It is widely held that agent-neutral consequentialism is incompatible with deontic constraints. Recently, Kieran Setiya has challenged this orthodoxy by presenting a form of agent-neutral consequentialism that he claims can capture deontic constraints. In this reply, we argue against Setiya's proposal by pointing to features of deontic constraints that his account fails to capture.

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that (...) provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. (shrink)

This essay examines Nietzsche’s musical ontology and situates it within the naturalist and anti-metaphysical framework evident throughout his corpus. Nietzsche often associated this position with the figure of Dionysus, which plays a leading role in The Birth of Tragedy, his most sustained consideration of music and musical ontology. The essay returns to The Birth of Tragedy in an effort to recover Nietzsche’s musical ontology and its relationship with ontology more generally. Heeding Nietzsche’s own remarks, I read this text in light (...) of his mature philosophy. My analysis draws on the work of the late twentieth-century Nietzschean, Gilles Deleuze, whose distinction between “the virtual” and “the actual” enables us to see what is really at issue in The Birth of Tragedy. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

We can conceive of peace in many different ways, and these differences are related to a variety of assumptions and practices we can adopt in our culture. This book is about those differences. Part I describes the ways in which we usually talk about peace. It argues that our conception is fundamentally obscure. We do not know what peace is and we do not know how to promote it. Part II develops an explanation of how peace has been obscured. It (...) has been obscured by a network of beliefs and institutions in our culture. Part III critically evaluates some key parts of this cultural web and argues that there is an alternative cluster of assumptions and practices which we ought to adopt. It is a cluster which is intrinsically better—regardless of whatever it may imply about peace. Part IV argues that it happens to imply that we should think of peace as an activity—a practice we can cultivate at high levels of excellent performance. It draws on Gandhian satyagraha, Quaker process and practices of "principled negotiation" using the Harvard model to illustrate. (shrink)

Semaglutide, sold under the brand names of Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, is one of the most popular drugs on the market. Manufactured by Novo Nordisk, semaglutide is the newest in a family of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists used most commonly to treat type II diabetes. To date, the results of semaglutide for the treatment of type II diabetes have been overwhelmingly positive. It is for the drug’s effects on appetite suppression and weight loss, however, that have led its surge in (...) popularity, with many hailing semaglutide as the new ‘miracle drug for weight loss’. Despite its popularity, both the governmental and popular reception to the drug has largely been mixed. In this paper, we address a range of ethical concerns and argue that while many are legitimate, they do not provide conclusive reason not to prescribe semaglutide for weight loss. (shrink)

This article is not about machine consciousness. It's about our understanding of new technology. An emerging contemporary trend treats large language models (LLMs) as cognitive beings partly because they display high-level linguistic abilities. This is in part because we struggle to conceive of a purely linguistic agent. I flesh out this new typological possibility while suggesting that there are interesting features attributable to LLMs based on their architectures and the kinds of information they can process that help us to see (...) the world through their nodes. (shrink)

Bilateralism in proof-theoretic semantics, according to which rules are provided for both assertions and denials, has been central to the development of inferentialist theories of meaning over the past few decades. Bilateralists are split, however, as to what this position amounts to, with two different formal approaches to bilateralism corresponding to fundamentally different ways of thinking about the basic notion in terms of which an inferentialist theory is to be cast: normative incoherence or committive consequence. In this paper, I show (...) how these two forms of bilateralism can be brought together in a single framework that has the virtues of both. The resulting framework is uniquely capable of serving as a proof-theoretic basis to carry out an inferentialist semantic theory. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

This document is a set of notes I took on QFT as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, mainly inspired in lectures by Burt Ovrut, but also working through Peskin and Schroeder (1995), as well as David Tong’s lecture notes available online. They take a slow pedagogical approach to introducing classical field theory, Noether’s theorem, the principles of quantum mechanics, scattering theory, and culminating in the derivation of Feynman diagrams.

