I present a problem for an influential argument of Chen Lai's, and argue that Wang Yangming may have believed that all "motivating concerns" are actions. (The archived version is a Chinese preprint; the published Chinese version is available by the external link in the entry. An English version is available on my website.).

Some people commonly know a proposition just in case they all know it, they all know that they all know it, they all know that they all know that they all know it, and so on. They commonly believe a proposition just in case they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe that they all believe it, and so on. A long tradition in economic theory, theoretical computer science, linguistics (...) and philosophy has held that people have some approximation of common knowledge or common belief in a range of circumstances, for example, when they are looking at an object together, or when they have just discussed something explicitly in conversation. In this paper, I argue that people do not have any approximation of common knowledge or common belief in these circumstances. The argument suggests that people never have any approximation of common knowledge or common belief. (shrink)

This letter replies to the letter “Colonial and Neocolonial Barriers to Companion Digital Humans in Africa,” by Luís Cordeiro‐Rodrigues, in the same, May‐June 2024, issue of the Hastings Center Report.

This paper introduces the axiom of Negative Dominance, stating that if a lottery f is strictly preferred to a lottery g, then some outcome in the support of f is strictly preferred to some outcome in the support of g. It is shown that if preferences are incomplete on a sufficiently rich domain, then this plausible axiom, which holds for complete preferences, is incompatible with an array of otherwise plausible axioms for choice under uncertainty. In particular, in this setting, Negative (...) Dominance conflicts with the standard Independence axiom. A novel theory, which includes Negative Dominance, and rejects Independence, is developed and shown to be consistent. (shrink)

The coordinated attack scenario and the electronic mail game are two paradoxes of common knowledge. In simple mathematical models of these scenarios, the agents represented by the models can coordinate only if they have common knowledge that they will. As a result, the models predict that the agents will not coordinate in situations where it would be rational to coordinate. I argue that we should resolve this conflict between the models and facts about what it would be rational to do (...) by rejecting common knowledge assumptions implicit in the models. I focus on the assumption that the agents have common knowledge that they are rational, and provide models to show that denying this assumption suffices for a resolution of the paradoxes. I describe how my resolution of the paradoxes fits into a general story about the relationship between rationality in situations involving a single agent and rationality in situations involving many agents. (shrink)

This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace (...) the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular. (shrink)

Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates (...) on the prior by conditionalization; (3) that agents commonly know that if an agent knows a proposition, she knows that she knows that proposition (the “K K” principle); (4) that agents commonly know that they each update only on true propositions. It is shown that natural weakenings of any one of these strong assumptions can lead to countermodels to Aumann’s key conditional. Examples are given in which agents who have a common prior and commonly know what probability they each assign to a proposition nevertheless assign that proposition unequal probabilities. To alter Aumann’s famous slogan: people can “agree to disagree”, even if they share a common prior. The epistemological significance of these examples is presented in terms of their role in a defense of the Uniqueness Thesis: If an agent whose total evidence is E is fully rational in taking doxastic attitude D to P, then necessarily, any subject with total evidence E who takes a different attitude to P is less than fully rational. (shrink)

Whether to allow the presence of family members during cardiopulmonary resuscitation has been a highly contentious topic in recent years. Even though a great deal of evidence and professional guidelines support the option of family presence during resuscitation , many healthcare professionals still oppose it. One of the main arguments espoused by the latter is that family members should not be allowed for the sake of the patient's best interests, whether it is to increase his chances of survival, respect his (...) privacy or leave his family with a last positive impression of him. In this paper, we examine the issue of FPDR from the patient's point of view. Since the patient requires CPR, he is invariably unconscious and therefore incompetent. We discuss the Autonomy Principle and the Three-Tiered process for surrogate decision making, as well as the Beneficence Principle and show that these are limited in providing us with an adequate tool for decision making in this particular case. Rather, we rely on a novel principle and a novel integrated model for surrogate decision making. We show that this model is more satisfactory in taking the patient's true wishes under consideration and encourages a joint decision making process by all parties involved. (shrink)

