{"title":"Reflecting on believability: on the epistemic approach to justifying implicit commitments","authors":"Maciej Głowacki, Mateusz Łełyk","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02215-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02215-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By definition, the implicit commitment of a formal theory <span>(textrm{Th})</span> consists of sentences that are independent of the axioms of <span>(textrm{Th})</span>, but their acceptance is implicit in the acceptance of <span>(textrm{Th})</span>. In Cieśliński (2017, 2018), the phenomenon of implicit commitments was studied from the epistemological perspective through the lenses of the formal theory of believability. The current paper provides a comprehensive proof-theoretic analysis of this approach and compares it to other main theories of implicit commitments. We argue that the formal results presented in the paper favour the believability theory over its main competitors. However, there is still a fly in the ointment. We argue that in its current formulation, the theory cannot deliver all the goods for which it was defined. In particular, being amenable to a generalised conservativeness argument, it does not support the view that the notion of truth is epistemically light. At the end of the paper, we discuss possible ways out of the problem.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142594704","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 new internalism about prudential value","authors":"Anthony Kelley","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02231-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02231-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>According to internalism about prudential value, the token states of affairs that are basically good for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your positive attitudes. It is commonly thought that any theory of welfare that implies internalism is guaranteed to respect the alienation constraint, the doctrine that you cannot be alienated from that which is basically good for you. In this paper, I show that extant formulations of internalism do not have this desirable feature. The central defect of traditional formulations is that they do not respect an important but overlooked truth about alienation: namely, that even if a state of affairs is suitably connected to your <i>positive</i> attitudes, your <i>negative</i> attitudes can nonetheless render you alienated from it. By taking into account the relevance of the negative attitudes, I propose the new internalism—the view that <i>x</i> is basically good for you only if you have a <i>net</i> positive attitude towards it—as a way to advance our thinking about what is required to avoid alienating theories of welfare.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142574599","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":"Beautiful, troubling art: in defense of non-summative judgment","authors":"P. Quinn White","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02229-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02229-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is “yes” (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork’s overall aesthetic value, i.e., as merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., “the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically purient perspective on its female lead.” Such a “non-summative” judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like “it’s a 6/10” or “it’s a pretty good movie!” I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people’s character.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142536578","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":"Unpossessed evidence revisited: our options are limited","authors":"Sanford C. Goldberg","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02248-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02248-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Several influential thought experiments from Harman 1973 purport to show that unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge. Recently, some epistemologists have appealed to these thought experiments in defense of a logically stronger thesis: unpossessed evidence can defeat justification. But these appeals fail to appreciate that Harman himself thought of his examples as Gettier cases, and so would have rejected this strengthening of his thesis. On the contrary, he would have held that while unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge, it leaves justification intact. In this paper I seek to undermine the viability of Harman’s position. If this is correct, contemporary epistemology faces a choice: either we reject that unpossessed evidence in Harman-style cases bears on knowledge <i>at all</i>, or else we must allow that it undermines knowledge <i>by defeating justification</i>. The former option must explain why Harman’s thought experiments elicit strong ‘no knowledge’ intuitions; the latter option embraces a minority view about the bearing of social expectations on the assessment of knowledge <i>and justification</i> (= the doctrine of normative defeat).</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142536582","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":"Promotionalism, orthogonality, and instrumental convergence","authors":"Nathaniel Sharadin","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02212-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02212-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Suppose there are no in-principle restrictions on the contents of arbitrarily intelligent agents’ goals. According to “instrumental convergence” arguments, potentially scary things follow. I do two things in this paper. First, focusing on the influential version of the instrumental convergence argument due to Nick Bostrom, I explain why such arguments require an account of “promotion”, i.e., an account of what it is to “promote” a goal. Then, I consider whether extant accounts of promotion in the literature—in particular, <i>probabilistic</i> and <i>fit-based</i> views of promotion—can be used to support dangerous instrumental convergence. I argue that neither account of promotion can do the work. The opposite is true: accepting either account of promotion undermines support for instrumental convergence arguments’ existentially worrying conclusions. The conclusion is that we needn’t be scared—at least not because of arguments concerning instrumental convergence.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142486786","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":"Testimonial liberalism and the balance of epistemic goals","authors":"Ross F. Patrizio","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02244-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02244-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There are two broad views in the epistemology of testimony, conservatism and liberalism. The two views disagree over a particular necessary condition on testimonial justification: the positive reasons requirement (PRR). Perhaps the most prominent objection levelled at liberalism from the conservative camp stems from <i>gullibility</i>; without PRR, the thought goes, an objectionable form of gullibility looms large for liberals. In this paper I aim to make two main contributions: to introduce a new metric for adjudicating this debate; and to argue that, from the perspective of this new metric, the liberal view is stronger than has been appreciated. Drawing on work from James (The Will to believe and other essays in Popular Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1896), Goldman (Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986), and Kelp et al. (Synthese 197:5187–5202, 2020), I firstly countenance the distinction between <i>positive</i> and <i>negative</i> epistemic measures. Positive measures concern, roughly, the acquisition of truths, whereas negative measures concern the avoidance of falsehoods. Both, it is argued, are relevant to epistemic justification, but this debate has proceeded in such a way as to overemphasise the importance of the latter over the former. Once this distinction is made, new conceptual terrain opens for the liberal. Rather than being resigned to a predominantly defensive role—of mitigating worries about negative measures—the liberal can go on the offensive, and explore the independent epistemic strengths of their position. The upshot is that liberals have a new way to dispel their most prominent objection.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142449788","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":"Incommensurability and population-level bioethics","authors":"Anders Herlitz","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02239-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02239-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper introduces incommensurability, its potential relevance to population-level bioethics, and thecontributions to the special issue. It provides an overview of recent research on incommensurability, outlines somereasons to believe in its possibility and relevance, and presents some problems and opportunities that arise onceone accepts that incommensurability is possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142449789","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":"Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics","authors":"Tom Ralston","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02242-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02242-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of generics, since it takes speakers’ judgments at face value and ignores the non-semantic factors that might affect these judgments. Leslie’s theory therefore overfits the data of our linguistic intuitions. I present a reconceptualised version of the Psychological Theory of Generics as a theory of how heuristics affect our judgements of the truth values of generics and discuss the application of this reconceptualised theory to some of the puzzles posed by generics, including their apparent content-sensitivity, their inferential asymmetry and their association with stereotyping and prejudice.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142449787","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 motivates humeanism?","authors":"Harjit Bhogal","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02238-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02238-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The ‘great divide’ in the metaphysics of science is between Humean approaches—which reduce scientific laws (and related modalities) to patterns of occurrent facts—and anti-Humean approaches—where laws stand apart from the patterns of events, making those events hold. There is a vast literature on this debate, with many problems raised for the Humean. But a major problem comes right at the start—what’s the motivation for Humeanism in the first place? This is rather unclear. In fact Maudlin, and other anti-Humeans, claim that there is no good motivation for Humeanism. I criticize a few influential approaches to motivating Humeanism—in particular those based on empiricism, pragmatism, and fidelity to science. In their place I suggest a different type of motivation, which has not received much attention in the literature, that rests on considerations of the role of <i>unification</i> in scientific understanding.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142449795","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":"Two approaches to grounding moral standing: interests-first or value-first?","authors":"Daniel Elbro","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02230-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02230-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142431293","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}
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