This essay advances the Sentient Universe Hypothesis, a theoretically speculative yet empirically constrained proposal suggesting that the cosmos may display life-like or even conscious qualities at the largest scales. Drawing on contemporary physics, systems theory, and philosophy of mind, the work introduces four metaphors — space as tissue, time as metabolism, matter as memory, and consciousness as reflection — to explore how complexity and information integration might give rise to cosmic-scale awareness. The hypothesis outlines testable indicators, thresholds for consciousness, and (...) potential falsification criteria, while also addressing ethical implications. Rather than claiming the universe is a deity, this framework proposes that the universe may evolve toward awareness, or may already possess it in a distributed form. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept beauty? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as prettiness? It is argued here that beauty, but not prettiness, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that beauty has descriptive senses that refer to, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances, and a normative sense associated with deeply held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500) and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (ELSA) originated in the 4thEuropean Research Framework Programme (1994) andresponsible research and innovation (RRI) from the EC researchagenda in 2010. ELSA has received renewed attention inEuropean funding schemes and research. This raises the questionof how these two approaches to social responsibility relate toone another and if there is the possibility to align. There is aneed to evaluate the relationship/overlap between ELSA and RRIbecause there is a possibility that new ELSA research will reinventthe wheel if it (...) does not engage with the body of literaturealready present in RRI research. This provides unneeded extrabureaucracy, reformulations of research agendas, extrainvestment, and an overabundance of frameworks to implement,and ELSA research does not take advantage of the body ofresearch developed in RRI. This paper evaluates how ELSA andRRI diverge, are complementary, and can be aligned. (shrink)

Jc Beall argues that if FDE is logic proper, then there is no logical negation. This claim is largely based on the fact that, in standard proof systems for FDE, there are no stand-alone negation rules that suffice to capture the behavior of negation. In this paper, I show that by adopting a bilateral proof system for FDE, one can maintain that there is a logical negation, it is the very same logical negation that belongs to classical logic, and its (...) basic function is to flip-flop between assertion and denial. After laying out the bilateral proof systems on which this claim is technically based, I develop the conception of assertion and denial on which this claim is philosophically based, responding to a number of objections. I conclude by considering the possibility of a different, so-called "Boolean" negation, in the context of this bilateral framework. (shrink)

This paper examines how professionals (N = 32) working on artificial intelligence (AI) view structural AI ethics challenges like injustices and inequalities beyond individual agents' direct intention and control. This paper answers the research question: What are professionals’ perceptions of the structural challenges of AI (in the agri-food sector)? This empirical paper shows that it is essential to broaden the scope of ethics of AI beyond micro- and meso-levels. While ethics guidelines and AI ethics often focus on the responsibility of (...) designers and the competencies and skills of designers to take this responsibility, our results show that many structural challenges are beyond their reach. This result means that while ethics guidelines and AI ethics frameworks are helpful, there is a risk that they overlook more complicated, nuanced, and intersected structural challenges. In addition, it highlights the need to include diverse stakeholders, such as quadruple helix (QH) participants, in discussions around AI ethics rather than solely focusing on the obligations of AI developers and companies. Overall, this paper demonstrates that addressing structural challenges in AI is challenging and requires an approach that considers four requirements: (1) multi-level, (2) multi-faceted, (3) interdisciplinary, and (4) polycentric governance. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

I introduce a schematic notation for formulating bilateral natural deduction systems, and I use this notation to formulate three distinct bilateral natural deduction systems for classical logic. I then propose a new criterion for bilateral harmony that I argue is superior to the existing criteria proposed in the literature. Finally, I show, at the schematic level, that all three bilateral systems meet this criterion of bilateral harmony.

Bilateral proof systems, which provide rules for both affirming and denying sentences, have been prominent in the development of proof-theoretic semantics for classical logic in recent years. However, such systems provide a substantial amount of freedom in the formulation of the rules, and, as a result, a number of different sets of rules have been put forward as definitive of the meanings of the classical connectives. In this paper, I argue that a single general schema for bilateral proof rules has (...) a reasonable claim to inferentially articulating the core meaning of all of the classical connectives. I propose this schema in the context of a bilateral sequent calculus in which each connective is given exactly two rules: a rule for affirmation and a rule for denial. Positive and negative rules for all of the classical connectives are given by a single rule schema, harmony between these positive and negative rules is established at the schematic level by a pair of elimination theorems, and the truth-conditions for all of the classical connectives are read off at once from the schema itself. (shrink)

