Physical activity, body composition and sedentary behavior may affect the health of children. Therefore, this study examined the effect of an educational hybrid physical education program on physical fitness, body composition and sedentary and PA times in adolescents. A 9-month group-randomized controlled trial was conducted in 150 participants allocated into the control group and experimental group. Cardiorespiratory fitness, speed, strength, agility, flexibility and body mass index were assessed through previously validated field tests. Sedentary time, PA at school and afterschool were (...) evaluated with the Youth Activity Profile-Spain questionnaire. Significant differences were observed concerning to the CG in APA-weekend, speed-agility and agility. Regarding the intervention, cardiorespiratory fitness, speed-agility, strength, flexibility, agility, PA in school, APA-weekday, APA-weekend, APA-week, and sedentary time increased significantly in the EG. The use of a hybrid program based on teaching personal and social responsibility and gamification strategies produced enhancements in cardiorespiratory fitness, agility, speed, APA-weekdays and APA-weekends, reducing the sedentary time. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como propósito criticar y reformular la teoría de valores del autor y filósofo argentino Risieri Frondizi. Para ello, se someterán a falsacionismo las tesis según las cuales la cualidad estructural es, primero, estructuralista y no analítica y, segundo, empírica, de acuerdo con la metodología holista de la ciencia. La crítica, así, se desarrollará a partir de los siguientes interrogantes. Inicialmente, ¿el autor acude al holismo o al reduccionismo como enfoques metodológicos de desarrollo? Finalmente, ¿cuál es la (...) distinción lógica entre el valor como cualidad sui géneris y el valor como cualidad estructural? (shrink)

Randomized controlled trials test new drugs using various debiasing devices to prevent participants from manipulating the trials. But participants often dislike controls, arguing that they impose a paternalist constraint on their legitimate preferences. The 21st Century Cures Act, passed by US Congress in 2016, encourages the Food and Drug Administration to use alternative testing methods, incorporating participants’ preferences, for regulatory purposes. We discuss, from a historical perspective, the trade-off between trial impartiality and participants’ freedom. We argue that the only way (...) out is considering which methods improve upon the performance of conventional trials in keeping dangerous or inefficacious compounds out of pharmaceutical markets. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objeto llevar a cabo un estudio pragmático y analítico sobre la acción de valoración, el valor y los valores a la luz de la ciencia semiótica y de la ciencia cibernética. Por ello, se desarrollará un proceso axiológico que ilustre cómo sucede el ingreso, la transición y la salida de códigos morales en función de un esquema cognitivo. Así pues, el proceso axiológico se postula, primero, en fundamento de tres sistemas: de mentalidad, de valores y (...) de biomoralidad y, segundo, conforme a la teoría de la información y de la teoría general de sistemas. (shrink)

Es necesario considerar la ciencia como un producto histórico y cultural para poder comprender su estatus epistemológico. Frente a las posiciones relativistas que consideran que no existe la posibilidad de trascender la perspectiva de una mirada necesariamente anclada en una u otra cultura y su equipaje conceptual, sostenemos que siendo innegablemente cierto que la ciencia es también un producto cultural, es sin embargo mucho más y se erige como un saber de tipo transcultural, es decir, que trasciende los elementos locales (...) de toda cultura y posee privilegios epistémicos que la posicionan por encima de cualquier otro tipo de conocimiento. De la mano del filósofo inglés Ernest Gellner, sostendremos que el relativismo cognitivo es falso y que esa falsedad tiene implicaciones morales. (shrink)

Una de las vías por la cuales el pensamiento neoliberal cobra cada vez más fuerza es la de la educación. Las nuevas pedagogías se han convertido en poderosas propagadoras de un sistema educativo que favorece el individualismo y acentúa la injusticia social. Este modelo no se ha conformado con conquistar el ámbito de la educación privada, sino que está consiguiendo dar el salto al sistema público. Para analizar el alcance de este fenómeno nos serviremos de las ideas que sobre la (...) educación nos ha legado Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio y ofreceremos a la vez una visión crítica del momento presente de la mano de Ani Pérez Rueda. (shrink)

Aristóteles establece una relación muy estrecha entre la política y la ética en tanto la política se ocupa del conocimiento del bien supremo y permite asimismo la acción virtuosa, condiciones que llevan a la consecución de la felicidad, que, en definitiva, es el fin de la polis. Así la comunidad política se constituye en la comunidad humana por excelencia, comunidad natural, anterior a toda otra forma de asociación, espacio cívico en el que el hombre alcanza su pleno desarrollo y se (...) constituye finalmente en “animal político”. (shrink)

