There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.

Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a (...) dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content. (shrink)

Over the last several years, there has been an explosion of interest and attention devoted to the problem of Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in climate science—that is, to giving quantitative estimates of the degree of uncertainty associated with the predictions of global and regional climate models. The technical challenges associated with this project are formidable, and so the statistical community has understandably devoted itself primarily to overcoming them. But even as these technical challenges are being met, a number of persistent conceptual (...) difficulties remain. So why is UQ so important in climate science? UQ, I would like to argue, is first and foremost a tool for communicating knowledge from experts to policy makers in a way that is meant to be free from the influence of social and ethical values. But the standard ways of using probabilities to separate ethical and social values from scientific practice cannot be applied in a great deal of climate modeling, because the roles of values in creating the models cannot be discerned after the fact—the models are too complex and the result of too much distributed epistemic labor. I argue, therefore, that typical approaches for handling ethical/social values in science do not work well here. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn its reconstruction of scientific practice, philosophy of science has traditionally placed scientific theories in a central role, and has reduced the problem of mediating between theories and the world to formal considerations. Many applications of scientific theories, however, involve complex mathematical models whose constitutive equations are analytically unsolvable. The study of these applications often consists in developing representations of the underlying physics on a computer, and using the techniques of computer simulation in order to learn about the behavior (...) of these systems. In many instances, these computer simulations are not simple number-crunching techniques. They involve a complex chain of inferences that serve to transform theoretical structures into specific concrete knowledge of physical systems. In this paper I argue that this process of transformation has its own epistemology. I also argue that this kind of epistemology is unfamiliar to most philosophy of science, which has traditionally concerned itself with the justification of theories, not with their application. Finally, I urge that the nature of this epistemology suggests that the end results of some simulations do not bear a simple, straightforward relation to the theories from which they stem. (shrink)

Simulations (both digital and analog) and experiments share many features. But what essential features distinguish them? I discuss two proposals in the literature. On one proposal, experiments investigate nature directly, while simulations merely investigate models. On another proposal, simulations differ from experiments in that simulationists manipulate objects that bear only a formal (rather than material) similarity to the targets of their investigations. Both of these proposals are rejected. I argue that simulations fundamentally differ from experiments with regard to the background (...) knowledge that is invoked to argue for the “external validity” of the investigation. (shrink)

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in (...) a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects. (shrink)

I argue for two major claims in this paper. First, I argue that the linguistic evidence best supports a certain form of contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like ?fun? and ?tasty?. In particular, I argue that these adjectives are both individual-level predicates (ILPs) and anaphoric implicit argument taking predicates (IATPs). As ILPs, these naturally form generics. As anaphoric IATPs, PPTs show the same dependencies on context and distributional behavior as more familiar anaphoric IATPs, for example, ?local? and ?apply?. (...) Moreover, they are subject to important binding-related phenomena, for example, various kinds of anaphora, binding arguments, and strict-sloppy ambiguities. The latter are particularly problematic for relativism, contextualism's major competitor. I argue that relativism cannot account for these binding facts in a non-ad hoc manner. Second, I argue that disagreement is a predictable feature of dialogues involving PPTs in conjunction with the contextualist semantics defended. Appealing to ?off the shelf? analyses of genericity, I show how disagreement arises in just the cases we would expect, licensing just the kinds of responses we would expect. They also suggest promising explanations, unavailable to relativists, of various otherwise puzzling features of disagreements involving PPTs. (shrink)

In Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) Hegel is often held to have announced the end of history, where 'history' is to be understood as the long pursuit of ends towards which humanity had always been striving. In this, the first book in English to thoroughly critique this entrenched view, Eric Michael Dale argues that it is a misinterpretation. Dale offers a reading of his own, showing how it sits within the larger schema of Hegel's thought and makes room for an (...) understanding of the 'end of history' as Hegel intended. Through an elegant analysis of Hegel's philosophy of history, Dale guides the reader away from the common misinterpretation of the 'end of history' to other valuable elements of Hegel's arguments which are often overlooked and deserve to endure. His book will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students of Hegel, the philosophy of history, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