According to an act-based conception of propositions, propositions are types of cognitive or linguistic acts. Such accounts are advertised as having major metaphysical and epistemological advantages over traditional platonic accounts. However, existing versions of such accounts appeal to platonic properties and relations in order to account for the contents expressed by predicates, reintroducing many of the problems they aim to solve. Characterizing both *that a is F* and *that it’s F* as different types of “assertibles” (the former can be asserted (...) full-stop and the latter can be asserted of things), the issue can be seen as a limitation of existing act-based approaches: they apply only to a restricted class of assertibles. In this paper, I show how adopting a normative functionalist approach to linguistic meaning enables one to generalize the act-based approach to all assertibles such that no appeal to extrinsic properties and relations is needed. I show, further, how this radicalized act-based account provides the resources for a satisfactory account of our knowledge of objective states of affairs, properties, and relations (which I dub “instantiables”) in terms of our mastery of linguistic norms. (shrink)

A modest theory of meaning does not attempt to give an account of the concepts expressed by the primitive expressions of a language. Throughout his career, John McDowell has argued that our semantic aspirations ought to be modest in this sense. By contrast, inferentialism, as developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, is clearly an immodest theory of meaning: it aims to account for the concepts expressed by linguistic expressions in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. In this (...) paper, I defend inferentialism against all of McDowell’s criticisms, arguing that they either fail to apply to the view, or beg the question against it. (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection and demonstrate that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the ‘adjacent properties’ response), and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the ‘equivocation of motivation required’ response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; also clarifying where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral–aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their options (...) are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

An “inferentialist” semantic theory for some language L aims to account for the meanings of the sentences of L solely in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. A “hyper-inferentialist” theory admits into the semantics only “narrowly inferential” rules that normatively relate sentences of L to other sentences of L. A “strong inferentialist” theory also admits into the semantics “broadly inferential” rules that normatively relate perceptual states to sentences of L or sentences of L to intentional actions. It is (...) widely thought that only the latter of these two sorts of semantic theories is at all viable. I argue here that the opposite is so. Negatively, strong inferentialism is viciously circular: including rules into the semantic theory that relate perceptual states to sentences of the language requires us to appeal, in individuating those perceptual states, to the very meanings for which we are supposed to be inferentially accounting. Hyper-inferentialism does not face this problem because it does not appeal to any nonlinguistic states. Positively, though hyper-inferentialism is widely thought to be a theoretical non-starter, I argue here that it is a genuine theoretical possibility insofar as it essentially includes cross-perspectival inferences, inferences along the lines of the one from the sentences “The ball is in front of n,” “The ball is red,” and “The lighting is good” to the sentence “n sees that the ball is red.” I make the further exegetical claim that Robert Brandom, though unanimously taken to be a strong inferentialist, is in fact a hyper-inferentialist. (shrink)

