Unentwegt werden neue technische Produkte gestaltet. Doch was macht die technische Gestaltung aus? Wie lässt sich ihr Gegenstand - (noch) nicht existierende Artefakte - adäquat auf den Begriff bringen? Michael Kuhn begreift technische Ideen vor ihrer Realisierung als Fiktionen. Er bietet eine fiktionstheoretische Rekonstruktion der Gestaltungstätigkeit und entwickelt hieraus eine Ethik der Gestaltung. Der stark interdisziplinäre Zugang zwischen Technikphilosophie und Ingenieurwissenschaften liefert neue Erkenntnisse für beide Fachrichtungen und stellt wertvolle Grundlagen bereit.

This paper explores various subtleties in our ordinary thought and talk about normative reasons—subtleties which, if taken seriously, have various upshots, both substantive and methodological. I focus on two subtleties in particular. The first concerns the use of reason (in its normative sense) as both a count noun and as a mass noun, and the second concerns the context-sensitivity of normative reasons-claims. The more carefully we look at the language of reasons, I argue, the clearer its limitations and liabilities become. (...) The cumulative upshot is that although talk of reasons is intelligible and useful for the purposes of communication, we should be wary of placing much weight on it when engaging in substantive normative inquiry. By way of illustration, I consider some potential pitfalls of taking our talk of reasons too seriously, explaining how careful attention to the language of reasons undermines the main argument for moral particularism, Mark Schroeder’s recent defense of Humeanism about practical reasons, and the “reasons-first” program in metanormativity. (shrink)

There is a systematic and suggestive analogy between grounding and causation. In my view, this analogy is no coincidence. Grounding and causation are alike because grounding is a type of causation: metaphysical causation. In this paper I defend the identification of grounding with metaphysical causation, drawing on the causation literature to explore systematic connections between grounding and metaphysical dependence counterfactuals, and I outline a non-reductive counterfactual theory of grounding along interventionist lines.

This paper argues that the semantic facts about ‘because’ are best explained via a metaphorical treatment of metaphysical explanation that treats causal explanation as explanation par excellence. Along the way, it defends a commitment to a unified causal sense of ‘because’ and offers a proprietary explanation of grounding skepticism. With the causal metaphor account of metaphysical explanation on the table, an extended discussion of the relationship between conceptual structure and metaphysics ends with a suggestion that the semantic facts about ‘because’ (...) tell against grounding-causation unity. (shrink)

The folk picture of agency suggests that human beings have basic agency over some of their omissions. For example, someone may follow through on a decision never to support a political party without doing anything in order to make themselves omit. A number of features appear to signal their agency: the omission is not just called intentional, it is also seen as an achievement and explained in terms of the reasons for the decision. Some philosophers have tried to debunk the (...) appearance and argue that agency over omissions always proceeds from agency over actions (on the model of Ulysses ordering his crew to tie him to the mast). Others have tried to uphold the appearance by understanding basic agency over omissions on the model of their theories of action (and most often on the model of causal theories). Against both groups, I argue for a vindication of the appearance in terms of a theory of sui generis basic agency over omissions. Basic intentional omissions are the behavioral outcomes of fluent control by their agents’ intentions. When an intention to omit fluently controls for the right omission, the omission is an intentional achievement performed because of the intention. The intention appropriately regulates the agent’s behavior so as to ensure the intended omission. We can therefore see basic agency over omissions as regulative and distinct from the agency exercised over actions. (shrink)

It’s an undeniable fact about our moral lives that we are partial towards certain people and projects. Despite this, it has traditionally been very hard to justify partiality. In this paper I defend a novel partialist theory. The context of the paper is the debate between three different views of how partiality is justified. According to the first view, partiality is justified by facts about our ground projects. According to the second view, partiality is justified by facts about our relationships (...) with the things that we are partial towards. And according to the third view, partiality is justified by facts about the things that we are partial towards. I argue that all three views contain part of the truth. We can see this by adopting a more sophisticated view of the weight of reasons. Once we do this, it will be clear that both facts about individuals and facts about relationships play a role in explaining why we often have stronger reason to act well towards those things we are partial towards. Further, I argue, facts about projects help explain why facts about relationships play the role that they do in determining the strength of our reasons. (shrink)

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine, as the EBM+ research group has (...) been advocating. (shrink)

Real causal systems are complicated. Despite this, causal learning research has traditionally emphasized how causal relations can be induced on the basis of idealized events, i.e. those that have been mapped to binary variables and abstracted from time. For example, participants may be asked to assess the efficacy of a headache-relief pill on the basis of multiple patients who take the pill (or not) and find their headache relieved (or not). In contrast, the current study examines learning via interactions with (...) continuous dynamic systems, systems that include continuous variables that interact over time (and that can be continuously observed in real time by the learner). To explore such systems, we develop a new framework that represents a causal system as a network of stationary Gauss--Markov (``\OU'') processes and show how such \textit{OU networks} can express complex dynamic phenomena such as feedback loops and oscillations. To assess adult's abilities to learn such systems, we conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to identify the causal relationships of a number of OU networks, potentially carrying out multiple, temporally-extended interventions. We compared their judgments to a normative model for learning OU networks as well as a range of alternative and heuristic learning models from the literature. We found that, although participants exhibited substantial learning of such systems, they committed certain systematic errors. These successes and failures were best accounted for by a model that describes people as focusing on pairs of variables, rather than evaluating the evidence with respect to the full space of possible structural models. We argue that our approach provides both a principled framework for exploring the space of dynamic learning environments as well as new algorithmic insights into how people interact successfully with a continuous causal world. (shrink)

David Haig propounds and illustrates the unity of a radically revised set of definitions of the family of terms at the heart of philosophy of cognitive science and mind: information, meaning, interpretation, text, choice, possibility, cause. This biological re-grounding of much-debated concepts yields a bounty of insights into the nature of meaning and life. An interpreter is a mechanism that uses information in choice. The capabilities of the interpreter couple an entropy of inputs to an entropy of outputs is dispelled (...) by observation. The second entropy is dispelled. I propose that an interpreter’s response to inputs meaning of the information for the interpreter. In this conceptual framework, the mechanisms of interpreters provide the much-debated link between Shannon information and semantics. (shrink)