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Self-referring as self-directed action Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Krisztina Orbán
I propose that examining pointing and, especially, self-pointing helps us to better understand Self-Referring (knowingly and intentionally self-referring). I explain basic features of pointing and self-pointing, such as referring, reference-fixing and the subject’s knowledge of the referent. I propose to treat Self-Referring as a self-directed action. Self-pointing makes it explicit how Self-Referring
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What is appreciation? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Auke Montessori
It is commonplace amongst epistemologists to note the importance of grasping or appreciating one’s evidence. The idea seems to be that agents cannot successfully utilize evidence without it. Despite the popularity of this claim, the nature of appreciating or grasping evidence is unclear. This paper develops an account of what it takes to appreciate the epistemic relevance of one’s evidence, such that
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Grievance politics and identities of resentment Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Paul Katsafanas
Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems
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Bias, Norms, and Function: comments on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: a Philosophical Study Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Gabbrielle M. Johnson
This commentary on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study compares his Norm-Theoretic Account, which defines bias as involving systematic deviations from genuine norms, with the Functional Account of Bias, which instead conceptualizes bias as a functional response to the problem of underdetermination. While both accounts offer valuable insights, I explore their compatibility and differences, arguing
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Fat-calling: ascriptions of fatness that subordinate Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Chris Cousens
Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years. But ‘fat-calling’ does not only have individual harms—it also perpetuates a subordinating social structure
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Definition by proxy Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Samuel Z. Elgin
I take some initial steps toward a theory of real definition, drawing upon recent developments in higher-order logic. The resulting account allows for extremely fine-grained distinctions (it can distinguish between any relata that differ in their syntactic structure, while avoiding the Russell-Myhill problem). It is the first account that can consistently embrace three desirable logical principles
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Insight, perceptio, and Sosa on firsthand knowledge Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Jack Lyons
Sosa emphasizes "firsthand intuitive insight" as a distinctive kind of epistemic aim and argues that this is a characteristic epistemic goal of humanistic inquiry. He draws from this some importantly antiskeptical conclusions for the epistemology of disagreement. I try to further develop this idea of insight, which I call ‘perceptio’, in which we "see" some truth to obtain. I agree that it is a distinctive
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Introspecting bias Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Daniel Greco
In his recent book, (Bias: A Philosophical Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022). Thomas Kelly argues that various phenomena that look initially like examples of how irrational we are in thinking about bias—especially our own biases—turn out to be exactly what you’d expect from ideally rational agents. The phenomena he discusses which I’ll focus on are (1) our inability to introspectively identify
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Defining consciousness and denying its existence. Sailing between Charybdis and Scylla Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-05 François Kammerer
Ulysses, the strong illusionist, sails towards the Strait of Definitions. On his left, Charybdis defines “phenomenal consciousness” in a loaded manner, which makes it a problematic entity from a physicalist and naturalistic point of view. This renders illusionism attractive, but at the cost of committing a potential strawman against its opponents – phenomenal realists. On the right, Scylla defines
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Comments on Kelly: Against Positing a Non-Pejorative Sense of ‘Bias’ Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-31 Selim Berker
In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly posits a distinction between two senses of the word ‘bias’, one pejorative, the other non-pejorative, and he puts this distinction to work in two crucial portions of the book: first, when he defends his central account of the nature of bias against would-be counterexamples; and, second, when he develops a new way of replying to external-world skepticism
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Deception and manipulation in generative AI Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-18 Christian Tarsney
Large language models now possess human-level linguistic abilities in many contexts. This raises the concern that they can be used to deceive and manipulate on unprecedented scales, for instance spreading political misinformation on social media. In future, agentic AI systems might also deceive and manipulate humans for their own purposes. In this paper, first, I argue that AI-generated content should
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Proportionality in the Aggregate Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Elad Uzan
Much of revisionist just war theory is individualistic in nature: morality in war is just an extension of morality in interpersonal circumstances, so that killing in war is subject to the same moral principles that govern personal self-defense and defense of others. Recent work in the ethics of self-defense suggests that this individualism leads to a puzzle, which I call the puzzle of aggregation,