Some authors argue that it is permissible for clinicians to conscientiously provide abortion services because clinicians are already allowed to conscientiously refuse to provide certain services. Call this the symmetry thesis. We argue that on either of the two main understandings of the aim of the medical profession—what we will call “pathocentric” and “interest‐centric” views—conscientious refusal and conscientious provision are mutually exclusive. On pathocentric views, refusing to provide a service that takes away from a patient's health is professionally justified because (...) there are compelling reasons, based on professional standards, to refuse to provide that service (e.g., it does not heal, and it is contrary to the goals of medicine). However, providing that same service is not professionally justified when providing that service would be contrary to the goals of medicine. Likewise, the thesis turns out false on interest‐centric views. Refusing to provide a service is not professionally justified when that service helps the patient fulfill her autonomous preferences because there are compelling reasons, based on professional standards, to provide that service (e.g., it helps her achieve her autonomous preferences, and it would be contrary to the goals of medicine to deny her that service). However, refusing to provide that same service is not professionally justified when refusing to provide that service would be contrary to the goals of medicine. As a result, on either of the two most plausible views on the goals of medicine, the symmetry thesis turns out false. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for an association between impurity and explanatory power in contemporary mathematics. This proposal is defended against the ancient and influential idea that purity and explanation go hand-in-hand (Aristotle, Bolzano) and recent suggestions that purity/impurity ascriptions and explanatory power are more or less distinct (Section 1). This is done by analyzing a central and deep result of additive number theory, Szemerédi’s theorem, and various of its proofs (Section 2). In particular, I focus upon the radically impure (...) (ergodic) proof due to Furstenberg (Section 3). Furstenberg’s ergodic proof is striking because it utilizes intuitively foreign and infinitary resources to prove a finitary combinatorial result and does so in a perspicuous fashion. I claim that Furstenberg’s proof is explanatory in light of its clear expression of a crucial structural result, which provides the “reason why” Szemerédi’s theorem is true. This is, however, rather surprising: how can such intuitively different conceptual resources “get a grip on” the theorem to be proved? I account for this phenomenon by articulating a new construal of the content of a mathematical statement, which I call structural content (Section 4). I argue that the availability of structural content saves intuitive epistemic distinctions made in mathematical practice and simultaneously explicates the intervention of surprising and explanatorily rich conceptual resources. Structural content also disarms general arguments for thinking that impurity and explanatory power might come apart. Finally, I sketch a proposal that, once structural content is in hand, impure resources lead to explanatory proofs via suitably understood varieties of simplification and unification (Section 5). (shrink)

Why must incompatibility be symmetric? An odd question, but recent work in the semantics of non-classical logic, which appeals to the notion of incompatibility as a primitive and defines negation in terms of it, has brought this question to the fore. Francesco Berto proposes such a semantics for negation argues that, since incompatibility must be symmetric, double negation introduction must be a law of negation. However, he offers no argument for the claim that incompatibility really must be symmetric. Here, I (...) provide such an argument, showing that, insofar as we think of incompatibility in normative pragmatic terms, it can play its basic pragmatic function only if it is symmetric. The upshot is that we can vindicate Berto’s claim about the symmetry of incompatibility but only if we, pace Berto, think about incompatibility, in the first instance, as a pragmatic relation between acts rather than a semantic relation between contents. (shrink)

Räsänen and Ahola-Launonen recently offered a commentary on an ethical analysis I co-authored with Julian Savulescu on the use of semaglutide-based weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic. In this response, I continue the discussion by engaging their concerns about the narrow framing of our analysis with respect to the structural determinants of health and the conditions of autonomy, as well as the role of race, class and gender in shaping stigma and access to treatment. I argue that Räsänen and Ahola-Launonen’s critique (...) and the conclusion they draw are largely in alignment with our paper and that the absence in our account of a more expansive conception of autonomy and a broader discussion of race, class and gender are fair criticisms. In what follows, I add nuance to these dimensions and caution against critiques of unjust structures that risk reproducing injustice by inadvertently denying the agency, self-respect and inclusion of marginalised groups. (shrink)

I motivate and develop a use-based semantic theory in opposition to the dominant paradigm in philosophical and linguistic semantics. Drawing inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars, I argue that contemporary semantic theories are faced with a basic problem of explanatory circularity. These theories universally presuppose that worldly knowledge of such things as properties or sets of possible worlds precedes and underlies knowledge of meaning. However, I argue that it is only through learning a language--mastering the rules governing the use of the expressions (...) belonging to that language--that speakers can possibly have knowledge of the worldly entities appealed to by semanticists at the base level of their semantic theories. In response to this fundamental problem, I develop a formal semantic framework in which the meaning of a sentence is understood directly in terms of its role in discourse. In contrast to existing semantic frameworks, this framework does not presuppose speakers' worldly knowledge, and so is actually able to explain it. The result is not just a new kind of semantic theory, but a new conception of the relation between meaning and the world. (shrink)

It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain (...) that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges. (shrink)

