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Just humour me: humour, humourlessness, and mutual recognition Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-09 Jordan MacKenzie
We care about whether the people around us can take a joke. And this care has a moral tinge to it: we're more likely to trust good-humoured people, and are prone to accusing humourless people of being ‘sanctimonious buzzkills’ who need to ‘get over themselves’. But are these moralized reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? This paper discusses the moral value of humour in terms
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Public reason, values in science, and the shifting boundaries of the political forum Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-07 Gabriele Badano
A consensus is emerging in the philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from scientific inquiry. Which values should then be chosen by scientists? This paper proposes a novel answer to this question, labelled the public reason view. To place this answer on firm ground, I first redraw the boundaries of the political forum; in other words, I broaden the range of actors who have a
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Extension and replacement Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-04 Michal Masny
Many people believe that it is better to extend the length of a happy life than to create a new happy life, even if the total welfare is the same in both cases. Despite the popularity of this view, one would be hard-pressed to find a fully compelling justification for it in the literature. This paper develops a novel account of why and when extension is better than replacement that applies not just
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The agentive achievement of acceptance Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-04-05 Samuel Boardman
Is acceptance an act or a state? Jonathan Cohen is often seen as a proponent of the view that acceptance is a mental act. In contrast, Michael Bratman claims that acceptance is a mental state. This paper argues that the evidence supports a more subtle approach. Linguistic intuitions about the lexical aspect of the verb ‘accept’ support the view that there is an act of acceptance and a state of acceptance
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Is Kant's critique of metaphysics obsolete? Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-04-05 Nicholas F. Stang
I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally due to Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g., ‘property’, ‘grounding’) refer to entities and structures (e.g., properties, grounding) in the world? I distinguish a meta‐metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (‘deflationism’) from a meta‐metaphysical view for which this explanatory
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In Defense of Bias: Replies to Berker, Greco, and Johnson Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-04 Thomas Kelly
This is a contribution to a book symposium on Bias: A Philosophical Study, in which I respond to commentaries by Gabbrielle Johnson, Daniel Greco, and Selim Berker. In response to Johnson, I argue that many paradigmatic cases of bias are not best understood as involving underdetermination, and I defend my alternative account of bias against the concerns that she raises. In response to Greco, I note
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Interpreting imprecise probabilities Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-04 Nicholas J J Smith
It is essential that formal models come with interpretations: accounts of how the models relate to the phenomena. The traditional representation of degrees of belief as mathematical probabilities comes with a clear and simple interpretative story. This paper argues that the model of degrees of belief as imprecise probabilities (sets of probabilities) lacks a workable interpretation: The standard interpretative
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Social kind essentialism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-02 Asya Passinsky
There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while
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Nudging for judging that p Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-03 Oscar A Piedrahita, Matthew Vermaire
Recent work in social epistemology has begun to make use of the behavioral-scientific concept of the nudge, but without sustained attention to how it should be translated from behavioral to epistemic contexts. We offer an account of doxastic nudges that satisfies extensional and theoretical desiderata, defend it against other accounts in the literature, and use it to clarify ongoing discussions of
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What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice? Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-04-03 Richard Pettigrew
In this paper, I aim to identify the wrong that is done by the hearer to the testifier in all cases of testimonial injustice. I introduce the concept of testimonial injustice, as well as the existing accounts of this characteristic wrong, and I argue that the latter don’t work. Then I present my favoured account, which adapts Rachel Fraser’s account of the wrong of aesthetic injustice. I argue that
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Vagueness without truth functionality? No worries Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-30 Bret Donnelly
Among theories of vagueness, supervaluationism stands out for its non–truth functional account of the logical connectives. For example, the disjunction of two atomic statements that are not determinately true or false can, itself, come out either true or indeterminate, depending on its content—a consequence several philosophers find problematic. Smith (2016) turns this point against supervaluationism
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Two types of AI existential risk: decisive and accumulative Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-30 Atoosa Kasirzadeh
The conventional discourse on existential risks (x-risks) from AI typically focuses on abrupt, dire events caused by advanced AI systems, particularly those that might achieve or surpass human-level intelligence. These events have severe consequences that either lead to human extinction or irreversibly cripple human civilization to a point beyond recovery. This decisive view, however, often neglects
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A matter of principle? AI alignment as the fair treatment of claims Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-30 Iason Gabriel, Geoff Keeling
