IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-06 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-04924-9

Ben White, Andy Clark, Avel Guènin-Carlut, Axel Constant, Laura Desirée Di Paolo

{"title":"Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.","authors":"Ben White, Andy Clark, Avel Guènin-Carlut, Axel Constant, Laura Desirée Di Paolo","doi":"10.1007/s11229-025-04924-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11229-025-04924-9","url":null,"abstract":"This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the \"classical\" extended mind, characterised by conditions such as \"trust and glue\" and phenomenal transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent's biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"205 2","pages":"81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11802705/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Shifty morals. 变化的道德。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-06-04 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-05088-2

Aleksander Domosławski

{"title":"Shifty morals.","authors":"Aleksander Domosławski","doi":"10.1007/s11229-025-05088-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05088-2","url":null,"abstract":"Epistemicism explains ignorance due to vagueness through semantic plasticity: the propensity of intensions of vague terms to shift across close linguistic communities. In the case of moral vagueness, e.g. when it's vague whether it's permissible to terminate a pregnancy after a certain number of days, epistemicism predicts that 'permissible' denotes distinct properties in different close linguistic communities. This epistemicist prediction has been pressured by arguments due to Miriam Schoenfield (Ethics 126: 257-282, 2016) as well as certain interpretations of the Moral Twin Earth cases. Schoenfield (Ethics 126: 257-282, 2016) argues that epistemicist account of moral vagueness leads to an unfeasible treatment of moral deliberation. A related worry comes from the Moral Twin Earth cases, which produce the intuition that the reference of moral terms such as 'permissible' remains stable across different linguistic communities. The problem for epistemicism is that metasemantic models that are meant to account for the Moral Twin Williams (Philosophical Review 127(1): 41-71, 2018) or Billy Dunaway and Tristram McPherson (Ergo 3(25): 239-279, 2016), predict that moral vocabulary is stable, which makes them incompatible with epistemicism. My aim is to make use of the inferentialist metasemantic framework presented by Robbie Williams (Philosophical Review 127(1): 41-71, 2018), and I refine it to give an epistemicist account of moral vagueness.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"205 6","pages":"237"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12137495/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Discounting past experience and the utility of memory: an empirical study. 贴现过去的经验和记忆的效用：一个实证研究。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-04-10 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-04992-x

Jack Shardlow, Ruth Lee, Patrick A O'Connor, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack

{"title":"Discounting past experience and the utility of memory: an empirical study.","authors":"Jack Shardlow, Ruth Lee, Patrick A O'Connor, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack","doi":"10.1007/s11229-025-04992-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-04992-x","url":null,"abstract":"It has been argued that adult humans are absolutely time biased towards the future, at least as far as purely hedonic experiences (pain/pleasure) are concerned. What this means is that they assign zero value to them once they are in the past. Recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this claim, suggesting that while adults hold asymmetrical hedonic preferences - preferring painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future - these preferences are not absolute and are often abandoned when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is greater in the past than in the future. Research has also examined whether such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign to experiential memories, since the recollection of past events can itself be pleasurable or aversive. We extend this line of research, investigating the utility people assign to experiential memories regardless of tense, and provide - to our knowledge - the first quantitative attempt at directly comparing the relative subjective weightings given to 'primary' experiences (i.e., living through the event first-hand) and 'secondary' (i.e., recollective or anticipatory) experiences. We find that when painful events are located in the past, the importance of the memory of the pain appears to be enhanced relative to its importance when they are located in the future. We also find extensive individual differences in hedonic preferences, reasons to adopt them, and willingness to trade them off. This research allows for a clearer picture of the utility people assign to the consumption of recollective experiences and of how this contributes to, or perhaps masks, time biases.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"205 4","pages":"166"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11985612/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144051854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The individuation of mathematical objects. 数学对象的个性化。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2024-12-23 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-024-04814-6

Bahram Assadian, Robert Fraser

引用次数: 0

Concept-formation and deep disagreements in theoretical and practical reasoning. 概念的形成和理论与实践推理的深刻分歧。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-01-20 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-024-04884-6

Michael Wee

{"title":"Concept-formation and deep disagreements in theoretical and practical reasoning.","authors":"Michael Wee","doi":"10.1007/s11229-024-04884-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11229-024-04884-6","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the idea that deep disagreements essentially involve disputes about what counts as good reasoning, whether it is theoretical or practical reasoning. My central claim is that deep disagreements involve radically different paradigms of some principle or notion that is constitutively basic to reasoning-I refer to these as \"basic concepts\". To defend this claim, I show how we can understand deep disagreements by accepting the indeterminacy of concept-formation: concepts are not set in stone but are responsive to human needs, and differences in individuating and ordering concepts lead to clashes in paradigms of reasoning. These clashes can be difficult to resolve because linguistic concepts, especially basic concepts, impose a normative structure onto thought to make reasoning possible at all. This, I also argue, is an authentically Wittgensteinian account of the nature of reasoning. While deep disagreements involving theoretical and practical reasoning both stem from the same root problem of clashing paradigms of basic concepts, I will also draw attention to the particularly radical indeterminacy of moral concept-formation, which makes moral deep disagreements more difficult to resolve. Over the course of the paper, I will discuss two examples of deep disagreements to illustrate and defend my central claim: deep disagreements over vaccines and the concept of \"evidence\" (theoretical reasoning) and deep disagreements over affirmative action and the concept of \"fairness\" (practical reasoning). I conclude by suggesting how my account of reasoning does not lead to moral relativism.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"205 2","pages":"58"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11753318/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143025419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Fairness and randomness in decision-making: the case of decision thresholds. 决策的公平性与随机性：以决策阈值为例。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-06-18 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-05091-7

Kate Vredenburgh

引用次数: 0

The hybrid account of activities 混合活动账户

IF 1.5 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2024-01-10 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-023-04452-4

K. H. Kalewold