When we raise children what we are typically aiming for is a kind of flourishing; we want children to live well as children, and to grow to become adults who live well too. Undoubtedly, part of what we are aiming for when we aim for a child’s flourishing is that they meet their developmental milestones well, and that they succeed among their peers. We are also generally interested in how a child regards themselves; we want children to believe that they (...) have value, and that what they care about has value too. We also typically want children to have an appreciation for their relative value among others; that they are important among many other important beings, and we want them to act well in that knowledge. Of course, not all persons who raise children aim for those ends. Some do not care for how a child conceives of themselves, or whether the child flourishes at all. Others care for their children, and how they conceive of themselves, but aim poorly. As result, some children come to believe that they only deserve love and kindness when they succeed at meeting a caregiver’s ends. Some children come to believe that they have no worth at all. And yet other children, rather than believing they are unworthy, come to regard themselves as of superior worth; as children, for example, who bully and sneer at other children for being a different race, a different class, gender, ability, etc. may. When a child comes to understand themselves in these terms, we typically see it at best as morally problematic, and at worst as a tragedy. Despite our interest in children’s self-conceptions, and the vast literature on how to conceive of and regard children, there is relatively little regarding how children should conceive of and regard themselves. In order to explain how children should conceive of themselves it is my contention that a new account of self-respect is needed for the context of childhood; one that is responsive to the moral value of children, as well as their developmental capacities to recognize that value. Given that developmental psychology is complex and subject to significant variation as children develop, my aim in this paper is to offer a snapshot of what I take self-respect to amount to in early childhood. In particular, I focus on an account fitting for children between three to six years of age. (shrink)

Let’s say that you regard two things as on a par when you don’t prefer one to other and aren’t indifferent between them. What does rationality require of you when choosing between risky options whose outcomes you regard as on a par? According to Prospectism, you are required to choose the option with the best prospects, where an option’s prospects is a probability-distribution over its potential outcomes. In this paper, I argue that Prospectism violates a dominance principle—which I call The (...) Principle of Predominance—because it sometimes requires you to do something that’s no better than the alternatives and might be worse. I argue that this undermines the strongest argument that’s been given in favor of Prospectism. (shrink)

Seeing-in is the experience of seeing something in a picture. Richard Wollheim observed that this experience displays a puzzling combination of features. On the one hand, seeing-in is experienced as a single, unified experience. It is not like the disjoint experience of visualizing something into a scene that one perceives. On the other hand, seeing-in is 'twofold': it involves being visually aware of two distinct objects – an array of ink-marks, and the depicted scene – in two distinct ways. We (...) perceive the ink-marks as before us, but the form of our visual awareness of the depicted object is different. In this paper, I demonstrate how seeing-in can have both these features at the same time. The account I give forces a considerable reconfiguration of the space of possible theories of seeing-in. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and respond to five objections to (...) such causation, which all threaten to undermine this support. Lastly, I consider a very serious problem that the theory faces in virtue of positing emergent moral properties as responsible for moral causation – namely, the problem of downward moral causation. I describe this problem in detail and argue that, as it stands, it does not spell doom for the theory. (shrink)

This paper is a defense of moral evidentialism, the view that we have a moral obligation to form the doxastic attitude that is best supported by our evidence. I will argue that two popular arguments against moral evidentialism are weak. I will also argue that our commitments to the moral evaluation of actions require us to take doxastic obligations seriously.

Semaglutide (Wegovy), a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA), has attracted global attention for its appetite-suppressing and weight-loss effects. Approved by the U.S. FDA in 2022 for adolescents aged 12 and older, it has since been authorized in several other countries. Despite this, its use among youth remains limited, with ongoing concerns about its long-term safety, efficacy, and suitability during periods of growth and development. Advocates see Wegovy as an important tool for addressing pediatric obesity and its psychological burdens, while (...) critics caution against widespread use in such a vulnerable population. -/- This paper examines an underexplored ethical dimension of Wegovy’s use in children: its impact on mental health. We argue that Wegovy may offer mental health benefits for children—such as reducing weight stigma, improving self-esteem, and avoiding invasive interventions such as bariatric surgery. However, these potential benefits are constrained by barriers to access, supply shortages, risks of misuse, and the possibility of reinforcing stigma and class-based discrimination. -/- In light of these considerations, we argue that while Wegovy offers promising health benefits for children, its long-term effects on growth, development, and mental health remain uncertain, warranting further study before definitive policy decisions are made. If future evidence confirms its value, it is our view that access should be equitable and accompanied by reforms to reduce stigma, regulate prescribing, and prevent misuse. Until then, clinicians should prescribe cautiously, ensuring clear medical need and implementing safeguards against risks such as weight regain, treatment interruption, and bias in care. (shrink)

