{"title":"Visual Icons","authors":"Jake Quilty‐Dunn","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70141","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophers often characterize perception as image‐like. There is little agreement, however, about what constitutes an imagistic or iconic representation. This article identifies five signature properties of iconic representations endorsed in the philosophical and scientific literature: item‐richness, feature‐richness, spatiotemporal composition, holistic composition, and analog primitives. The article identifies a candidate class of visual processes— <jats:italic>scene‐based early vision</jats:italic> —and argues that the signature properties of icons cluster together in those processes. It then uses this ostension of a natural kind in visual perception to sketch a deeper theory of icons, outlining a hierarchy of more and less restricted forms of iconicity. Iconic representations are compositional structures built by coordinating analog dimensions in a multidimensional space. Visual icons are, like photographs and realist paintings, a more restricted case: They involve coordination of optional, repeatable <jats:italic>dependent</jats:italic> dimensions with mandatory, non‐repeatable <jats:italic>independent</jats:italic> dimensions. Coordinating dependent and independent dimensions, with some additional constraints, allows visual icons to index repeatable feature‐instances in computationally useful ways and provides a deeper understanding of why icons exhibit their characteristic properties.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148355595","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":"Rational Defeat Beyond Belief","authors":"Joshua Schechter","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70135","url":null,"abstract":"Epistemologists typically discuss defeat as applying to beliefs and other cognitive states. But many other kinds of mental states can also be defeated, including emotions. This article argues that there are strong structural analogies between the rational defeat of beliefs and the rational defeat of other kinds of mental states, analogies that call for a unified explanation. In the case of belief, there are at least three ways evidence can have a defeating effect: It can act as a rebutter, an undercutter, or a higher‐order defeater. Many other kinds of mental states can also be defeated in each of these three ways. This suggests that there is a general account of rational defeat that applies across mental states. This article develops such an account, according to which defeat concerns the fittingness of mental states.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"337 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148321745","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":"What's Wrong With “Conceptual Amelioration”?","authors":"Lidal Dror","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70133","url":null,"abstract":"Conceptual amelioration aims to make the world a more just place by ameliorating our concepts. I offer three arguments against this enterprise as currently practiced to show how social philosophy aimed at producing social change can be better practiced. First, ameliorators often fail to provide plausible stories to vindicate their claims about how conceptual amelioration will unfold in our nonideal world. Second, ameliorators’ focus on postulating meanings of “concepts” risks distracting from important normative theorizing about justice. Third, ameliorators tend to overstate the importance of conceptual change for social change. The upshot is that, since such projects tend to be done poorly on their own terms and to evince excessively idealistic views of social change, we should reconsider how to engage in such projects. Drawing on these criticisms, I argue that if conceptual amelioration should be practiced, it should be in service of ideology critique.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"131 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148314066","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":"Against Proxy Optimization","authors":"Sven Neth","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70138","url":null,"abstract":"I discuss conditions under which maximizing a proxy utility function is harmful and suggest this poses problems for applying decision theory.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148299394","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":"External‐World Skepticism and the New Ethics of Belief","authors":"James Fritz","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70140","url":null,"abstract":"External‐world skepticism challenges, among other things, the epistemic credentials of beliefs about other people. Some external‐world skeptics deny that I know my loved ones exist; some claim that my belief that my loved ones exist is epistemically impermissible. However, abandoning this belief would be highly unattractive. In fact, new developments in the ethics of belief provide the groundwork for an argument that skeptical doubts about loved ones, even if well‐grounded, are prima facie morally wrongful. I defend the external‐world skeptic from this moral criticism. Our moral obligations, I note, are sensitive to our epistemic limitations; the fact that you have no epistemic reason to believe that your uncle exists, for instance, can explain why you are under no moral obligation to visit him in the hospital. Drawing on this point, I demonstrate that we face no moral obligation to avoid skeptical doubt when that doubt is genuinely well‐grounded.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148299365","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":"Attending With Feeling: The Normative Structure of Emotional Attention","authors":"Juliette Vazard","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70132","url":null,"abstract":"In assessing an emotional episode, we can ask whether the intentional object of the emotion is that which the subject ought to be paying attending to. If the intentional object is not that which the subject should be paying attention to, what should be the target of normative assessment? Although emotions have been accused of drawing us into inappropriate fixations, the source of such attentional misdirection remains unclear. I argue against accounts that locate attentional inappropriateness in the mere tokening of thoughts that go on to elicit emotions, on the grounds that thoughts provide reasons to emote only insofar as an agent is sensitive to them. I also challenge the view that emotions can be epistemically faulty for failing to track the most important features of a situation, contending that emotions lack a salience‐tracking function. Instead, drawing on Wu's account of attention as guidance in action, I argue that the normative assessment of affective attention should target the diachronic emotional sensibilities that constitute one's attunement to certain evaluative aspects over others. Norms of attention might thus call, first and foremost, for the refinement of these sensibilities.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"180 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148299665","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":"Consent and the Formation of Preferences","authors":"Richard Pettigrew","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70131","url":null,"abstract":"Under ideal conditions, explicit consent and related actions usually change the moral facts in a distinctive way: they make something permissible that was previously impermissible. But they don't do this if the consent is coerced. And it seems they also don't do it if the preferences on which the consent is based were formed in particular ways: if they were formed via certain mechanisms under pressure from unjust social forces, for instance. In this paper, I describe a range of mechanisms by which our preferences might be formed, determine which of those can give rise to preferences that ground effective consent and which cannot, and explain why each mechanism falls on its side of the division.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148286041","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":"Parity and the Permissivism Puzzle: A Defense of Epistemic Options","authors":"Chris Tucker, Elizabeth Jackson","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70129","url":null,"abstract":"Moral philosophers generally affirm that there are moral options: a single person sometimes has multiple morally permissible actions at a time. But epistemologists generally deny that there are epistemic options: a single person never has multiple epistemically permissible doxastic attitudes at a time. This asymmetry is striking. Furthermore, there are intuitive cases of epistemic options. However, it's not clear how these cases differ from cases where withholding is required, such as a coin flip case. We call this the Permissivism Puzzle. In this paper, we offer a solution to the Permissivism Puzzle and defend the possibility of epistemic options by appealing to epistemic parity, which is something like imprecise equality. Not only does epistemic parity help solve the puzzle, but it also helps the permissivist respond to notable objections from, for example, arbitrariness and accuracy.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148286051","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":"Correction to “Why Paternalism is Wrong (When it is Wrong)”","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70128","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148286048","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":"High Standards","authors":"Pekka Väyrynen","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70125","url":null,"abstract":"Evaluative adjectives are gradable. The standard for falling under a gradable adjective “ <jats:italic>F</jats:italic> ” is either context‐relative or absolute. Some philosophers have recently used general linguistic tests to argue that “rational” and (moral) “good” are maximum‐degree absolute gradable adjectives: Only what's perfectly morally good strictly counts as morally “good,” and only what's optimally rational strictly counts as “rational.” Against maximalism, I defend a novel “high standards” account: counting as “rational” or morally “good” doesn't require the maximum degree of the relevant property, but “rational” and moral “good” are systematically associated with normatively demanding standards. Unlike maximalism, this account allows for scales of infinite value and that supererogation talk is coherent in its literal interpretation. One part of my argument draws on a broader range of linguistic phenomena than the debate has so far considered to undermine the linguistic case for maximalism. My results challenge the prevailing classification of gradable adjectives in linguistics into relative, maximum‐degree, and minimum‐degree absolute adjectives. Another part of my argument draws on special features of evaluative and normative discourse, which suggest that its standards tend to be demanding even when non‐maximal.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"173 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148289648","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}