Augustine—for all of his influence on Western culture and politics—was hardly a liberal. Drawing from theology, feminist theory, and political philosophy, Eric Gregory offers here a liberal ethics of citizenship, one less susceptible to anti-liberal critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition. The result is a book that expands Augustinian imaginations for liberalism and liberal imaginations for Augustinianism. Gregory examines a broad range of Augustine’s texts and their reception in different disciplines and identifies two classical themes which (...) have analogues in secular political theory: love—and related notions of care, solidarity, and sympathy—and sin—as well as related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest. From an Augustinian point of view, Gregory argues, love and sin constrain each other in ways that yield a distinctive vision of the limits and possibilities of politics. In providing a constructive argument for Christian participation in liberal democratic societies, Gregory advances efforts to revive a political theology in which love’s relation to justice is prominent. _Politics and the Order of Love _will provoke new conversations for those interested in Christian ethics, moral psychology, and the role of religion in a liberal society. (shrink)

Should philosophers of science be paying attention to developments in "nanoscience"? Undoubtedly, it is too early to tell for sure. The goal of this paper is to take a preliminary look. In particular, I look at the use of computational models in the study of nano-sized solid-state materials. What I find is that there are features of these models that appear on their face to be at odds with some basic philosophical intuitions about the relationships between different theories and between (...) theories and their models. My conclusion is that developments in nanoscience are not an unlikely place for novel insights in the philosophy of science to emerge. (shrink)

Statistical Mechanics (SM) involves probabilities. At the same time, most approaches to the foundations of SM—programs whose goal is to understand the macroscopic laws of thermal physics from the point of view of microphysics—are classical; they begin with the assumption that the underlying dynamical laws that govern the microscopic furniture of the world are (or can without loss of generality be treated as) deterministic. This raises some potential puzzles about the proper interpretation of these probabilities. It also raises, more generally, (...) the question of what kinds, if any, of objective probabilities can exist in a deterministic world. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the two-system framework, examine its strengths, point out a fundamental weakness concerning the unity of conscious experience, and then propose a new hypothesis that avoids that weakness and other related concerns. According to our strong emergence hypothesis, what emerges are not merely mental properties in specialized, distributed neural areas, but also a new, irreducibly singular entity that functions in a recurrent manner to integrate its mental properties and to rewire its brain. We argue that the (...) former function is suggested, in part, by the effects of anesthetics on sensory integration, and that the latter function is suggested by evidence garnered from the neuroscience of mindfulness, constraint-induced movement therapy for stroke, and neuroimaging data surrounding mental illness. We then discuss how our strong emergence hypothesis relates to the description and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Finally, potential objections are addressed. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence from many hunter-gatherer societies suggests that successful hunters experience higher prestige and greater reproductive success. Detailed quantitative data on these patterns are now available for five widely dispersed cases (Ache, Hadza, !Kung, Lamalera, and Meriam) and indicate that better hunters exhibit higher age-corrected reproductive success than other men in their social group. Leading explanations to account for this pattern are: (1) direct provisioning of hunters’ wives and offspring, (2) dyadic reciprocity, (3) indirect reciprocity, (4) costly signaling, and (5) (...) phenotypic correlation. I examine the qualitative and quantitative evidence bearing on these explanations and conclude that although none can be definitively rejected, extensive and apparently unconditional sharing of large game somewhat weakens the first three explanations. The costly signaling explanation has support in some cases, although the exact nature of the benefits gained from mating or allying with or deferring to better hunters needs further study. (shrink)

This paper explores some connections between competing conceptions of scientific laws on the one hand, and a problem in the foundations of statistical mechanics on the other. I examine two proposals for understanding the time asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomenal: David Albert's recent proposal and a proposal that I outline based on Hans Reichenbach's “branch systems”. I sketch an argument against the former, and mount a defense of the latter by showing how to accommodate statistical mechanics to recent developments in the (...) philosophy of scientific laws. (shrink)

