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Browsing Department of Philosophy by Content Type "Article - Refereed"
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- Anti-Metaphysical Arguments in the Anticipations of PerceptionPatton, Lydia K. (Editura Academiei Romane/Publishing House of the Romanian Academy, 2022-12-22)In the Anticipations, Kant defends the claim that all sensations must register on a purely subjective scale of response to stimuli, in order for sensation to be a possible source of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Kant defends this claim in response to “scholasticism” or transcendental realism about sensation. The fact that all sensations are measurable on a subjec- tive scale is the a priori content of the principle of the Anticipations, and, according to Kant, is a necessary condition for building any systematic analysis of sensation. The anti-metaphysical arguments in the “Anticipations of Perception” are key building blocks of Kant’s transcendental idealism.
- The beautiful soul and the autocratic agent: Schiller's and Kant's 'children of the house'Baxley, A. M. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2003-10)In his extended essay "On Grace and Dignity," Friedrich Schiller sets out an important challenge to Kant when he argues that sensibility must play a constitutive role in the ethical life. This paper argues that there is much we can learn from Schiller's "corrective" to Kant's moral theory and Kant's reply to this critique, for what is at stake in their debate are rival conceptions of the proper state of moral health for us as finite rational beings and competing political notions concerning the ideal form of self-governance that we ought to strive to attain.
- Chance and the Continuum HypothesisHoek, Daniel (2021-12-06)This paper presents and defends an argument that the continuum hypothesis is false, based on considerations about objective chance and an old theorem due to Banach and Kuratowski. More specifically, I argue that the probabilistic inductive methods standardly used in science presuppose that every proposition about the outcome of a chancy process has a certain chance between 0 and 1. I also argue in favour of the standard view that chances are countably additive. Since it is possible to randomly pick out a point on a continuum, for instance using a roulette wheel or by flipping a countable infinity of fair coins, it follows, given the axioms of ZFC, that there are many different cardinalities between countable infinity and the cardinality of the continuum.
- Data models, representation and adequacy-for-purposeBokulich, Alisa; Parker, Wendy (2021-03)We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational (PR) view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the product of a process of inquiry, and they should be evaluated in terms of their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Some important implications of the PR view for data assessment, related to misrepresentation, context-sensitivity, and complementary use, are highlighted. The PR view provides insight into the common but little-discussed practices of iteratively reusing and repurposing data, which result in many datasets' having a phylogeny-an origin and complex evolutionary history-that is relevant to their evaluation and future use. We relate these insights to the open-data and data-rescue movements, and highlight several future avenues of research that build on the PR view of data.
- Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic ComedySmith, N. D. (University of California Press, 1989-04)
- Egalitarianism under Severe UncertaintyRowe, Thomas; Voorhoeve, Alex (2018-06)
- Ethical pluralism without complementarityFitzPatrick, William J. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2004)Grinnell, Bishop, and McCullough (2002) have proposed extending Bohr's notion of complementarity from the realm of quantum physics to that of bioethics, arguing that many ethical disputes cannot in principle be resolved. On this view, we should give up the aim of reaching all-things-considered moral verdicts on a variety of disputed questions, settling instead for a holism of irreducibly complementary perspectives. I discuss a number of difficulties with this proposal, and argue that the desire for inclusiveness that motivates it is properly captured through a different approach to ethical pluralism already familiar in moral philosophy, which does allow for resolution.
- Expanding theory testing in general relativity: LIGO and parametrized theoriesPatton, Lydia K. (2020-02)The multiple detections of gravitational waves by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), operated by Caltech and MIT, have been acclaimed as confirming Einstein's prediction, a century ago, that gravitational waves propagating as ripples in spacetime would be detected. Yunes and Pretorius (2009) investigate whether LIGO's template-based searches encode fundamental assumptions, especially the assumption that the background theory of general relativity is an accurate description of the phenomena detected in the search. They construct the parametrized post-Einsteinian (ppE) framework in response, which broadens those assumptions and allows for wider testing under more flexible assumptions. Their methods are consistent with work on confirmation and testing found in Carnap (1936), Hempel (1969), and Stein (1992, 1994), with the following principles in common: that confirmation is distinct from testing, and that, counterintuitively, revising a theory's formal basis can make it more broadly empirically testable. These views encourage a method according to which theories can be made abstract, to define families of general structures for the purpose of testing. With the development of the ppE framework and related approaches, multi-messenger astronomy is a catalyst for deep reasoning about the limits and potential of the theoretical framework of general relativity.
- Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of InertiaHoek, Daniel (Cambridge University Press, 2022-02-10)Newton’s First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that the law is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent to which any body can change its state of motion—even if that body is subject to impressed forces. The misunderstanding can be traced back to an error in the first English translation of Newton’s Principia, which was published a few years after Newton’s death.
- A General Metric for the Similarity of Both Stochastic and Deterministic System DynamicsShea-Blymyer, Colin; Roy, Subhradeep; Jantzen, Benjamin C. (MDPI, 2021-09-09)Many problems in the study of dynamical systems—including identification of effective order, detection of nonlinearity or chaos, and change detection—can be reframed in terms of assessing the similarity between dynamical systems or between a given dynamical system and a reference. We introduce a general metric of dynamical similarity that is well posed for both stochastic and deterministic systems and is informative of the aforementioned dynamical features even when only partial information about the system is available. We describe methods for estimating this metric in a range of scenarios that differ in respect to contol over the systems under study, the deterministic or stochastic nature of the underlying dynamics, and whether or not a fully informative set of variables is available. Through numerical simulation, we demonstrate the sensitivity of the proposed metric to a range of dynamical properties, its utility in mapping the dynamical properties of parameter space for a given model, and its power for detecting structural changes through time series data.
- Intrinsicality without NaturalnessWitmer, D. Gene; Butchard, William; Trogdon, Kelly Griffith (2005-03)Rae Langton and David Lewis have proposed an account of "intrinsic property" that makes use of two notions: being independent of accompaniment and being natural. We find the appeal to the first of these promising; the second notion, however, we find mystifying. In this paper we argue that the appeal to naturalness is not acceptable and offer an alternative definition of intrinsicality. The alternative definition makes crucial use of a notion commonly used by philosophers, namely, the notion of one property being had in virtue of another property. We defend our account against three arguments for thinking that this "in virtue of' notion is unacceptable in this context. We also take a look at a variety of cases in which the definition might be applied and defend it against potential counterexamples. The upshot, we think, is a modest but adequate account of what we understand by "intrinsic property."
- Million dollar questions: why deliberation is more than information poolingHoek, Daniel; Bradley, Richard (Springer, 2022-03-29)Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents' informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved.
- Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical ChallengeFitzPatrick, William J. (University of Chicago Press, 2008-07)Philosophical doubts about moral responsibility have typically been rooted in worries about free agency in the face of causal determinism, culminating in familiar metaphysical arguments against the very possibility of moral responsibility.1 Recently, however, a skeptical argument has emerged that is simultaneously less ambitious and potentially more challenging to many of our common beliefs and practices concerning responsibility. It is less ambitious because the aim is to show not that agents cannot in principle be responsible for what they do but only that the ascription of responsibility or blame for bad actions is never warranted in any particular case.2 Since this more modest argument does not rely on the truth of determinism, however, the worries it raises for attributions of moral responsibility are likewise not mitigated by familiar compatibilist strategies for rescuing moral responsibility from the threat of determinism. The problems remain whatever one concludes about the underlying metaphysical issues.
- Must Kuhn Allow Cross-Paradigm Evidence?Patton, Lydia K. (Editura Academiei Romane/Publishing House of the Romanian Academy, 2023-12-01)Does Kuhn’s thesis that successive paradigms are incommensurable necessarily entail denying that the same evidence can be employed under successive paradigms? In this paper, I will argue no. In supporting that conclusion, I will argue for an even stronger point: Kuhn must be committed to the claim that the same evidence can be employed across paradigms, or his account of anomalies makes no sense.
- A new well-being atomismHersch, Gil; Weltman, Daniel (Wiley, 2022-06)Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being.
- Newton's wet moet rechtgezet: Hoe een 18e-eeuwse vertaalfout de wereld in de war bracht over de Eerste Wet van NewtonHoek, Daniel (2024)De eerste wet van Newton, ook bekend als het traagheidsprincipe, staat al eeuwenlang verkeerd in de boeken. Dit is het gevolg van een betreurenswaardige vergissing door de broer van een haastige boekenverkoper uit de achttiende eeuw. Het wordt hoog tijd om dit mistverstand eindelijk eens recht te zetten: Newtons echte eerste wet is fundamenteler en minder verwarrend dan de versie die we kennen.
- “Not Up For Debate”: Reflections on an Ethical Challenge to Ethics BowlHorn, Justin (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2024)Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is a debate-style activity that aims to help students cultivate skills of moral deliberation. While a fair amount has been written about the pedagogical benefits of Ethics Bowl, relatively little attention has been given to potential ethical criticisms of the activity. In this paper I present some reflections on an ethical challenge to Ethics Bowl, namely that applying the characteristic approach of Ethics Bowl to some issues of contemporary ethical controversy can be immoral. The concern is that treating certain topics as “open to debate” conveys disrespect for certain individuals, and risks normalizing harmful viewpoints. I argue that we should take this challenge seriously; indeed, the guiding values behind Ethics Bowl require that we do so. I conclude that conducting Ethical Bowl in an ethical manner requires caution and skill.
- On the Birnbaum Argument for the Strong Likelihood PrincipleMayo, Deborah G. (Statistical Science, 2014)An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist notions, such as p-values, significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution. This feature results in violations of a principle known as the strong likelihood principle (SLP), the focus of this paper. In particular, if outcomes x∗ and y∗ from experiments E1 and E2 (both with unknown parameter θ) have different probability models f1(·), f2(·), then even though f1(x∗; θ) = cf2(y∗; θ) for all θ, outcomes x∗ and y∗ may have different implications for an inference about θ. Although such violations stem from considering outcomes other than the one observed, we argue this does not require us to consider experiments other than the one performed to produce the data. David Cox [Ann. Math. Statist. 29 (1958) 357–372] proposes the Weak Conditionality Principle (WCP) to justify restricting the space of relevant repetitions. The WCP says that once it is known which Ei produced the measurement, the assessment should be in terms of the properties of Ei . The surprising upshot of Allan Birnbaum’s [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 57 (1962) 269–306] argument is that the SLP appears to follow from applying the WCP in the case of mixtures, and so uncontroversial a principle as sufficiency (SP). But this would preclude the use of sampling distributions. The goal of this article is to provide a new clarification and critique of Birnbaum’s argument. Although his argument purports that [(WCP and SP) entails SLP], we show how data may violate the SLP while holding both the WCP and SP. Such cases also refute [WCP entails SLP].
- Plan-Based Expressivism and Innocent MistakesDaskal, S. (University of Chicago Press, 2009-01)Over the past hundred years, there has been a series of metaethical views according to which we ought to deepen our understanding of normative terms by inquiring after the states of mind they express. This is the class of views, sometimes identified as forms of noncognitivism, that Allan Gibbard has dubbed "expressivist." It includes the emotivism of A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson as well as, on some readings, the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare. More recently, Simon Blackburn's "quasi_realist" projectivism is a sophisticated form of expressivism, and Gibbard has also developed and defended an expressivist theory of his own.1 What these views share is the thought that normative terms are intimately linked to emotions or actions in a way that cannot be captured in a purely descriptive analysis. They also share a set of common objections. For instance, all expressivists must confront the so_called Frege_Geach problem, according to which an expressivist analysis of normative terms will be unable to account for the many ways in which such terms can be embedded in otherwise descriptive sentences.2 Expressivists also face objections, raised most prominently by Ronald Dworkin, according to which their analyses of normative terms fail to provide an adequate degree of objectivity for normative judgments.3
- The practical turn in ethical theory: Korsgaard's constructivism, realism, and the nature of normativityFitzPatrick, William J. (University of Chicago Press, 2005-07)My aim is to assess the merits of Korsgaard's rejection of realism as well as the prospects for her practical approach to normativity, and I shall both raise problems for her constructivism and develop a realist response to her central challenge. To make clear what is at stake, I will begin by elucidating the "normative question" that motivates her negative and positive projects alike and by describing the realist and constructivist positions in this debate. Then, in Section II, I will lay out her central critique of realism and go on, in Section III, to explain her current strategy for avoiding the problems she raises for realists. As described more fully at the end of Section III, I will then examine Korsgaard's distinctive approach to normativity by looking at how her practical_problem_solving conception of normativity applies specifically to the principle at the heart of Kantian ethics-the formula of humanity, which she believes must be derived in a purely constructivist fashion in order to be binding. Giving careful attention to such derivations in light of her general account of normativity (Secs. IV-VI) is the best way both to clarify what is really at issue in the debate over normativity and to see concretely how her constructivist approach to deriving normative principles is supposed to deliver what is required by her practical_problem_solving account of binding normative force.