Are LLMs cultural technologies like photocopiers or printing presses, which transmit information but cannot create new content? A challenge for this idea, which we call bibliotechnism, is that LLMs generate novel text. We begin with a defense of bibliotechnism, showing how even novel text may inherit its meaning from original human-generated text. We then argue that bibliotechnism faces an independent challenge from examples in which LLMs generate novel reference, using new names to refer to new entities. Such examples could be (...) explained if LLMs were not cultural technologies but had beliefs, desires, and intentions. According to interpretationism in the philosophy of mind, a system has such attitudes if and only if its behavior is well explained by the hypothesis that it does. Interpretationists may hold that LLMs have attitudes, and thus have a simple solution to the novel reference problem. We emphasize, however, that interpretationism is compatible with very simple creatures having attitudes and differs sharply from views that presuppose these attitudes require onsciousness, sentience, or intelligence (topics about which we make no claims). (shrink)

I present a new puzzle about choice under uncertainty for agents whose preferences are sensitive to multiple dimensions of outcomes in such a way as to be incomplete. In response, I develop a new theory of choice under uncertainty for incomplete preferences. I connect the puzzle to central questions in epistemology about the nature of rational requirements, and ask whether it shows that preferences are rationally required to be complete.

Remarks on method in the history of Chinese philosophy for analytic philosophy.

Loneliness is a major public health concern, particularly during pandemics such as Covid. It is extremely common, and it poses a major risk to human health. Technological solutions including social media, robots, and virtual reality have been advocated and implemented to relieve loneliness, and their use will undoubtedly increase in the near future. This paper explores the use of technological solutions from a normative perspective, asking whether and to what extent such measures should indeed be relied upon. The conclusion is (...) that technological solutions are unquestionably part of the solution to loneliness, but that they cannot and should not constitute the whole solution. It is important to note that this is not a straw‐man argument, as several organizations and scholars have strictly focused on such technological solutions for loneliness. (shrink)

We provide a general argument against value incomparability, based on a new style of impossibility result. In particular, we show that, against plausible background assumptions, value incomparability creates an incompatibility between two very plausible principles for ranking lotteries: a weak "negative dominance" principle (to the effect that Lottery 1 can be better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2) and a weak form of ex ante Pareto (to (...) the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2). After spelling out our results, and the arguments based on them, we consider which principle the proponent of incomparability ought to reject. (shrink)

The difficult phrase ὅ ποτε ὄν ἐστι (hereafter ‘OPO’), which occurs in key passages in Aristotle’s discussions of blood and of time, has long vexed interpreters of Aristotle. This paper proposes a new interpretation of OPO, which resolves some textual and interpretative problems about Aristotle’s theories of blood and of time. My interpretation will also shed light on more general issues in Aristotle’s metaphysics. In the passages I will discuss, Aristotle takes both blood and time to be examples of his (...) peculiar ‘coupled entities’. He then uses OPO to provide explanations which differ from what we might call his ‘standard’ metaphysical explanations. On the ‘standard’ approach, Aristotle explains derivative entities—non-substances—by describing their relationship to substances. By contrast to this standard form of explanation, when Aristotle uses OPO he explains blood and time by describing their relationship to non-substances. This paper thus identifies a new species of metaphysical dependence in Aristotle. In addition, it provides detailed examination of evidence concerning whether Aristotle himself used coupled entities in his own physical and metaphysical theories. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from this (...) form of doxastic conflict if and only if they are acting virtuously. (shrink)