To date, emotion research has primarily focused on the experience and display of the emoter. However, of equal, if not more, importance is how such displays impact and guide the behavior of an observer. We incorporate a functionalist framework of emotion to examine the development of differential responding to discrete emotion, theorize on what may facilitate its development, and hypothesize the functions that may underlie such behavioral responses. Although our review is focused primarily on development, the theoretical and methodological ideas (...) laid out are relevant for researchers of emotion at all ages. (shrink)

In “Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research,” Lee and Baskerville try to clarify generalization and classify it into four types. Unfortunately, their account is problematic. We propose repairs. Central among these is our balance-of-evidence argument that we should adopt the view that Hume’s problem of induction has a solution, even if we do not know what it is. We build upon this by proposing an alternative classification of induction. There are five types of generalization: theoretical, within-population, cross-population, contextual, and temporal, (...) with theoretical generalization being across the empirical and theoretical levels and the rest within the empirical level. Our classification also includes two kinds of inductive reasoning that do not belong to the domain of generalization. We then discuss the implications of our classification for information systems research. (shrink)

Before the story can be told, however, some stage-setting is necessary. First, it is important to be clear about the most basic doctrines of Pre-established Harmony, Occasionalism, and Physical Influx. Physical Influx asserts intersubstantial causation amongst finite substances. For instance, when I appear to kick a ball, I really am the cause of the ball's motion. Pre-established Harmony denies intersubstantial causation, but affirms intrasubstantial causation. According to Pre-established Harmony, then, I am not the cause of the ball's motion, but rather (...) the ball is simply causing itself to move. Occasionalism, like Pre-established Harmony, denies intersubstantial causation, but, unlike Pre-established Harmony, it denies intrasubstantial causation as well. Occasionalism typically asserts that God alone, that is, an infinite substance, is the cause of all changes, and thus of the ball's motion. Though there are other ways of defining these causal theories, this way has the advantage that the causal theories form an exhaustive disjunction. (shrink)

At the dawn of the new century, Robert Plomin was gloomy. As he recounts in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, attempts to find the DNA responsible for the heritability of behavior failed. Month after month, journals would report new findings of specific genes for behavioral phenotypes, but they never replicated. One amazing genomic methodology after another was developed in biological genetics and applied to medicine, where it succeeded, and then to human behavior, where it failed. This was (...) the moment of Plomin's despair. He had, with great intellectual courage, staked his reputation on the existence of actionable scientific knowledge of the DNA‐based genesis of twin‐based heritability. But Blueprint is hardly the product of a gloomy author. Quite the opposite: it is a declaration of victory of nature over nurture, a celebration of the vindication of Plomin as a scientist and of behavior genetics as a field of study. What happened between 2000 and 2019 to brighten Plomin's outlook so radically? Were the genes for schizophrenia and intelligence finally discovered? Are we at last on our way to understanding why, at a biological level, all differences in human behavior are substantially heritable? Alas, no. What happened is that Robert Plomin gave up on the search for individual genes that explain heritability and decided to be satisfied with much less. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance is roughly a phenomenon that is characterized by either an inability or an unwillingness to imagine some proposition. It has been noted that this phenomenon varies from person to person and from context to context. Most philosophers account for this variation by appealing to contextual factor. While such accounts make progress, I argue that the variation outruns the use of such a tactic. I propose a new account that can explain all of the variation.

The relationship between game play and naturalistic cooperation, generosity, or market involvement is ambiguous at best, making it difficult to link game results to preferences and beliefs guiding decision-making in daily life. Discounting reputation-based explanations because the games are anonymous, while arguing that game play is guided by motivational structures or framing effects reflecting daily life, is inconsistent.

