{"title":"Assertoric mindreading","authors":"Peter van Elswyk","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70016","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers an explanation of how assertions express that the speaker has a propositional attitude toward what's asserted. The explanation is that this feature of assertion is owed to a hearer's spontaneous mindreading. I call this the <span>assertoric mindreading hypothesis</span>. Once developed and defended, the hypothesis is used to investigate which attitude is expressed. Since the attitude expressed is the attitude tracked during mindreading, the attitude must have a certain profile. It is argued that only factive attitudes like knowledge have this profile. Non-factive attitudes like belief or acceptance are ineligible.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144136924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Axiological pessimism, procreation and collective responsibility","authors":"Andrea Sauchelli","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70015","url":null,"abstract":"A form of pessimism can support the claim that we have a collective duty to prevent the creation of additional human beings. More specifically, I argue that axiological pessimism, which suggests that human existence is overall bad (for humans) because of a form of evil it causes, implies that we should end human procreation, provided that we do not thereby generate further such evil. In turn, this conclusion can support anti-natalism, the normative view that we should refrain from procreating.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No right to an explanation","authors":"Brett Karlan, Henrik D. Kugelberg","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70008","url":null,"abstract":"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 that might be meant by a ‘right to an explanation,’ we argue that, for the most plausible and popular versions (a right to an explanation for a specific bureaucratic decision, a right to an explanation grounded in public reason considerations, or a right to a higher-level explanation of an entire system of automated decision-making), such a right is either superfluous, impossible to obtain, or not the best way to secure the relevant normative goods. We also argue that proponents of a right to an explanation carve off certain kinds of automated decisions as requiring more justification than others in similar areas of social (and natural) science policy, a demarcation we argue is unjustified. While there will be some cases where an explanation is the only thing that can secure an important normative good (e.g. when an explanation is the only thing that would catch an unjustified individual decision), we argue these cases are too rare and scattered to ground something as weighty as a right to an explanation.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143946106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Boltzmann brains and cognitive instability","authors":"Adam Elga","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70014","url":null,"abstract":"A <jats:italic>Boltzmann brain</jats:italic> 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 seems to be “cognitively unstable”: It seems unstable to end up confident that you are a Boltzmann brain because you should then think that your apparent cosmological evidence was randomly generated and hence that your confidence was unwarranted. But it also seems unstable to end up confident that you are not a Boltzmann brain because then you should follow your cosmological evidence to the conclusion that many Boltzmann brain duplicates of you exist, and hence that you are probably a Boltzmann brain. A case involving unreliable vision exhibits a similar threat of instability. A simple Bayesian model of that case, however, shows that the threat is an illusion. And a corresponding model suggests that the same goes for the threat of instability associated with Boltzmann brains.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143877892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Margaret cavendish on passion, pleasure, and propriety","authors":"Daniel Whiting","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70011","url":null,"abstract":"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 is a problematic one for Cavendish. After defending my reading through a consideration of Cavendish's reflections on mental health and disorder, I explore ways in which she might revise her commitments to avoid the problem. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate the extent to which Cavendish's theory of the passions draws on Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas that loomed large in late sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century writings on the topic.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143862881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Freedom first: On coercion and coercive offers","authors":"Pascal Brixel","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70013","url":null,"abstract":"The dominant theories of coercion and coercive offers today are moralized, in the sense that they explain the <jats:italic>prima facie</jats:italic> 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 incentivization is <jats:italic>prima facie</jats:italic> wrong fundamentally because it threatens another's freedom. Coercion and coercive offers, I argue, are essentially exercises of power over another person for the purpose of steering that person's practical reasoning. This power‐dependent way of trying to steer another's practical reasoning threatens the other's freedom, thereby violates a general <jats:italic>prima facie</jats:italic> duty of respect, and is <jats:italic>prima facie</jats:italic> wrong for that reason.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143862852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sakes exist","authors":"Tristan Grøtvedt Haze","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70012","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143847048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Proactivity, Partiality, and Procreation","authors":"Hong Wai Cheong","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70010","url":null,"abstract":"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 the other hand, we have philosophers like Douglas and Podgorski seeking to undermine its moral justifiability by arguing that we possess no reasons of special concern at all to engage in pre‐parental partiality. This paper aims to rescue the moral justifiability of pre‐parental partiality in light of these arguments. In particular, a novel account of our pre‐parental partiality obligations is developed; one which sees our special reasons (as <jats:italic>prospective parents</jats:italic>) for engaging in pre‐parental partiality as arising from the special reasons for engaging in standard parental partiality that we come to possess (as <jats:italic>parents</jats:italic>) in the future. The result is a compelling moral justification for pre‐parental partiality that amends itself to a whole platitude of views of what our standard parental obligations of partiality amount to.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143822788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The agentive achievement of acceptance","authors":"Samuel Boardman","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70009","url":null,"abstract":"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. It is shown that ‘accept’ is polysemous between a non‐stative and a stative sense. In addition to its evident stative sense, ‘accept’ has a non‐stative “agentive achievement” sense which denotes the essentially intentional action of adopting the state of acceptance. Ultimately, the paper returns to Jonathan Cohen's view of acceptance and argues that it is more charitable to attribute to him the view that to accept is to adopt the state of acceptance.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143782466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is Kant's critique of metaphysics obsolete?","authors":"Nicholas F. Stang","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70002","url":null,"abstract":"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 task is more difficult (which I call the ‘substantive’ view of metaphysics). I then canvass responses that the substantive metaphysician can give to this Kantian demand for an explanation of reference in metaphysics. I argue that these responses are either inadequate or depend, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea of ‘joint carving’: carving at the joints is part of the explanation of referencefacts quite generally and our metaphysical terms in particular refer because they carve at the joints. I examine Ted Sider's recent work on joint carving and structure and argue that it cannot fill the explanatory gap. I conclude that this is reason <jats:italic>ceterus paribus</jats:italic> to reject the substantive view of metaphysics. Kant's critique, far from being obsolete, applies to the most cutting‐edge of contemporary meta‐metaphysical views.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143782465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}