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Moral deference and morally worthy attitudes Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Max Lewis
This paper defends a novel version of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to try to avoid moral deference. The problem with moral deference is that it puts one in a bad position to form what I call morally worthy attitudes, i.e., non-cognitive attitudes that have moral worth in the same sense that certain actions have moral worth. Forming morally worthy
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From seeing to knowing: the case of propositional perception Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Miloud Belkoniene
This paper examines the question as to whether propositional seeing is best thought of as a way of knowing a proposition to be true. After showing how Pritchard’s distinction between objective and subjective goodness motivates a negative answer to this question, I examine a challenge raised by Ghijsen for Pritchard’s construal of that distinction. I then turn to the connection between propositional
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The normative significance of God’s self Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Troy Seagraves
This paper argues that God plausibly has facts of self that function as modifiers of the normative reasons that apply to him. Facts of self are subjective facts like the fact that one has certain commitments, the fact that one has a certain character, the fact that one has a certain practical identity, the fact that one has certain projects. There is a widespread intuition (the normative significance
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Understanding and how-possibly explanations: Why can’t they be friends? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Philippe Verreault-Julien, Till Grüne-Yanoff
In the current debate on the relation between how-possibly explanations (HPEs) and understanding, two seemingly irreconcilable positions have emerged, which either deny or assert HPEs’ contribution to understanding. We argue, in contrast, that there is substantial room for reconciliation between these positions. First, we show that a shared assumption is unfounded: HPEs can be interpreted as being
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Temporal holism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 John Michael Pemberton
How can a persisting object change whilst remaining the same object? Lewis, who frames this as the problem of temporary intrinsics, presents us with the perdurance solution: objects persist by having temporal parts which may have differing properties. And in doing so he characterises the opposing view as persisting but not by having temporal parts – a view he calls endurance. But this dichotomous picture
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Understanding and veritism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Duncan Pritchard
My interest is in an apparent tension between two epistemological theses. The first is veritism, which is roughly the claim that truth is the fundamental epistemic good. The second is the idea that understanding is the proper goal of inquiry. The two theses seem to be in tension because the former seems to imply that the proper goal of inquiry should be truth rather than understanding. And yet there
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Evaluating action possibilities: a procedural metacognitive view of intentional omissions Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Kaisa Kärki
How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation
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Overdetermination and causal connections Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Ezra Rubenstein
Some theories are alleged to be implausible because they are committed to systematic ‘overdetermination’. In response, some authors defend ‘compatibilism’: the view that the putative overdetermination is benign, like other unproblematic cases of a single effect having many sufficient causes. The literature has tended to focus on the following question: which relations between sufficient causes of a
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Causal inference from clinical experience Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi, Jacob Stegenga
How reliable are causal inferences in complex empirical scenarios? For example, a physician prescribes a drug to a patient, and then the patient undergoes various changes to their symptoms. They then increase their confidence that it is the drug that causes such changes. Are such inferences reliable guides to the causal relation in question, particularly when the physician can gain a large volume of
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Knowledge and merely predictive evidence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Haley Schilling Anderson
A jury needs “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” in order to convict a defendant of a crime. The standard is vexingly difficult to pin down, but some legal epistemologists have given this account: knowledge is the standard of legal proof. On this account, a jury should deliver a guilty verdict just in case they know that the defendant is guilty. In this paper, I’ll argue that legal proof requires more
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Climate change and state interference: the case of privacy Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-16 Leonhard Menges
Climate change is one of the most important issues we are currently facing. There are many ways in which states can fight climate change. Some of them involve interfering with citizens’ personal lives. The question of whether such interference is justified is under-explored in philosophy. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of people’s personal lives, namely their informational privacy. It discusses
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Knowledge, skills, and creditability Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-10 Carlotta Pavese
