ABSTRACT In this article I read Freud’s theory of dream condensation alongside Blanchot and Derrida’s analysis of the literary fragment. Both these thinkers describe how an imperturbable secret provides an excess that calls out for a response. I thus analyze the structure of dream interpretation as one where the latent dream thoughts respond to a call imbedded in the condensed dream-content. Through a deconstructive reading of Freud and a quote by Nietzsche, I argue that the structure of this call is (...) the condensation of the secret, which is both a mark and occurrence of forgetting. (shrink)

Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.

Recent controversial cases of killings by police have generated competing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Lives Matter proponents claim that the focus on and protests in light of police killings of unarmed black persons is unwarranted. Part of this dispute turns on the moral evaluation of the killing of citizens by law enforcement. To address the dispute, I develop an account of the special moral obligations of law enforcement and show how it can be applied. I (...) argue that members of law enforcement have special moral obligations against killing citizens. The account generates moral guidance for law enforcement in a number of other ways. It implies, finally, that the Blue Lives Matter proponents fundamentally misunderstand the ethics of law enforcement. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the familiar non-Archimedean field of hyperreals from Abraham Robinson’s nonstandard analysis and Paolo Giordano’s ring extension of the real numbers containing nilpotents. There is an interesting nontrivial homomorphism from the limited hyperreals into the Giordano ring, whereas the only nontrivial homomorphism from the Giordano ring to the hyperreals is the standard part function, namely, the function that maps a value to its real part. We interpret this asymmetry to (...) mean that the nilpotent infinitesimal values of Giordano’s ring are “smaller” than the hyperreal infinitesimals. By viewing things from the “point of view” of the hyperreals, all nilpotents are zero, whereas by viewing things from the “point of view” of Giordano’s ring, nonnilpotent, nonzero infinitesimals register as nonzero infinitesimals. This suggests that Giordano’s infinitesimals are more fine-grained. (shrink)

Aulisio and Arora argue that the moral significance of value imposition explains the moral distinction between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. The former objects to directly performing actions, whereas the latter objects to indirectly assisting actions on the grounds that indirectly assisting makes the actor morally complicit. Examples of non-traditional conscientious objection include objections to the duty to refer. Typically, we expect physicians who object to a practice to refer, but the non-traditional conscientious objector physician refuses to refer. (...) Aulisio and Arora argue that physicians have a duty to refer because refusing to do so violates the patient’s values. While we agree with Aulisio and Arora’s conclusions, we argue value imposition cannot adequately explain the moral difference between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. Treating autonomy as the freedom to live in accordance with one’s values, as Aulisio and Arora do, is a departure from traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy and consequently fails to explain the moral difference between the two kinds of objection. We outline how a traditional liberal understanding of autonomy would help in this regard, and we make two additional arguments—one that maintains that non-traditional conscientious objection undermines society’s autonomy, and another that maintains that it undermines the physician-patient relationship—to establish why physicians have a duty to refer. (shrink)

I offer a novel solution to Zeno’s paradox of The Arrow by introducing nilpotent infinitesimal lengths of time. Nilpotents are nonzero numbers that yield zero when multiplied by themselves a certain number of times. Zeno’s Arrow goes like this: during the present, a flying arrow is moving in virtue of its being in flight. However, if the present is a single point in time, then the arrow is frozen in place during that time. Therefore, the arrow is both moving and (...) at rest. In “Zeno’s Arrow, Divisible Infinitesimals, and Chrysippus,” White suggests using an infinitesimal value as the length of the present. Contra Zeno, this allows the arrow to be moving in the present, rather than frozen in place. In this paper, I follow the basic outline of White’s solution but argue that his solution suffers from arbitrariness and a related theoretical artificiality in relation to the system of infinitesimals he invokes, viz. in relation to the hyperreal infinitesimals of nonstandard analysis. After arguing that any solution to the paradox must satisfy certain theoretical requirements, I examine White’s solution alongside two nilpotent solutions. One of these solutions is inspired by F.W. Lawvere’s Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis and the other is inspired by Paolo Giordano’s ring of Fermat Reals. I argue that Giordano’s nilpotents supply the best answer to Zeno’s paradox. (shrink)

After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result in a (...) wholesale reduction of iterated to one-shot revision. The present paper offers grounds to hold that these principles should be significantly weakened and that the reductionist thesis should ultimately be rejected. Furthermore, the considerations provided suggest a close connection between the logic of iterated belief change and the logic of evidential relevance. (shrink)

Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative practice poses similar risks to the wider community of patients (...) and society as a whole. Given these concerns, how should we control and oversee innovative practice, and in particular, how should we coordinate innovative practice and clinical research? In this article, I argue that an ethical approach to overseeing innovative practice must encourage the early transition to rigorous clinical research without delaying or deferring the development of beneficial innovations or violating the autonomy rights of clinicians and their patients. (shrink)

Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. (...) While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values. (shrink)

Organizations are making massive investments in artificial intelligence, and recent demonstrations and achievements highlight the immense potential for AI to improve organizational and human welfare. Yet realizing the potential of AI necessitates a better understanding of the various ethical issues involved with deciding to use AI, training and maintaining it, and allowing it to make decisions that have moral consequences. People want organizations using AI and the AI systems themselves to behave ethically, but ethical behavior means different things to different (...) people, and many ethical dilemmas require trade-offs such that no course of action is universally considered ethical. How should organizations using AI—and the AI itself—process ethical dilemmas where humans disagree on the morally right course of action? Though a variety of ethical AI frameworks have been suggested, these approaches do not adequately address how people make ethical evaluations of AI systems or how to incorporate the fundamental disagreements people have regarding what is and is not ethical behavior. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we theorize that a person will perceive an organization’s use of AI, its data procedures, and the resulting AI decisions as ethical to the extent that those decisions resonate with the person’s moral foundations. Since people hold diverse moral foundations, this highlights the crucial need to consider individual moral differences at multiple levels of AI. We discuss several unresolved issues and suggest potential approaches for thinking about conflicts in moral judgments concerning AI. (shrink)

According to instrumental proceduralism, political power is justified when it is the output of a reliable procedure. In this paper, I examine how procedures are supposed to confer normative properties. Based on this assessment, I conclude that many proceduralists set the reliability bar too low. Next, I motivate two additional requirements for instrumental procedures. I introduce the notion of “predictable” procedural failure and argue that in order for a procedure to confer legitimacy or other normative properties on its output, it (...) must not have failed predictably. Finally, I argue that even when procedures are highly reliable, it must not be the case that their failures fall disproportionately on certain people. The goal is to develop an instrumental proceduralism that is more sensitive to the failures of real institutions. (shrink)

As the ongoing literature on the paradoxes of the Lottery and the Preface reminds us, the nature of the relation between probability and rational acceptability remains far from settled. This article provides a novel perspective on the matter by exploiting a recently noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it is noted that a number (...) of these constraints will be satisfied if and only if acceptable sentences are true under all valuations in a distinguished non-empty set W. Drawing inspiration from distance-based aggregation procedures, various scoring rule based membership conditions for W are discussed and a possible point of contact with ranking theory is considered. The paper closes with various suggestions for further research. (shrink)

In order to sketch an account of a moral commitment to persons as such, the essay examines empathy, sympathy, and benevolence as they arise first in special relations and then are reconstructed to include the stranger under the rubric of "extensive benevolence" or "universal love." The account, the author argues, must deal with conceptual empowerment and authorizing reasons, weakness and evil, normative conflict, and the relation of benevolence to justice.

It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne out (...) by the sharp model but not by any promising incarnation of its imprecise counterpart. After first pointing out that Elga has fallen short of establishing that his principle is indeed uniquely borne out by the sharp model, I cast aspersions on its plausibility. I show that a slight weakening of the principle is satisfied by at least one, but interestingly not all, varieties of the imprecise model and point out that Elga has failed to motivate his stronger commitment. (shrink)

A great deal of theorizing has emerged about the economic ramifications of increased automation. However, significantly less attention has been paid to the potential effects of AI-driven occupational replacement on less measurable metrics—in particular, what it feels like to be replaced. In politics, we see examples of nation-states and extremist groups invoking the concept of replacement as a motivator for political action, unrest, and, at times, violence. In the realm of workplace automation, and in particular, in the case of AI-driven (...) workplace automation, the replacement of human labor with artificial labor is an explicit goal. In this paper, we suggest that, given the effects that the experience of a sense of replacement has in political contexts and the potential for that sense of replacement to motivate unrest and violence, we should be concerned about the widely predicted replacement of workers over the coming decades beyond the potential economic challenges which may arise. (shrink)

The world passed the halfway point of oil supply in 2005. World demand for oil likely will severely outstrip supply in 2008, leading to increasingly higher oil prices. Consequences are likely to include increasing gasoline prices, rapidly increasing inflation, and subsequently a series of increasingly severe recessions followed by a worldwide economic depression. Consequences may include, particularly in industrialized countries such as the United States, massive unemployment, economic collapse, and chaos.

I outline four competing probabilistic accounts of contrastive evidential support and consider various considerations that might help arbitrate between these. The upshot of the discussion is that the so-called 'Law of Likelihood' is to be preferred to any of the alternatives considered.