The debate about the meaning of color terms in the philosophy of language has been dominated by two main issues. Firstly, there is the discussion about the context-dependency of color terms, specifically, quantity, the degree to which the object is of the color, and one of the dimensions of color quality, hue. Secondly, there is the question of how indexical contextualism can account for these elements of context-dependence. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to examine brightness, one of (...) the dimensions of color quality that has been neglected in the literature. For this purpose, we will examine how the equivalent of “white” in Arabic and Spanish interacts with brightness modifiers. The analysis will allow us to distinguish three different usage patterns, light source, light reflection, and contrast between white and black, pointing to three new ways of contextual incompleteness of color terms. Second, to assess indexical theories of color terms considering these new empirical findings. We will argue that the results of our study offer support for indexical contextualist theories by distinguishing new dimensions of contextual incompleteness of color terms. However, the consequences of applying the standard indexical contextualist explanation–hidden-variable analysis– are too strong. (shrink)

Este libro es un homenaje a la trayectoria intelectual y académica de la profesora María Teresa López de la Vieja, Catedrática emérita de la Universidad de Salamanca. En él se trazan algunos de los caminos que, con su obra, nos invita a transitar. El volumen recoge contribuciones de colegas de varias nacionalidades y procedentes de diversos ámbitos de reflexión que le son afines: la filosofía moral y política, la literatura, la teoría de la argumentación, los estudios feministas, las éticas aplicadas, (...) la bioética. Los capítulos que componen este libro dan voz a varias generaciones de investigadoras e investigadores que han acompañado y acompañan su andadura académica y que aquí dialogan con ella haciendo propias sus preocupaciones intelectuales. Con su participación contribuyen al justo reconocimiento de su dedicación a la labor docente e investigadora. (shrink)

Nel 1881, per i tipi dell’editore Brigola di Milano, vedeva la luce Macchiette parigine, un compendio di profili biografici che lo scrittore siciliano Emanuele Navarro della Miraglia (1838-1919) dedicava a eminenti personalità della cultura letteraria e artistica francese di metà Ottocento.Francesista, a lungo residente a Parigi (1864-1872), in contatto a Milano con gli ambienti della scapigliatura lombarda (1872-1882) e da ultimo professore di Lingua e letteratura francese presso l’Istituto superiore di magistero femminile di Roma (1883-1913), Navarro della Miraglia (...) includeva fra le sue “macchiette” anche due ritratti d’artisti dedicati rispettivamente a Gustave Courbet e a Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.Questo contributo si propone di definire il contesto e le ricadute di una lettura non allineata alla tempestiva e più “ortodossa” discussione della lezione di Courbet promossa da Diego Martelli presso i macchiaioli toscani, a beneficio di una geografia culturale diversamente articolata fra le aperture cosmopolite del naturalismo meridionale e le frange più avanzate della scapigliatura lombarda. Allo stesso modo il resoconto dell’atelier di Carpeaux è riconsiderato alla luce del coevo dibattito sulla scultura monumentale e delle ricerche in corso a Milano su un modellato più mosso e nervoso. (shrink)

“Toda interpretación pende, juntamente con lo interpretado, en el aire; no puede servirle de apoyo. Las interpretaciones solas no determinan el significado”Wittgenstein, Investigaciones filosóficas § 198IntroducciónLa obra del filósofo estadounidense David H. Finkelstein, Expression and the Inner, publicada originariamente en 2003 por Harvard University Press (2ª ed. 2008) puede ahora leerse en la versión española de Lino San Juan, editada por la ovetense KRK Ediciones con el título: La expr.

«Fortaleza» y «debilidad» son dos adjetivos que se han utilizado prolijamente en la literatura científica sobre institucionalismo para describir la permanencia o, por el contrario, la porosidad y maleabilidad de las reglas y principios rectores en los que están atrincheradas las instituciones que sobreviven en equilibrio y, por tanto, no son alteradas unilateralmente.