Four-dimensionalism and eternalism are theories on time, change, and persistence. Christian philosophers and theologians have adopted four-dimensional eternalism for various reasons. In this paper I shall attempt to argue that four-dimensional eternalism conflicts with Christian thought. Section I will lay out two varieties of four-dimensionalism—perdurantism and stage theory—along with the typically associated ontologies of time of eternalism and growing block. I shall contrast this with presentism and endurantism. Section II will look at some of the purported theological benefits of adopting (...) four-dimensionalism and eternalism. Section III will examine arguments against four-dimensional eternalism from the problem of evil. Section IV will argue that four-dimensional eternalism causes problems for Christian eschatology. (shrink)

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told (...) about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Caspar Hare presents a compelling argument for “taking the sugar” in cases of opaque sweetening: you have no reason to take the unsweetened option, and you have some reason to take the sweetened one. I argue that this argument fails—there is a perfectly good sense in which you do have a reason to take the unsweetened option. I suggest a way to amend Hare's argument to overcome this objection. I then argue that, although the improved version fares better, there is (...) still room to resist Hare's argument—in a way that raises interesting questions about rational agency. In short, rationality is not about doing what one has the most reason to do; rather, it is about aiming to do what there is most reason to do. (shrink)

When faced with the question of whether to assert or deny a paradoxical sentence such as the liar, it seems that there are two plausible responses: neither asserting it nor denying it, or both asserting it and denying it. In this paper, I make this thought concrete by formulating bilateral proof systems (of both the natural deduction and sequent calculus variety) for the logics in the FDE family: K3, LP, and FDE. The different logics are simply the result of different (...) choices of "coordination principles," bilateral structural rules which coordinate the opposite speech acts of assertion and denial. I show that conceiving of these logics in bilateral terms has important philosophical consequences, most notably for the debate between "subclassical'' and "substructural" approaches to paradox. In particular, I show how adopting Bilateral K3 enables one to endorse the ``non-transitive'' solution to paradox, as developed by Ripley, while maintaining that logical consequence (understood bilaterally) is transitive. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to extend the Realist account of the foundations of linguistics offered by Postal, Katz and others. I first argue against the idea that naive Platonism can capture the necessary requirements on what I call a ‘mixed realist’ view of linguistics, which takes aspects of Platonism, Nominalism and Mentalism into consideration. I then advocate three desiderata for an appropriate ‘mixed realist’ account of linguistic ontology and foundations, namely (1) linguistic creativity and infinity, (2) linguistics as (...) a theory of types (and not tokens) and (3) independence but structural respect between language and the linguistic competence thereof. My own brand of mixed realism, what I call ante rem realism, is defended along the lines of an ante rem or non-eliminative structuralism, the likes of which has been offered for mathematics by Resnik (1997) and Shapiro (1997). In other words, grammars describe a mind-independent (but not necessarily unconnected) linguistic reality in terms of linguistic patterns or structures also known as natural languages. I further amend this picture to allow for the possibility of a naturalistic account of language acquisition and evolution by arguing against a particular view of the type-token distinction. (shrink)

If Large Language Models can make real scientific contributions, then they can genuinely use language, be systematically wrong, and be held responsible for their errors. AI models which can make scientific contributions thereby meet the criteria for scientific authorship.

Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

In this article, I present a novel argument against abortion. In short, what makes it wrong to kill someone is that they are a counterfactual person; counterfactual persons are individuals such that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. My view accommodates two intuitions which many views concerning the wrongness of killing fail to account for: embryo rescue cases and the impermissibility of infanticide. The view avoids embryo rescue cases because embryos in the rescue scenarios are not counterfactual (...) people: they are not counterfactual people because it is false to say that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. As a result, it does not follow from my account that there is a prohibition against allowing embryos to die. On the other hand, infants are counterfactual people: an infant is an individual such that, were she not killed, she would have been a person. (shrink)