IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2026-01-01 Epub Date: 2026-03-12 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-026-05503-2

Eline de Jong, Sebastian De Haro

{"title":"Technological Understanding: On the cognitive skill involved in the design and use of technological artefacts.","authors":"Eline de Jong, Sebastian De Haro","doi":"10.1007/s11229-026-05503-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-026-05503-2","url":null,"abstract":"Although several accounts of scientific understanding exist, the concept of understanding in relation to technology remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a philosophical account of technological understanding: the type of understanding that is required for and reflected by successfully designing and using technological artefacts. We develop this notion by building on the concept of scientific understanding. Drawing on parallels between science and technology, and specifically between scientific theories and technological artefacts, we extend the idea of scientific understanding into the realm of technology. We argue that, just as scientific understanding involves the ability to explain a phenomenon using a theory, technological understanding involves the ability to use a technological artefact to realise a practical aim. Both theories and artefacts are tools, and using them successfully requires the cognitive skill of understanding. Technological understanding is thus conceived as the ability to recognise how a practical aim can be achieved by using a technological artefact. In a context of design, this general notion of technological understanding is specified as the ability to design an artefact that, by producing a phenomenon through its physical structure, achieves the intended aim. By analogy with De Regt's criterion of the intelligibility of theories, we give, as a precondition for technological understanding, a criterion for the intelligibility of a technological artefact. We illustrate our concept of technological understanding through two running examples: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and superconducting quantum computers. Our account highlights the epistemic dimension of engaging with technology and, by allowing for context-dependent specifications, provides guidance for testing and improving technological understanding in specific contexts.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"207 3","pages":"121"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12982202/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147470037","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

AI-assisted rational decision-making. 人工智能辅助理性决策。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2026-01-01 Epub Date: 2026-03-23 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-026-05528-7

Daniel Villiger

{"title":"AI-assisted rational decision-making.","authors":"Daniel Villiger","doi":"10.1007/s11229-026-05528-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11229-026-05528-7","url":null,"abstract":"AI has become a common assistant for making choices, from minor to major ones. It can inform our beliefs relevant to a decision by both helping us to find existing information and generating new information. But in what ways and to what extent is AI useful when making a rational decision? The present paper provides answers to this question for three different types of choices: easy choices, hard choices, and transformative choices. In easy choices, where the rational action is, in principle, straightforward, AI can make the decision-making process more efficient and accurate, increasing derived value (at least in the long-term). In hard choices, where options are on a par, AI can help us when we commit to an option by assisting us in the creation process of new will-based reasons. In transformative choices, where we cannot, even in principle, know by ourselves which option maximizes expected value, AI cannot fill the epistemic or metaphysical gap characteristic of such choices, and therefore cannot enable rational decision-making. Overall, the analysis shows that if the values of our options do not already allow us to determine the rational choice without AI, its assistance does not change that.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"207 4","pages":"133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13009003/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147516198","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

When do we experience effort? 我们什么时候经历过努力？

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2026-01-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-06 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-05387-8

Eleanor Holton, Richard Holton

引用次数: 0

Can Evidential Pluralism mitigate bias and motivated reasoning? 证据多元化能减轻偏见和动机推理吗？

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2026-01-01 Epub Date: 2026-03-31 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-026-05530-z

Joe Jones, Alexandra Trofimov, Michael Wilde, Jon Williamson

引用次数: 0

Addictive Motivational Scaffolds and the Structure of Social Media. 成瘾动机支架与社交媒体结构。

IF 1.3 1区哲学

Synthese Pub Date : 2025-11-01 Epub Date: 2025-10-22 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-025-05312-z

Lorenzo Manuali

{"title":"Addictive Motivational Scaffolds and the Structure of Social Media.","authors":"Lorenzo Manuali","doi":"10.1007/s11229-025-05312-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11229-025-05312-z","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I propose an account of behavioral addiction in terms of what I call addictive motivational scaffolds (AMSs). Taking inspiration from recent work concerning psychiatric externalism and addiction, I propose and describe the concept of motivational scaffolding: external structure that enhances, supports, or regulates motivational processes in the mind-brain. I then argue that some motivational scaffolds are likely difference-makers in that they make an activity more addictive. The paper proceeds in three main parts. First, I describe the concept of a motivational scaffold and how it builds on recent literature in 4E cognition/psychiatric externalist accounts of addiction. Using gambling and gaming as paradigm cases of addictive activities, I then identify and empirically justify four addictive motivational scaffolds (AMSs): (1) quantified metrics, (2) reward uncertainty, (3) short time-horizon to reward, and (4) physically salient features. Finally, I apply my account to social media to showcase its philosophical usefulness: analyzing behavioral addiction in terms of AMSs uniquely elucidates the more structural aspects of the addictiveness of social media, which are undertheorized.","PeriodicalId":49452,"journal":{"name":"Synthese","volume":"206 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12799236/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145971423","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

Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control. 移动边界，扩展思维：环境技术和扩展的适应控制。

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

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

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

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