La obra del filósofo estadounidense David H. Finkelstein, Expression and the Inner, publicada originariamente en 2003 por Harvard University Press (2ª ed. 2008) puede ahora leerse en la versión española de Lino San Juan, editada por la ovetense KRK Ediciones con el título: La expresión y lo interno. Finkelstein propone en La expresión y lo interno un análisis expresivista del autoconocimiento. Podría parecer cuando menos sorprendente y aún más admirable que con tan sólo dos capítulos (“Detectivismo y constitutivismo” y (...) “Expresión”) y un Epílogo (“Deliberación y transparencia”), Finkelstein haya conseguido presentar en esta obra un planteamiento calificado por muchos como una auténtica renovación de la discusión analítica en torno al tema del autoconocimiento, o sea, acerca del problema de qué clase de autoridad quepa atribuir a las expresiones sobre nuestros propios estados de ánimo y/o nuestros estados mentales sin más. (shrink)

Some authors sustain that historical research is an effect of a specific historiographical context (Jenkins, 1991; González de Oleaga, 2009). An approach to the historiographical debate between constructivism and recontructivism is presented in this paper. Two theses are here defended. The first one affirms that the above mentioned debate is deeply related to epistemological questions (study of mental representations, different conceptions about historical reasoning functions, historical reasoning, cognitive bias, and informal falacies). The second thesis affirms that each historiographical conception can (...) be understood as the effect of assuming a specific perspective about these epistemic questions. As an evidence of this, some connections between historiography and epistemology will be analysed through the analogy between the reconstructivism vs. constructivism debate, and the epistemological debate detectivism vs. constitutivism (Finkelstein, 2003). (shrink)

RESUMENEl presente artículo pretende dar cuenta del origen y cambio radical de paradigma filosófico sufrido por el filósofo de origen Navarro Juan David García Bacca. En especial, trataremos de analizar cómo y por qué razón, el filósofo español pasa de desestimar la posibilidad de una forma propia del filosofar español desde una perspectiva ontológica, hasta tratar la poesía y la literatura como las formas idiosincráticas del hacer filosofía en español. Esta forma característicamente española de hacer filosofía en español (...) será, pues, determinante para la comprensión del abandono de la etapa existencialista garcibaccquiana, y su renovado interés por la obra del poeta Antonio Machado, y su filosofar por y para el pueblo.PALABRAS CLAVEONTOLOGÍA, GARCÍA BACCA, FILOSOFÍA, ESPAÑOLABSTRACTThis paper pursues to explain the origin and radical philosophical paradigm shift undergone by the philosopher from Navarre Juan David Garcia Bacca. Specifically, we will try to analyze how and why the Spanish philosopher moves from dismissing the possibility of a particular form of Spanish philosophizing from an ontological perspective, to treating poetry and literature as idiosyncratic ways of doing philosophy in Spanish. This typically Spanish way of doing philosophy in Spanish will be, therefore, crucial to understand the abandonment of the Garcibaccquian existentialist stage, and his renewed interest in the work of the poet Antonio Machado and his philosophizing by and for the peopleKEYWORDSONTOLOGY, GARCÍA BACCA, PHILOSOPHY, SPANISH. (shrink)

_ Convention_ was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

What makes teaching a moral endeavor? How can we prepare classroom practitioners for engaging in that moral endeavor in meaningful and effective ways? This volume brings together leading scholars who draw upon both their academic expertise and substantial wisdom of practice to offer a variety of perspectives on the challenge of preparing today’s teachers for the moral work of teaching. Book Features: Examines the role that teacher preparation and development can play in addressing the moral work of teaching. Highlights the (...) work of leading scholars from educational psychology, educational philosophy, and teacher education. Provides compelling insights for identifying the next generation of our nation’s best teachers. Contributors: Wolfgang Althof, Karen Benson, Marvin Berkowitz, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Elizabeth Campbell, Julie Canniff, Mary Crawford, Lana Daly, Rebecca Evers, Catherine Fallona, Gary Fenstermacher, Anthony Holter, Lisa Johnson, Daniel Lapsley, Darcia Narvaez, Virginia Navarro, Larry Nucci, Joy Pelton, Virginia Richardson, Don Senneville, David Light Shields, Barbara Stengel, Jonatha Vare, Marilyn Watson. (shrink)