The article discusses the relation between skills (or competences), creditability, and aptness. The positive suggestion is that we might make progress understanding the relation between creditability and aptness by inquiring more generally about how different kinds of competences and their exercise might underwrite allocation of credit. Whether or not a competence is acquired and whether or not a competence
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Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-10 Juan F. Álvarez
Many philosophers endorse “exclusionism”, the view that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of genuine remembering, and vice versa. Appealing to simulationist, distributed causalist, and trace minimalist theories of remembering, I develop three conditional arguments against exclusionism. First, if simulationism is right to hold that some cases of remembering involve reliance on post-event
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How to be a postmodal directionalist Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-04 Scott Dixon
According to directionalism, non-symmetric relations are distinct from their converses. Kit Fine (2000a) argues that the directionalist faces a dilemma; they must either (i) reject the principle Uniqueness, which states that no completion (fact, state of affairs, or proposition) is a completion of more than one relation, or (ii) reject the principle Identity, which states that each completion of a
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The linguistic dead zone of value-aligned agency, natural and artificial Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-04 Travis LaCroix
The value alignment problem for artificial intelligence (AI) asks how we can ensure that the “values”—i.e., objective functions—of artificial systems are aligned with the values of humanity. In this paper, I argue that linguistic communication is a necessary condition for robust value alignment. I discuss the consequences that the truth of this claim would have for research programmes that attempt
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Closure and the structure of justification Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-02 Christoph Kelp, Matthew Jope
This paper considers two recent views on the structure of justification and closure of knowledge by Ernest Sosa. It provides reason to believe that neither view is ultimately viable and sketches a better alternative.
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A simpler model of judgment: on Sosa’s Epistemic Explanations Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-28 Antonia Peacocke
In Epistemic Explanations, Sosa continues to defend a model of judgment he has long endorsed. On this complex model of judgment, judgment aims not only at correctness but also at aptness of a kind of alethic affirmation. He offers three arguments for the claim that we need this model of judgment instead of a simpler model, on which judgment aims only at correctness. The first argument cites the need
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Silence as complicity and action as silence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-25 J. L. A. Donohue
Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent
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Responses to Speaks, Stojnić and Szabó Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-20 Jeffrey C. King
Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do not suffice to secure semantic values in context. Demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns are the examples of such expressions that have received the most attention from philosophers. However, arguably this class of contextually sensitive expressions includes among other expressions modals, conditionals
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In defense of virtual veridicalism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-20 Yen-Tung Lee
This paper defends virtual veridicalism, according to which many perceptual experiences in virtual reality are veridical. My argument centers on perceptual variation, the phenomenon in which perceptual experience appears all the same while being reliably generated by different properties under different circumstances. It consists of three stages. The first stage argues that perceptual variation can
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What are we to do? Making sense of ‘joint ought’ talk Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-18 Rowan Mellor, Margaret Shea
We argue for three main claims. First, the sentence ‘A and B ought to φ and ψ’ can express what we a call a joint-ought claim: the claim that the plurality A and B ought to φ and ψ respectively. Second, the truth-value of this joint-ought claim can differ from the truth-value of the pair of claims ‘A ought to φ’ and ‘B ought to ψ.’ This is because what A and B jointly ought to do can diverge from what
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Disagreement, AI alignment, and bargaining Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-18 Harry R. Lloyd
New AI technologies have the potential to cause unintended harms in diverse domains including warfare, judicial sentencing, medicine and governance. One strategy for realising the benefits of AI whilst avoiding its potential dangers is to ensure that new AIs are properly ‘aligned’ with some form of ‘alignment target.’ One danger of this strategy is that–dependent on the alignment target chosen–our
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Withhold by default: a difference between epistemic and practical rationality Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-18 Chris Tucker
In practical rationality, if two reasons for alternative actions are tied, then either action is *permissible*. In epistemic rationality, we get the Epistemic Ties Datum: if the reasons for belief and disbelief are tied, then withholding judgment is *required*. I argue that this difference is explained by a difference in default biases. Practical rationality is biased toward permissibility. An action
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The prescriptive and the hypological: A radical detachment Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-16 Maria Lasonen-Aarnio