The normative challenge of AI alignment centres upon what goals or values ought to be encoded in AI systems to govern their behaviour. A number of answers have been proposed, including the notion that AI must be aligned with human intentions or that it should aim to be helpful, honest and harmless. Nonetheless, both accounts suffer from critical weaknesses. On the one hand, they are incomplete: neither
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Against willing servitude: Autonomy in the ethics of advanced artificial intelligence Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-31 Adam Bales
Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that
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Laws of nature as results of a trade-off—Rethinking the Humean trade-off conception Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-31 Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels
According to the standard Humean account of laws of nature, laws are selected as a result of an optimal trade-off between the scientific virtues of simplicity and strength. Roberts and Woodward have objected that such trade-offs play no role in how laws are chosen in science. We first discuss an example from automated scientific discovery which provides support for Roberts and Woodward’s point that
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A zetetic approach to perspectivism Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-31 Inken Titz
According to perspectivism, what I ought to do depends on my perspective. While recently popular, perspectivism faces a central puzzle. In some deliberative practices, facts outside our perspective are clearly relevant. In deliberation, we are concerned with acquiring new information. In advising, a better-informed adviser possesses relevant information I do not have. The latter case distinctly highlights
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Proper names as counterpart‐theoretic individual concepts Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-03-29 James Ravi Kirkpatrick
Many philosophers and linguists have been attracted to counterpart theory as a framework for natural language semantics. I raise a novel problem for counterpart theory involving simple declarative sentences with proper names. To resolve this problem, counterpart theorists must introduce the notion of a counterpart in the semantics of the non‐modal fragment of language. I develop my preferred solution:
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What are atmospheres? Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-29 Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Takuya Niikawa
This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or
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Symmetries of value Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-03-27 Zachary Goodsell
Standard decision theory ranks risky prospects by their expected utility. This ranking does not change if the values of all possible outcomes are uniformly shifted or dilated. Similarly, if the values of the outcomes are negated, the ranking of prospects by their expected utility is reversed. In settings with unbounded levels of utility, the expected utility of prospects is not always defined, but
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Grounding, contingentism, and the reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-25 Qichen Yan
Teitel (Mind 128:39-68, 2019) argues that the following three doctrines are jointly inconsistent: i) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity reduces to essence; ii) the doctrine that possibly something could fail to exist; and iii) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity obeys a modal logic of at least S4. This paper presents a novel solution to Teitel’s puzzle, regimented in a higher-order logical
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Longtermism and aggregation Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-03-24 Emma Curran
Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about an astronomical amount of good (or agent‐neutral value). As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to engage in long‐term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism
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Liberal legitimacy and future citizens Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-22 Emil Andersson
If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that
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On the accuracy and aptness of suspension Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-22 Sven Bernecker, Luis Rosa
This paper challenges Sosa’s account of the epistemic propriety of suspension of judgment. We take the reader on a test drive through some common problem cases in epistemology and argue that Sosa makes accurate and apt suspension both too easy and too hard.
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Are there transitional beliefs? – I think so? Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-03-22 Julia Staffel
This paper investigates a novel question about the relationship between belief and deliberation: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe an answer to a question Q prior to concluding one's deliberation about Q? This question differs from a more commonly discussed one, insofar as it asks about the rationality of believing that p before settling on p as the answer to some question Q. By contrast
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Farewell to the modal theory of luck Noûs (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-03-20 Chaoan He
The modal theory of luck, according to one influential version of it, holds that an event is lucky if and only if it actually obtains but fails to obtain in some close possible worlds, holding fixed certain initial conditions for the event. There have been some notable critiques of the theory. But they are not fully satisfactory, for they succumb to two typical and compelling strategies of defending
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Knowing to infinity: Full knowledge and the margin‐for‐error principle Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-03-19 Yonathan Fiat
Let's say that I fully know that if I know that , I know that I know that , I know that I know that I know that , and so on. Let's say that I partially know that if I know that but I don't fully know that . What, if anything, do I fully know? What, if anything, do I partially know? One response in the literature is that I fully know everything that I know; partial knowledge is impossible. This response
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Notes on Contributors Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 637-638, April 2025.