This paper studies one aspect of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s (王陽明 1472-1529) celebrated doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). Wang states that his doctrine does not apply to all knowledge, but only to an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes calls “genuine knowledge” (zhen zhi 真知). But what is “genuine knowledge”? I develop and compare four different interpretations of this notion: the perceptual, practical, normative and introspective models. The main (...) aim of the paper is to develop these models in more detail than has been done before. But at the end of the paper I argue that the introspective model is to be preferred over the alternatives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Unsettling AffairZohar LedermanAdults should not bury babies. Whenever that happens, you know something in the world has gone awry.Similarly to most Israeli Jews, I had to enlist in the military when I was 18. As part of my basic military training, I had to guard a certain settlement in the West Bank for two weeks. The drill was what we call “4–8”: four hours of guarding, eight hours (...) of rest. I was supposed to stand on my feet throughout my shift without eating, reading, or doing anything that might distract my attention. The terrorists are coming, we were told, and they are bloodthirsty. You can save lives! Well, not that of the terrorist, obviously.I did very little guarding during those two weeks. I was too busy coping with depression and loneliness, although I am only now aware of the latter. Desperately struggling to keep my head above water, I did what I could to survive. I read books, lots of books. I remember reading Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s parable of one’s development in the desert. You start off as a lion, then a camel, and finally a child. If I could bestow only one piece of advice to my younger self, it would be to pack lightly, as even the camel’s back can only take so much. My laziness paid off. Nothing happened during that time. My older brother was kind enough to drive for an hour and bring me and my comrades the best candy Israel has to offer, and Coke. So I snacked, drank, and read.Two years later, I was called to the very same settlement as an emergency medical technician, just about to commence medical school. I was accompanied by my brother, who was then in paramedic school. We were in the midst of a family dinner in one of the too-many Jewish holidays. A terrorist attack occurred—a terrorist penetrated a house while everyone was asleep and shot everything that moved, including a male baby. Being only a couple of months old, his body occupied less than a quarter of the ambulance gurney. The upper part was bare; the lower part was wrapped in a diaper. There was no blood, no obvious visible signs of trauma on his body, except for a small hole in his right arm, just under the bicipital muscle, right where the brachial artery is.Talking about the ethics of futile care seems out of sync in such moments, even if I were aware then of the debate. When a baby is dying, you do everything to save him. Two fingers on the chest, 15 chest compressions, 2 breaths. That is what we had to do then, and that is what we did. Needless to say, the pale body did not respond. My brother and I drove the small body to the morgue. I could do nothing but stare at it throughout the 50-minute drive. There is something wrong in a world where this kind of thing happens. I promised the baby that I would fix it.I have not fixed it. But I have been trying.I am now an emergency medicine physician and a bioethicist. I have not been involved in other terrorist attacks since then, but I have seen my share. Some deaths feel natural and even due; others feel cruel, untimely, and unjust. The latter takes away a tiny bit of your soul and makes you question your role in the world. By being the best physician I can be, I hope to prevent future cruel, unjust, and untimely deaths, one person at a time. But there is only so much a physician can do.Similarly to others working in bioethics, my research spans several topics, from clinical to public health ethics. A few topics, however, are particularly close to my heart, and the Israeli occupation is one of them. The untimely death of the baby drives this passion.I could not save that baby. No one could. But as a physician and a privileged academic I can choose to channel my efforts to make them count towards preventing other cruel, untimely, and unjust deaths. Through... (shrink)

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that these theories cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi () attempts to respond to this objection by appeal to so-called extended preferences: very roughly, preferences over situations whose description includes agents’ preferences. This paper examines the prospects for defending the preference-satisfaction theory via this extended preferences program. We argue that making conceptual sense of extended preferences is less problematic than others have supposed, but (...) that even so extended preferences do not provide a promising way for the preference satisfaction theorist to make interpersonal well-being comparisons. Our main objection takes the form of a trilemma: depending on how the theory based on extended preferences is developed, either the result will be inconsistent with ordinary preference-satisfaction theory, or it will fail to recover sufficiently rich interpersonal well-being comparisons, or it will take on a number of other arguably odd and undesirable commitments. (shrink)

