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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

The popular predictive processing (PP) framework posits prediction error minimization (PEM) as the sole mechanism in the brain that can account for all mental phenomena, including consciousness. I first highlight three ambitions associated with major presentations of PP: (1) Completeness (PP aims for a comprehensive account of mental phenomena), (2) Bayesian realism (PP claims that PEM is implemented

According to theorists of hermeneutical injustice, how we understand our social experiences is contingent on relations of hermeneutical power: the differential ability of groups to influence social meanings. On the prevailing understanding, privileged groups enjoy more hermeneutical power, at the expense of the marginalized. This paper argues that this obscures the sense in which we can possess different

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

Paradoxes inspired by José Benardete have been used in arguments for temporal finitism and causal finitism. Joseph C. Schmid has argued that there is a symmetry between those arguments and a corresponding argument against an endless future with respect to Koons’ patchwork principle using intrinsically identical copies of situations involving God revealing a future. I argue that this symmetry argument

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An increasing number of complex and important decisions are now being made with the aid of opaque algorithms. This has led to calls from both theorists and legislators for the implementation of a right to an explanation for algorithmic decisions. In this paper, we argue that, in most cases and for most kinds of explanations, there is no such right. After differentiating a number of different things

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

This paper argues for a responsibilist account of knowledge: S knows that p iff S believes the truth that p (rather than one of the alternatives to p) because S forms/retains the belief in a way that is ultima facie epistemically responsible. This account implies that knowing that p requires neither having evidence that favors p over ～p, nor possessing reliabilist virtues, nor exhibiting responsibilist

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

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

A Boltzmann brain is a randomly-formed configuration of matter that is conscious. According to some theories that cosmologists take seriously, the universe is so spatiotemporally large that it contains a great many Boltzmann brains that are duplicates of you. In the light of this it seems to follow that you should have significant confidence that you are a Boltzmann brain. What's worse, your situation

It is a widespread assumption that permanent philosophical dissensus indicates that none of the parties has philosophical knowledge. However, this assumption is based on the view that the philosophers’ community would recognize instances of individual philosophical knowledge if someone had such epistemic achievement. The problem is that it is challenging to justify this view because the idea that the

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

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

The dominant theories of coercion and coercive offers today are moralized, in the sense that they explain the prima facie wrongfulness of coercive incentivization on the basis that such incentivization essentially involves some other, independent wrong, such as a conditional proposal to violate another's rights. I develop and defend a new version of a more old-school theory, according to which coercive

In this paper, I present three claims belonging to Cavendish's theory of the passions. First, positive and negative passions are species of love and hate. Second, love and hate involve pleasure and pain. Third, pleasure and pain are regular and irregular, where these notions are to be understood in teleological terms. From these commitments, it follows that hate is irregular. I argue that this consequence

Protection rackets are used by criminal organizations to secure power, wherein “protection” is offered to individuals for threats coming from the criminal organization itself. In this paper, I put forth the concept of a moral racket as a type of structural racket wherein social dominants exploit moral reputation to perpetuate systems of domination. A moral racket occurs when individuals forcefully

Suppose we observe many emeralds which are all green. This observation usually provides good evidence that all emeralds are green. However, the emeralds we have observed are also all grue, which means that they are either green and already observed or blue and not yet observed. We usually do not think that our observation provides good evidence that all emeralds are grue. Why? I argue that if we are

I present evidence for a systematic complexity–coherence trade-off in cognition. I show how feasible strategies for increasing cognitive complexity along three dimensions come at the expense of a heightened vulnerability to incoherence. I discuss two normative implications of the complexity–coherence trade-off: a novel challenge to coherence-based theories of bounded rationality and a new strategy

Some philosophers have presented arguments that the all-things-considered-better-than relation admits of cycles. The most prominent arguments for this conclusion are spectrum arguments. Whether or not any spectrum arguments are sound is a topic of debate among value theorists. In this paper, I consider whether they are credible or incredible, i.e., whether or not there is anything of a distinctively