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David S. Wendler, Life without Degrees of Moral Status: Implications for Rabbits, Robots, and the Rest of Us Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Helen Ryland
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 631-636, April 2025.
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Jennifer Mather Saul, Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Jessica Keiser
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 627-631, April 2025.
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Hanno Sauer, Moral Teleology: A Theory of Progress Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Jan-Christoph Heilinger
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 621-627, April 2025.
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Emily McTernan, On Taking Offence Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 616-621, April 2025.
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Lisa Herzog, Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Matt Zwolinski
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 612-616, April 2025.
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Barbara Herman, The Moral Habitat Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Simon Hope
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 608-612, April 2025.
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Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, What We Owe to Future People: A Contractualist Account of Intergenerational Ethics Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Emil Andersson
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 604-608, April 2025.
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John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, and Russ Shafer-Landau, Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Tristram McPherson
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 599-604, April 2025.
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Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Jonathan Quong
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 594-599, April 2025.
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Sahar Akhtar, Immigration and Discrimination: (Un)Welcoming Others Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Daniel Sharp
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 589-594, April 2025.
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Emancipatory Methodology Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Elizabeth Barnes, Dee Payton
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 560-588, April 2025.
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Putting the “Structural” Back in “Structural Injustice” Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Kirun Sankaran, Jake Monaghan
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 545-559, April 2025.
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The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well-Being Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 David Sobel, Steven Wall
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 519-544, April 2025.
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Wrongdoer-Centered Reasons for Blame Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Andrew Lichter
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 489-518, April 2025.
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Distracting Metaphors Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Paula Keller
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 458-488, April 2025.
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Mistaken Defense and the Unbundling of Rights Ethics (IF 4.6) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 David J. Clark
Ethics, Volume 135, Issue 3, Page 428-457, April 2025.
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Nietzsche on art as the good will to appearance Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-03-18 Aaron Ridley
Nietzsche makes a number of remarks that suggest that he thinks that art and truth are antithetical – indeed that he thinks that the value of art lies in its falsification of aspects of the world that would otherwise prove unbearable. ‘Truth is ugly,’ he says: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ But the argument of the present paper is that the falsification reading is unsustainable, and
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Discrimination in action Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-18 Rhys Borchert
Not all actions are intentional actions. What separates merely doing something from intentionally doing something? One point of separation seems to be luck. Too much luck, or luck of a certain variety, seems to undermine the possibility of acting intentionally. This naturally leads to the idea that intentional action presupposes reliable success. I argue against this idea. Taking inspiration from Gareth
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Front Matter Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-03-14
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 1, March 2025.
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Thank you for misunderstanding! Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-14 Collin Rice, Kareem Khalifa
This paper examines cases in which an individual’s misunderstanding improves the scientific community’s understanding through “corrective” processes that produce understanding from poor epistemic inputs. To highlight the unique features of valuable misunderstandings and corrective processes, we contrast them with other social-epistemological phenomena including testimonial understanding, collective
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Can AI make scientific discoveries? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-14 Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini
AI technologies have shown remarkable capabilities in various scientific fields, such as drug discovery, medicine, climate modeling, and archaeology, primarily through their pattern recognition abilities. They can also generate hypotheses and suggest new research directions. While acknowledging AI’s potential to aid in scientific breakthroughs, the paper shows that current AI models do not meet the
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Knowledge by acquaintance & impartial virtue Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-03-14 Emad H. Atiq
Russell (Proc Aristot Soc 11:108–128, 1911; The Problems of Philosophy, Thornton Butterworth Limited, London, 1912) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient