This paper offers a new interpretation of Hume’s Treatise as a work written by a methodological solipsist. It argues that Hume anticipates later developments by launching a Fodorian project that is to be realised by Carnapian means. Hume develops an explanatory theory of mental operations based on an analysis conducted by way of similarity recollections in the stream of experience. The paper first

This paper explores the view that the vocabulary of metaphysical fundamentality is opaque, using Sider’s theory of structure as a motivating case study throughout. Two conceptions of fundamentality are distinguished, only one of which can explain why the vocabulary of fundamentality is opaque.

This article develops a new account of the relation “before” between events. It does so by taking the set of all states of an object, irrespective of any presupposed order, and then finding the order between events by exploiting a characteristic asymmetry which appears on this set, called the “record asymmetry”. It is shown that the record asymmetry 1. implies a weak temporal order (“before or simultaneous

A standard form of skeptical scenario, in the tradition of Descartes’ evil demon, raises the prospect that our sensory experiences are deceptive. A less familiar and importantly different kind of skeptical scenario raises the prospect that our beliefs have been debased (Schaffer, 2010). This paper provides a new and improved way of resisting this latter kind of debasing skepticism. Along the way, I

This paper employs epistemic decision theory to explore rational bridge principles between probabilistic beliefs and deductively cogent beliefs. I re-examine Hempel and Levi’s epistemic decision theories and generalize them by introducing a novel rationality norm for belief binarization. This norm posits that an agent ought to have binary beliefs that maximize expected utility in light of their credences

The field of AI safety considers whether and how AI development can be safe and beneficial for humans and other animals, and the field of AI welfare considers whether and how AI development can be safe and beneficial for AI systems. There is a prima facie tension between these projects, since some measures in AI safety, if deployed against humans and other animals, would raise questions about the ethics

Sosa holds one may rationally want to understand how the specific features of a particular artwork ground its aesthetic value, and that this understanding cannot be gained at second-hand. Such understanding requires one to have insight into the link between grounding features and that value, and this can only be gained through first-hand engagement with the artwork. I distinguish two senses of second-hand

This paper concerns the proxy problem: often machine learning programs utilize seemingly innocuous features as proxies for socially-sensitive attributes, posing various challenges for the creation of ethical algorithms. I argue that to address this problem, we must first settle a prior question of what it means for an algorithm that only has access to seemingly neutral features to be using those features

Many varieties of understanding subsist in a thinker’s having the right kind of mental connection to a certain body of fact (or putative fact), a connection often called “grasp”. The use of a single term suggests a single connection that does the job in every kind of understanding. Then again, “grasp” might be an umbrella term covering a diverse plurality of understanding-granting mind-world relations

According to qualitativism, thisness is not a fundamental feature of reality; facts about particular things are metaphysically second-rate. In this paper, I advance an argument for qualitativism from ideological parsimony. Supposing that reality fundamentally contains an array of propertied things, non-qualitativists employ a distinct name (or constant) for each fundamental thing. I argue that these

In this paper I outline a challenge for experiential passage realism, the view that we veridically perceptually experience the robust passage of time. The challenge lies in accommodating recent empirical data, according to which ~ 35% of people do not report that it seems as though time robustly passes, and ~ 65% report that it does. I argue that offering a plausible explanation for this data is especially

My cat Percy and I both engage in inquiry. For example, we both might wonder where the food is, and look around systematically in an effort to find the food. Indeed, we might even recruit others to help us search for the food, and so engage in collaborative inquiry concerning the location of the food. But such inquiry, even when collaborative, does not amount to research. Why not? What distinguishes

Discussions of statistical criteria for fairness commonly convey the normative significance of calibration within groups by invoking what risk scores “mean.” On the Same Meaning picture, group-calibrated scores “mean the same thing” (on average) across individuals from different groups and accordingly, guard against disparate treatment of individuals based on group membership. My contention is that

Summativism about group evidence holds that the evidence of a group is a function of the evidence of its members. In this paper, I put forward a novel knowledge-first summative view of group evidence formulated in terms of the notion of being in a position to know rather than knowledge. In developing this view, I address several crucial questions for any adequate account of group evidence: whether

In this paper, I present and defend a novel way for non-naturalists to account for the sui generis status of normative facts, which is consistent with the claim that contingent normative facts obtain in virtue of non-normative facts. According to what I call unsupplemented partial ground approach, non-derivative normative facts have non-normative partial grounds, but are not fully grounded in any collection

In this paper, I argue that four common prejudices have proven to be rather persistent obstacles to the development of an appropriate philosophical understanding of scientific discoveries: (1) the, already somewhat out-dated prejudice according to which scientific discoveries are non-rational and therefore not apt to philosophical analysis, (2) the prejudice that newly discovered scientific entities

To accept divine satisficing is to hold that it is possible for God to choose a worse option over a better one provided that the worse option is “good enough.” Divine satisficing plays an important role in certain responses to the problem of evil and problems of divine creation. Here I argue that if God is perfectly free, then divine satisficing is not possible even if it is permissible. To be perfectly

The topic of disagreement has captured a great deal of attention among epistemologists in recent years. In this paper, I want to raise the issue of disagreement for the epistemic aim of understanding. I will address three main issues. The first concerns the nature of understanding disagreement. What do disagreements in understanding amount to? What kind of disagreement is at play when two agents understand

In this essay, I argue that despite the apparent promise of the recently popular “robust omissions reply” to John Martin Fischer’s well-known robustness objection to flicker of freedom style responses to arguments against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) based on Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs), the robustness objection succeeds after all. Though I concede that the robust omissions reply

David Wallace has argued that there is no special problem for free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, beyond the well-known problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism. I argue to the contrary that, on the plausible and popular “deep self” approach to compatibilism, the many-worlds interpretation does face a special problem. It is not clear on the many-worlds

The Neurodiversity (ND) movement demands that some psychiatric categories be de-pathologized. It has faced much criticism, leading some to despair whether it can ever be brought together with psychiatry. In this paper, we argue for a particular understanding of this central demand of the ND movement. We argue that the demand for de-pathologizing is the rejection of (paradigmatically) autism as a hypostatic

A consensus is emerging in the philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from scientific inquiry. Which values should then be chosen by scientists? This paper proposes a novel answer to this question, labelled the public reason view. To place this answer on firm ground, I first redraw the boundaries of the political forum; in other words, I broaden the range of actors who have a

Many people believe that it is better to extend the length of a happy life than to create a new happy life, even if the total welfare is the same in both cases. Despite the popularity of this view, one would be hard-pressed to find a fully compelling justification for it in the literature. This paper develops a novel account of why and when extension is better than replacement that applies not just

This is a contribution to a book symposium on Bias: A Philosophical Study, in which I respond to commentaries by Gabbrielle Johnson, Daniel Greco, and Selim Berker. In response to Johnson, I argue that many paradigmatic cases of bias are not best understood as involving underdetermination, and I defend my alternative account of bias against the concerns that she raises. In response to Greco, I note

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while

Among theories of vagueness, supervaluationism stands out for its non–truth functional account of the logical connectives. For example, the disjunction of two atomic statements that are not determinately true or false can, itself, come out either true or indeterminate, depending on its content—a consequence several philosophers find problematic. Smith (2016) turns this point against supervaluationism

The conventional discourse on existential risks (x-risks) from AI typically focuses on abrupt, dire events caused by advanced AI systems, particularly those that might achieve or surpass human-level intelligence. These events have severe consequences that either lead to human extinction or irreversibly cripple human civilization to a point beyond recovery. This decisive view, however, often neglects

The normative challenge of AI alignment centres upon what goals or values ought to be encoded in AI systems to govern their behaviour. A number of answers have been proposed, including the notion that AI must be aligned with human intentions or that it should aim to be helpful, honest and harmless. Nonetheless, both accounts suffer from critical weaknesses. On the one hand, they are incomplete: neither

Teitel (Mind 128:39-68, 2019) argues that the following three doctrines are jointly inconsistent: i) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity reduces to essence; ii) the doctrine that possibly something could fail to exist; and iii) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity obeys a modal logic of at least S4. This paper presents a novel solution to Teitel’s puzzle, regimented in a higher-order logical

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that

This paper challenges Sosa’s account of the epistemic propriety of suspension of judgment. We take the reader on a test drive through some common problem cases in epistemology and argue that Sosa makes accurate and apt suspension both too easy and too hard.

This paper examines cases in which an individual’s misunderstanding improves the scientific community’s understanding through “corrective” processes that produce understanding from poor epistemic inputs. To highlight the unique features of valuable misunderstandings and corrective processes, we contrast them with other social-epistemological phenomena including testimonial understanding, collective

AI technologies have shown remarkable capabilities in various scientific fields, such as drug discovery, medicine, climate modeling, and archaeology, primarily through their pattern recognition abilities. They can also generate hypotheses and suggest new research directions. While acknowledging AI’s potential to aid in scientific breakthroughs, the paper shows that current AI models do not meet the

Russell (Proc Aristot Soc 11:108–128, 1911; The Problems of Philosophy, Thornton Butterworth Limited, London, 1912) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient

This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before

Many philosophers believe that it counts against one morally if one is close and good friends with a bad person. Some argue that one acts badly by counting a bad person as a good friend, because such friendships carry significant moral risks. Others locate the moral badness in one’s moral psychology, suggesting that one becomes objectionably complacent by being good friends with a bad person. In this

I provide an overview of some of the main ideas presented in my book Bias: A Philosophical Study.

Hadfield-Menell et al. (2017) propose the Off-Switch Game, a model of Human-AI cooperation in which AI agents always defer to humans because they are uncertain about our preferences. I explain two reasons why AI agents might not defer. First, AI agents might not value learning. Second, even if AI agents value learning, they might not be certain to learn our actual preferences.

There is a class of expressions which are perceived as ‘ungrammatical’ not because they are syntactically ill-formed but because they have interpretations which are informationally trivial. Triviality-driven unacceptability constrains the distribution of determiners, modals, attitude verbs, exhaustifiers, approximatives, among many other classes of logical terms. At the same time, many superficial

Perceptual liberals have offered numerous arguments claiming to show that kind-representing perceptual phenomenology exists, which raises questions about what it is like to perceive objects as belonging to different kinds. Yet almost no effort has been made to answer these questions. This quietism invites the concern that liberalism may be a defunct research program: unable to answer the questions

The purity principle requires that identity truths such as “Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus” are grounded. This argument from purity for the groundedness of identity truths for first-order entities can be naturally generalized to higher-order identities like “to be a vixen is to be a female fox.” In this paper, I will examine various accounts of the grounds of identity truths by taking the cases

Clearly, the fact that you are committed to these projects and those people is practically relevant. For example, a commitment to gardening can make it especially sensible for me to garden this afternoon, even in the presence of an equally and sufficiently good alternative like woodworking. We might capture commitment’s distinctive import by saying that it puts us in a ‘special relationship’ to the

The aim of this paper is to make some headway in understanding the notion of zero-grounding. The account of grounding in terms of generalized identity, proposed by Correia and Skiles (2019), is employed to clarify issues of ground and zero-ground. I discuss some options for accommodating zero-grounding. According to one option, we slide dangerously close to violating the irreflexivity of ground. According

Any adequate semantics of generic sentences (e.g., “Philosophers evaluate arguments”) must accommodate both what we call the positive data and the negative data. The positive data consists of observations about what felicitous interpretations of generic sentences are available. Conversely, the negative data consists of observations about which interpretations of generic sentences are unavailable. Nguyen

Dualism holds that experiences somehow arise from physical states, despite being neither identical with nor grounded in such states. This paper motivates a stringent set of constraints on constructing a dualist theory of experience. To meet the constraints, a dualist theory must: (1) construe experiences as causes of physical effects, (2) ensure that experiences do not cause observable violations of

Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT reflect, and can potentially perpetuate, social biases in language use. Conceptual engineering aims to revise our concepts to eliminate such bias. We show how machine learning and conceptual engineering can be fruitfully brought together to offer new insights to both conceptual engineers and LLM designers. Specifically, we suggest that LLMs can

I propose that examining pointing and, especially, self-pointing helps us to better understand Self-Referring (knowingly and intentionally self-referring). I explain basic features of pointing and self-pointing, such as referring, reference-fixing and the subject’s knowledge of the referent. I propose to treat Self-Referring as a self-directed action. Self-pointing makes it explicit how Self-Referring

It is commonplace amongst epistemologists to note the importance of grasping or appreciating one’s evidence. The idea seems to be that agents cannot successfully utilize evidence without it. Despite the popularity of this claim, the nature of appreciating or grasping evidence is unclear. This paper develops an account of what it takes to appreciate the epistemic relevance of one’s evidence, such that

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems

This commentary on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study compares his Norm-Theoretic Account, which defines bias as involving systematic deviations from genuine norms, with the Functional Account of Bias, which instead conceptualizes bias as a functional response to the problem of underdetermination. While both accounts offer valuable insights, I explore their compatibility and differences, arguing

Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years. But ‘fat-calling’ does not only have individual harms—it also perpetuates a subordinating social structure

I take some initial steps toward a theory of real definition, drawing upon recent developments in higher-order logic. The resulting account allows for extremely fine-grained distinctions (it can distinguish between any relata that differ in their syntactic structure, while avoiding the Russell-Myhill problem). It is the first account that can consistently embrace three desirable logical principles

Sosa emphasizes "firsthand intuitive insight" as a distinctive kind of epistemic aim and argues that this is a characteristic epistemic goal of humanistic inquiry. He draws from this some importantly antiskeptical conclusions for the epistemology of disagreement. I try to further develop this idea of insight, which I call ‘perceptio’, in which we "see" some truth to obtain. I agree that it is a distinctive

In his recent book, (Bias: A Philosophical Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022). Thomas Kelly argues that various phenomena that look initially like examples of how irrational we are in thinking about bias—especially our own biases—turn out to be exactly what you’d expect from ideally rational agents. The phenomena he discusses which I’ll focus on are (1) our inability to introspectively identify

Ulysses, the strong illusionist, sails towards the Strait of Definitions. On his left, Charybdis defines “phenomenal consciousness” in a loaded manner, which makes it a problematic entity from a physicalist and naturalistic point of view. This renders illusionism attractive, but at the cost of committing a potential strawman against its opponents – phenomenal realists. On the right, Scylla defines

In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly posits a distinction between two senses of the word ‘bias’, one pejorative, the other non-pejorative, and he puts this distinction to work in two crucial portions of the book: first, when he defends his central account of the nature of bias against would-be counterexamples; and, second, when he develops a new way of replying to external-world skepticism

Large language models now possess human-level linguistic abilities in many contexts. This raises the concern that they can be used to deceive and manipulate on unprecedented scales, for instance spreading political misinformation on social media. In future, agentic AI systems might also deceive and manipulate humans for their own purposes. In this paper, first, I argue that AI-generated content should

Much of revisionist just war theory is individualistic in nature: morality in war is just an extension of morality in interpersonal circumstances, so that killing in war is subject to the same moral principles that govern personal self-defense and defense of others. Recent work in the ethics of self-defense suggests that this individualism leads to a puzzle, which I call the puzzle of aggregation,

This paper defends a novel version of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to try to avoid moral deference. The problem with moral deference is that it puts one in a bad position to form what I call morally worthy attitudes, i.e., non-cognitive attitudes that have moral worth in the same sense that certain actions have moral worth. Forming morally worthy

This paper examines the question as to whether propositional seeing is best thought of as a way of knowing a proposition to be true. After showing how Pritchard’s distinction between objective and subjective goodness motivates a negative answer to this question, I examine a challenge raised by Ghijsen for Pritchard’s construal of that distinction. I then turn to the connection between propositional