Although contemporary methods of environmental regulation have registered some significant accomplishments, the current system of environmental law is not working well enough. First the good news: Since the first Earth Day in 1970, smog has decreased in the United States by thirty percent. The number of lakes and rivers safe for fishing and swimming has increased by one-third. Recycling has begun to reduce levels of municipal waste. Ocean dumping has been curtailed. Forests have begun to expand. One success story is (...) the virtual elimination of airborne lead in the United States. Another is the rapid phase-out of ozone-layer depleting chemicals worldwide. Nevertheless, prominent commentators of diverse political persuasions agree in an assessment that conventional models of environmental law have “failed.” Many environmental problems remain unsolved: species extinction, global desertification and deforestation, possible global climate change, and continuing severe air and water pollution in urban areas and poor countries. What is more, successful environmental protection has come only at enormous economic cost. By the year 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the United States will spend approximately two percent of its gross national product on environmental pollution control. Academic economists have pointed out the nonsensical inefficiency of many environmental regulations, but usually to no avail. (shrink)

Different views of life documented for discussion. For 14-16 year-olds.

This essay seeks to contribute to current debates about value in Kant's ethics. Its main objective is to dislodge the widely shared intuition that his view of autonomy requires constructivism or some other alternative to moral realism. I argue the following. Kant seems to think that the value of persons is due to their very nature, not to what anyone decides is the case (however rational or pure those decisions may be). He also seems to think that when we treat (...) persons as ends in themselves we are responding appropriately to the fact that their very nature elevates them above all other concerns. Neither of these beliefs is incompatible with his view of autonomy. So it is a mistake to think that Kant's ethics requires constructivism or any other form of anti-realism. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have employed the notion of advice to tackle a variety of philosophical problems. In particular, Michael Smith and Nomy Arpaly have in different ways related the notion of advice to the notion of a reason for action. Here I argue that both accounts are flawed, because each operates with a simplistic picture of the way advice works. I conclude that it would be wise to take more time to analyze what advice is and how it in fact works, (...) before putting it to particular philosophical uses. (shrink)

J.J.C. Smart famously complained that rule utilitarianism is incoherent, and that rule utilitarians are guilty of rule worship . Much has been said about whether Smart’s complaint is justified, but I will assume for the sake of argument that Smart was on to something. Instead, I have three other goals. First, I want to show that Smart’s complaint is a specific instance of a more general objection to a moral theory—what I will call the Incoherence Objection. Second, I want to (...) illustrate how the Incoherence Objection can apply both to consequentialist and, surprisingly, some nonconsequentialist theories. Finally, I want to demonstrate at least one way nonconsequentialist theories that make use of rules, principles, and the like can dodge the Incoherence Objection. (shrink)

Planteamos el problema del aparecer de la hylè husserliana, lo que nos conduce al problema de la auto-donación de la vida como condición de una fenomenología de la percepción. Para solucionar este problema, establecemos las condiciones de un diálogo entre Michel Henry, que pone énfasis sobre la auto-afección de la vida inmanente, y Merleau-Ponty, que privilegia una concepción intencional del cuerpo mundano. Tal diálogo nos permite identificar un prejuicio común, cuya superación podría ofrecer la posibilidad de una solución al problema (...) del aparecer sensible desde la vida. (shrink)

This paper addresses methodological and metatheoretical aspects of the ongoing debate over the adaptive significance of Tibetan polyandry. Methodological contributions include a means of estimating relatedness of fraternal co-husbands given multigenerational polyandry, and use of Hamilton’s rule and a member-joiner model to specify how inclusive fitness gains of co-husbands may vary according to seniority, opportunity costs, and group size. These methods are applied to various data sets, particularly that of Crook and Crook (1988). The metatheoretical discussion pivots on the critique (...) by evolutionary psychologists of adaptationist accounts of polyandry. Contrary to this critique, I argue that valid adaptationist explanations of such practices do not necessitate cognitive mechanisms evolved specifically to produce polyandry, nor that there must have been exact equivalents of Tibetan agricultural estates and social institutions in human evolutionary history. Specific issues raised when one posits either kin selection or cultural evolution to explain the adaptive features of Tibetan polyandry are also discussed. (shrink)

At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"--"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, one guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed--the significance of the Saying much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship to (...) a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology, and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics than any yet written. (shrink)