Epistemologists have recently proposed a number of norms governing rational inquiry. My aim in this paper is to unify and explain recently proposed norms of inquiry by developing a general account of the conditions under which inquiries are rational, analogous to theories such as evidentialism and reliabilism for rational belief. I begin with a reason-responsiveness conception of rationality as responding correctly to possessed normative reasons. I extend this account with a series of claims about the normative reasons for inquiry that (...) we possess. I apply the account to shed light on two classes of norms that have featured prominently in recent discussions: norms of clutter avoidance forbidding agents from engaging in trivial inquiries, and norms of logical non-omniscience governing properties such as the deductive closure and consistency of an agent's belief state. I conclude with a discussion of the sense in which norms of inquiry should be regarded as epistemic norms. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

This is a corrected version of the final proofs. I've fixed a number of typos, and corrected a blunder in chapter 4. In chapter 4 I say that 'this is this' is analytic, and 'this is not this' is antonymous. This is inconsistent with what I say in chapter 5, and not what I actually think. Rather, 'this is this' is taugologous, and 'this is not this' is contradictory. Analyticity and autnonmy are sense properties while tautologousness and contradictoriness are formal (...) logical properties. Heading, ToC and Index updated accordingly. (Oxford will make these corrections in their online version and in future print runs.). (shrink)

This paper is on the metaphysics and normativity of Jewish identity. It starts with a metaphysical question: “Can a Jewish person become non-Jewish?” This question and the related question “What is Jewishness?” are both ambiguous, because the word “Jewish” is ambiguous. The paper outlines five concepts of Jewishness: halachic, religious, ethnic, and cultural Jewishness, as well as being Jewish in the sense of belonging to the Jewish community. In some of these senses of “Jewish” a Jewish person is always Jewish. (...) In other senses a Jewish person can become non-Jewish. The paper closes with a normative question: Should a person who is Jewish, in the sense of belonging to the Jewish community, become non-Jewish? The paper explains reasons for and against staying in the Jewish community and in doing so highlights a tension, rather than telling anyone how they should identify. (shrink)

Does the capacity to think require the capacity to sense? A lively debate on this topic runs throughout the history of philosophy and now animates discussions of artificial intelligence. Many have argued that AI systems such as large language models cannot think and understand if they lack sensory grounding. I argue that thought does not require sensory grounding: there can be pure thinkers who can think without any sensory capacities. As a result, the absence of sensory grounding does not entail (...) that large language models cannot think or understand. I also consider to what extent quasi-sensory grounding can at least boost the performance of a language model. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, our best physical theories strongly support Eternalism over Presentism. Our goal is to argue against this consensus, by arguing that a certain overlooked aspect of our best physical theories strongly supports Presentism over Eternalism.

Psychological and philosophical studies have extended J. J. Gibson’s notion of affordances. Affordances are possibilities for bodily action presented to us by the objects of our perception. Recent work has argued that we should extend the actions afforded by perception to mental action. I argue that we can extend the notion of affordance itself. What I call ‘Introspective Affordances’ are possibilities for mental action presented to us by introspectively accessible states. While there are some prima facie worries concerning the non-perceptual (...) nature of introspection, I will argue that our internal mental lives share enough commonalities with experiences in our environment to warrant this extension. I will demonstrate the value of introspective affordances by showing how they allow us to explain an underexplored aspect of thought insertion. (shrink)

I argue that it is metaphysically necessary that: (i) every fundamental entity is conscious, and (ii) every fundamental property is a phenomenal property.

This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality—the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states—is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities that are our contents; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are our contents. We consider (...) the challenges facing these views, which include empirical challenges in accounting for all the contents our intentional states can represent, metaphysical challenges in making sense of how contents can be entertained or otherwise represented by us and how they can play a psychological role in the mental economy, and challenges in making sense of how intentionality connects us to the world—if at all. Along the way, we consider the question of how consciousness is related to intentionality and how this affects one’s choice of views. (shrink)

There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...) evocative images seems much more likely to donate for the children's benefit than someone who is merely told about their plight. This paper offers a phenomenal account of grasping according to which grasping a content (whether a proposition or concept) consists in one's thoughts about the content being constituted by phenomenal experiences of constituents of the content. This account improves on earlier phenomenal accounts of grasping (Bourget 2017a, 2018) by allowing for partial grasping and generalizing to concepts. The paper also addresses objections to phenomenal accounts of grasping, including the objection that recent developments in AI technology show that consciousness is irrelevant to grasping and understanding. (shrink)

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the great scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding of Ross's (...) great work today. (shrink)