Capps and Lederman, in a paper published in this journal in 2015, argued that, at the time, the dismal circumstances of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was an opportunity to revisit public health responses to emergent infectious diseases. Using a One Health lens, they argued for an ecological perspective—one that looked to respond to zoonoses as an environmental as well as public health concern. Using Ebola virus disease as an example, they suggested shared immunity as a strategy to (...) vaccinate both humans and great apes. Since then, vaccination as a conservation strategy in this case has been debated and at least one great ape vaccination trial has been proposed: some, however, are less convinced of the ethical arguments to pursue vaccinating wild animals. Using this opportunity, we review Capps and Lederman’s arguments and directly respond to the plausible objections to them. (shrink)

One Health is a novel paradigm that recognizes that human and non-human animal health is interlinked through our shared environment. Increasingly prominent in public health responses to zoonoses, OH differs from traditional approaches to animal-borne infectious risks, because it also aims to promote the health of animals and ecological systems. Despite the widespread adoption of OH, culling remains a key component of institutional responses to the risks of zoonoses. Using the threats posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to human (...) and animal health, economic activity and food security as a case exemplar, we explore whether culling and other standard control measures for animal-borne infectious disease might be justified as part of OH approaches. Our central premise is that OH requires us to reformulate ‘health’ as universal good that is best shared across species boundaries such that human health and well-being are contingent upon identifying and meeting the relevant sets of human and non-human interests and shared dependencies. Our purpose is to further nascent discussions about the ethical dimensions of OH and begin to describe the principles around which a public health agenda that truly seeks to co-promote human and non-human health could potentially begin to be implemented. (shrink)

According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that (...) propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure, and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise. (shrink)

BackgroundFamily presence during adult cardiopulmonary resuscitation is still not widely implemented. Based on empirical evidence, various national and international professional organizations recommend allowing relatives to be present during resuscitation. However, healthcare providers worldwide are still reluctant to make it standard care.PurposeThis paper is a part of an ongoing cross-cultural study that aims to solicit attitudes of healthcare providers working in emergency departments towards family presence during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. This paper reports the qualitative data from surveying healthcare providers working in an (...) emergency department at a university-affiliated hospital in Singapore.MethodHealthcare workers were asked to fill out an online survey, including both quantitative and qualitative questions. Their attitudes were critically analyzed and compared with existing empirical data.ResultsMajority of healthcare workers believed that relatives should not be present during c... (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli government’s role in supporting living conditions conducive to health in the occupied Palestinian territories. Limiting the discussion to public health, the authors argue that—whether justified in its overall political policy—the Israeli government and people are legally and ethically obligated to care for the well-being of the Palestinian people. The authors first review the current situation in the OPT and compare health statistics with Israel. Next, the authors make three arguments as to why the Israeli government (...) and citizens should assist the Palestinian people: moral responsibility, legal responsibility and solidarity. Based on these, the authors make the case for Israel’s moral duty to ensure that Palestinian people living in the OPT achieve equitable levels of health as compared to Israeli citizens, while minimizing restrictions on Palestinian self-determination. The authors urge the Israeli government and citizens to improve Palestinian’s daily living conditions, tackle inequitable distribution of power and allow international support in these efforts. Hospital Admission must therefore be open to every patient that needs it, irrespective of whether he has money or not, whether he be Jew or heathen. (shrink)

This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links (...) between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world. (shrink)

I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the problem with the concept-generator theory, but, as (...) I go on to show, it has problems of its own. I present three examples which the concept-generator theory can accommodate, but the simple fine-grained theory cannot. These examples motivate the full theory of the paper, which combines the basic ideas behind the concept-generator theory with a fine-grained semantics for names. The examples themselves are of interest independently of my theory: two of them constrain the original concept-generator theory more tightly than previously discussed examples had. (shrink)

An opinionated introduction to philosophical issues connected to common knowledge.

We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.