How is it that individuals who deny experiencing visual imagery nonetheless perform normally on tasks which seem to require it? This puzzle of aphantasia has perplexed philosophers and scientists since the late nineteenth century. Contemporary responses include: (i) idiosyncratic reporting, (ii) faulty introspection, (iii) unconscious imagery, and (iv) complete lack of imagery combined with the use

Russell famously posited a type of knowledge distinct from and irreducible to propositional knowledge, which he called knowledge by acquaintance. In recent years, several epistemologists have reignited interest in knowledge by acquaintance, pointing out an array of theoretical jobs it is serviceable in performing. Nonetheless knowledge by acquaintance continues to be met with resistance and disregard

Contemporary ontologists, almost unanimously, dismiss the idea that sakes (as in ‘I did it for her sake’) exist. Likewise with the kibosh, snooks, behalves, dints, and so on. In this essay, I argue that there is no good reason for this near consensus, I begin to make a case that sakes and the like do exist, and I consider what this means more broadly for ontology.

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

Common-sense morality has it that parents are morally justified in acting partially toward their own children. More controversial, however, is the form of partiality that obtains between prospective parents and their yet-to-be-conceived future children – or ‘pre-parental partiality’, for short. Is pre-parental partiality morally justified? On one hand, our intuitions seem to tell us that it is. On

This paper provides a novel defence of the philosophical use of examples drawn from literature, by comparison with thought experiments and real cases. Such fictional examples, subject to certain constraints, can play a similar role to real cases in establishing the generality of a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the distinct psychological vantage point offered by literature renders it a potent resource

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

We care about whether the people around us can take a joke. And this care has a moral tinge to it: we're more likely to trust good-humoured people, and are prone to accusing humourless people of being ‘sanctimonious buzzkills’ who need to ‘get over themselves’. But are these moralized reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? This paper discusses the moral value of humour in terms

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

I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally due to Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g., ‘property’, ‘grounding’) refer to entities and structures (e.g., properties, grounding) in the world? I distinguish a meta-metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (‘deflationism’) from a meta-metaphysical view for which this explanatory

It is essential that formal models come with interpretations: accounts of how the models relate to the phenomena. The traditional representation of degrees of belief as mathematical probabilities comes with a clear and simple interpretative story. This paper argues that the model of degrees of belief as imprecise probabilities (sets of probabilities) lacks a workable interpretation: The standard interpretative

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

Is acceptance an act or a state? Jonathan Cohen is often seen as a proponent of the view that acceptance is a mental act. In contrast, Michael Bratman claims that acceptance is a mental state. This paper argues that the evidence supports a more subtle approach. Linguistic intuitions about the lexical aspect of the verb ‘accept’ support the view that there is an act of acceptance and a state of acceptance

Recent work in social epistemology has begun to make use of the behavioral-scientific concept of the nudge, but without sustained attention to how it should be translated from behavioral to epistemic contexts. We offer an account of doxastic nudges that satisfies extensional and theoretical desiderata, defend it against other accounts in the literature, and use it to clarify ongoing discussions of

In this paper, I aim to identify the wrong that is done by the hearer to the testifier in all cases of testimonial injustice. I introduce the concept of testimonial injustice, as well as the existing accounts of this characteristic wrong, and I argue that the latter don’t work. Then I present my favoured account, which adapts Rachel Fraser’s account of the wrong of aesthetic injustice. I argue that

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

Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that

According to the standard Humean account of laws of nature, laws are selected as a result of an optimal trade-off between the scientific virtues of simplicity and strength. Roberts and Woodward have objected that such trade-offs play no role in how laws are chosen in science. We first discuss an example from automated scientific discovery which provides support for Roberts and Woodward’s point that

According to perspectivism, what I ought to do depends on my perspective. While recently popular, perspectivism faces a central puzzle. In some deliberative practices, facts outside our perspective are clearly relevant. In deliberation, we are concerned with acquiring new information. In advising, a better-informed adviser possesses relevant information I do not have. The latter case distinctly highlights

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or