Many philosophers of physics think that physical rates of change, like velocity or acceleration in classical physics, are extrinsic. Many philosophers of mind think that phenomenal properties, which characterize what it’s like to be an agent at a time, are intrinsic. I will argue that these two views can’t both be true. Given that these two views are in tension, we face an explanatory challenge. Why should there be any interesting connection between these physical quantities and consciousness in the first (...) place? In a speculative spirit, I close by developing a panpsychist view which promises to explain this connection in a particularly satisfying way. (shrink)

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, every fact has an explanation. An important challenge to this principle is that it risks being a counterexample to itself. What explains why everything needs to be explained? My first goal is to distinguish two broad kinds of answers to this question, which I call “Humean Rationalism” and “Non-Humean Rationalism”. My second goal will be to defend the prospects of Humean Rationalism.

Christian pro-lifers often respond to Thomson’s defense of abortion that the violinist is allowed to die while the embryo is killed. Boonin and McMahan counter that this distinction does not provide an objection to extraction abortions that disconnect embryos and allow them to die. I disagree. I first argue that letting die and killing are not to be distinguished by differences between acts and omissions, moral and immoral motives, intentional or unintentional deaths, and causing or not causing a pathology. I (...) offer a taxonomy in which hysterotomies turn out to be killings. I then argue that if either the placenta is considered an organ of the embryo or the embryo is construed as a part of the pregnant woman, then abortion pills kill rather than allow death. So, assuming that killing people is morally worse than letting them die, extraction abortions can be condemned to the same degree as other abortions. (shrink)

Creation Ethics illuminates an array of issues in "reprogenetics" through the lens of moral philosophy. With novel frameworks for understanding prenatal moral status and human identity, David DeGrazia tackles the ethics of abortion and embryo research, genetic enhancement and prenatal genetic interventions, procreation and parenting, and obligations to future generations.

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume's comprehensive attempt to base philosophy on a new, observationally grounded study of human nature, is one of the most important texts in Western philosophy. It is also the focal point of current attempts to understand 18th-century western philosophy. The Treatise addresses many of the most fundamental philosophical issues: causation, existence, freedom and necessity, and morality. The volume also includes Humes own abstract of the Treatise, a substantial introduction, extensive annotations, a glossary, a (...) comprehensive index, and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

Know how and ability have a seemingly fraught relationship. I deepen the tension here, by arguing for two new pieces of data concerning know how and ability. First, know how ascriptions have two distinct readings that differ in their entailments to ability: one entails ability, the other does not. Second, in certain cases, the indeterminacy of certain ability claims infects both readings of know how claims. No existing accounts of the relationship between know how and ability captures both data points, (...) I argue; but a certain kind of intellectualism has special resources to account for them. Ascriptions of knowledge of infinitival questions give rise to a distinctive kind of context-sensitivity specific to infinitivals. I show how on an intellectualist view where, very roughly, knowing how to do something is knowing an answer to an infinitival question about your abilities, this context-sensitivity accounts for the relationship between know how and ability. (shrink)

We often get evidence that bears on the reliability of some of our own first-order reasoning. The rational response to such “higher-order” evidence would seem to depend on a rational assessment of how reliable we can expect that reasoning to be, in light of the higher-order evidence. “Independence” principles are intended to constrain this reliability-assessment, so as to prevent question-begging reliance on the very reasoning being assessed. However, extant formulations of Independence principles tend to be vague or ambiguous, and coming (...) up with a tolerably precise formulation turns out to be tricky. This paper aims to make some progress toward developing a more precise Independence principle, and also to highlight some of the difficulties the project entails. The hope is to take a step toward understanding how rational belief is informed by evidence bearing on agents’ cognitive reliability. (shrink)

According to a popular idea, freedom is grounded in orthonomy – the ability to be responsive to normative demands. But how exactly must an agent’s action relate to their reasons in order for this orthonomous relationship to hold? In this paper, I propose a novel explanationist answer to this question. I argue that extant answers – causalism and modalism about orthonomy – fail because they fail to account for the fact that intuitions about freedom and orthonomy track facts about explanation. (...) And these facts cannot be reduced to either causal or modal facts. Instead, I propose that we should understand freedom as grounded in special accidentality-dispersing explanations in terms of normative reasons. The resultant view is to be understood as following a Frankfurtian intuition: only factors that explain action can be relevant to whether the action is free. (shrink)