My aim in this paper is to introduce and motivate a general normative framework, which I call feasibilism, and to sketch a view of the relationship between the prescriptive and the hypological in the epistemic domain by drawing on the theoretical resources provided by this framework. I then generalise the lesson to the moral domain. I begin by motivating feasibilism. A wide range of norms appear to
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What Is Rational Sentimentalism? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-13 Selim Berker
This commentary on Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson’s Rational Sentimentalism explores two key issues: what exactly is the position D’Arms and Jacobson call ‘rational sentimentalism’, and why exactly do they restrict their theorizing to the normative categories they dub ‘the sentimentalist values’? Along the way, a challenge is developed for D’Arms and Jacobson’s claim that there is no “response-independent”
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Incommensurability and democratic deliberation in bioethics Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-13 Nir Eyal
Often, a health resource distribution (or, more generally, a health policy) ranks higher than another on one value, say, on promoting total population health; and lower on another, say, on promoting that of the worst off. Then, some opine, there need not be a rational determination as to which of the multiple distributions that partially fulfill both one ought to choose. Sometimes, reason determines
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Metaphor and ambiguity Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-13 Elek Lane
What is the status of metaphorical meaning? Is it an input to semantic composition or is it derived post-semantically? This question has divided theorists for decades. Griceans argue that metaphorical meaning/content is a kind of implicature that is generated through post-semantic processing. Others, such as the contextualists, argue that metaphorical meaning is an input to semantic composition and
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Beyond Preferences in AI Alignment Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-09 Tan Zhi-Xuan, Micah Carroll, Matija Franklin, Hal Ashton
The dominant practice of AI alignment assumes (1) that preferences are an adequate representation of human values, (2) that human rationality can be understood in terms of maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, and (3) that AI systems should be aligned with the preferences of one or more humans to ensure that they behave safely and in accordance with our values. Whether implicitly followed or
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What is reasonable doubt? For philosophical studies special issue on Sosa’s ‘epistemic explanations’ Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-08 Lilith Mace, Mona Simion
This paper develops and defends novel accounts of accurate and reasonable doubt. We take a cue from Sosa's telic epistemic normative picture to argue that one’s degree of doubt that p is accurate just in case it matches the level of veritic risk involved in believing that p. In turn, on this account, reasonable doubt is doubt that is generated by a properly functioning cognitive capacity with the function
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Content determination in dreams supports the imagination theory Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-08 Daniel Gregory
There are two leading theories about the ontology of dreams. One holds that dreams involve hallucinations and beliefs. The other holds that dreaming involves sensory and propositional imagining. I highlight two features of dreams which are more easily explained by the imagination theory. One is that certain things seem to be true in our dreams, even though they are not represented sensorily; this is
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Reflecting on believability: on the epistemic approach to justifying implicit commitments Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-07 Maciej Głowacki, Mateusz Łełyk
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The new internalism about prudential value Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-04 Anthony Kelley
According to internalism about prudential value, the token states of affairs that are basically good for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your positive attitudes. It is commonly thought that any theory of welfare that implies internalism is guaranteed to respect the alienation constraint, the doctrine that you cannot be alienated from that which is basically good for
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Unpossessed evidence revisited: our options are limited Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-29 Sanford C. Goldberg
Several influential thought experiments from Harman 1973 purport to show that unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge. Recently, some epistemologists have appealed to these thought experiments in defense of a logically stronger thesis: unpossessed evidence can defeat justification. But these appeals fail to appreciate that Harman himself thought of his examples as Gettier cases, and so would have
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Beautiful, troubling art: in defense of non-summative judgment Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-29 P. Quinn White
Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is “yes” (for at least some such ethical features)
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Promotionalism, orthogonality, and instrumental convergence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-21 Nathaniel Sharadin
Suppose there are no in-principle restrictions on the contents of arbitrarily intelligent agents’ goals. According to “instrumental convergence” arguments, potentially scary things follow. I do two things in this paper. First, focusing on the influential version of the instrumental convergence argument due to Nick Bostrom, I explain why such arguments require an account of “promotion”, i.e., an account
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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