Scholars who engage with texts that were written by George Herbert Mead (e.g., 1925e.g., 1926e.g., 1929e.g., 1932e.g., 1938) in the latter half of the 1920s are faced with the task of comprehending Mead’s interpretation of relativity theory and also understanding why relativity theory was considered by Mead to have such profound implications for his own philosophy. As several scholars of Mead’s work have explained (e.g., Joas 1997; Martin 2007; Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991), Mead was a realist. Mead opposed psychophysical dualism (...) (Cook 1979) and both the behaviorist and the idealist implications that could follow from such a dualism. He wanted to explain human conduct in terms of the self-determination of human .. (shrink)

In this paper I examine John Rawls’s understanding of desert. Against Samuel Scheffler, I maintain that the reasons underlying Rawls’s rejection of the traditional view of distributive desert in A Theory of Justice also commit him to rejecting the traditional view of retributive desert. Unlike Rawls’s critics, however, I view this commitment in a positive light. I also argue that Rawls’s later work commits him to rejecting retributivism as a public justification for punishment.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 565-595, Fall 2024.

It appears to have gone unnoticed in the literature that Pollock's widely endorsed analysis of evidential defeat entails a remarkably strong symmetry principle, according to which, for any three propositions D, E and H, if both E and D provide a reason to believe H, then D is a defeater for E's support for H if and only if, in turn, E is a defeater for D's support for H. After illustrating the counterintuitiveness of this constraint, a simple, more suitable, (...) alternative to the Pollockian account is offered. (shrink)

Progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence has spurred the widespread adoption of automated decision systems (ADS). An extensive literature explores what conditions must be met for these systems' decisions to be fair. However, questions of legitimacy -- why those in control of ADS are entitled to make such decisions -- have received comparatively little attention. This paper shows that when such questions are raised theorists often incorrectly conflate legitimacy with either public acceptance or other substantive values such as fairness, (...) accuracy, expertise or efficiency. In search of better theories, we conduct a critical analysis of the philosophical literature on the legitimacy of the state, focusing on consent, public reason, and democratic authorisation. This analysis reveals that the prevailing understanding of legitimacy in analytical political philosophy is also ill-suited to the task of establishing whether and when ADS are legitimate. The paper thus clarifies expectations for theories of ADS legitimacy and charts a path for a future research programme on the topic. (shrink)

This is a survey of the concept of continuity. Efforts to explicate continuity have produced a plurality of philosophical conceptions of continuity that have provably distinct expressions within contemporary mathematics. I claim that there is a divide between the conceptions that treat the whole continuum as prior to its parts, and those conceptions that treat the parts of the continuum as prior to the whole. Along this divide, a tension emerges between those conceptions that favor philosophical idealizations of continuity and (...) those that are more readily available for mathematico-scientific use. (shrink)

The structure of police agencies, especially how the boundaries of their authority are drawn, is a crucial element of their legitimacy. Poorly drawn boundaries encourage unjustified police power and illegitimate police agencies. Claiming that realized political entities in developed democracies are illegitimate is fraught, in part because the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political power can be subtle in practice. To overcome this difficulty, I propose thinking in terms of “legitimacy-risk profiles.” I develop a way of determining a measure of (...) risk to legitimacy associated with various kinds of police power and agency structure. I then use it to explore the institutional boundaries recommended by the legitimacy-risk profiles of different kinds of policing. The result is a normative framework for thinking about political legitimacy at the realized—that is, not the fundamental and idealized—level. (shrink)

A survey of the recent literature suggests that physicians should engage religious patients on religious grounds when the patient cites religious considerations for a medical decision. We offer two arguments that physicians ought to avoid engaging patients in this manner. The first is the Public Reason Argument. We explain why physicians are relevantly akin to public officials. This suggests that it is not the physician’s proper role to engage in religious deliberation. This is because the public character of a physician’s (...) role binds him/her to public reason, which precludes the use of religious considerations. The second argument is the Fiduciary Argument. We show that the patient-physician relationship is a fiduciary relationship, which suggests that the patient has the clinical expectation that physicians limit themselves to medical considerations. Since engaging in religious deliberations lies outside this set of considerations, such engagement undermines trust and therefore damages the patient-physician relationship. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of hypergunk: that is, it is possible that there exists an x such that every part of x has a proper part and, for any set S of parts of x, there is a set S′ of parts of...

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the (...) criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

The traditional Bayesian qualitative account of evidential support (TB) takes assertions of the form 'E evidentially supports H' to affirm the existence of a two-place relation of evidential support between E and H. The analysans given for this relation is $C(H,E) =_{def} Pr(H\arrowvertE) \models Pr(H)$ . Now it is well known that when a hypothesis H entails evidence E, not only is it the case that C(H,E), but it is also the case that C(H&X,E) for any arbitrary X. There is (...) a widespread feeling that this is a problematic result for TB. Indeed, there are a number of cases in which many feel it is false to assert 'E evidentially supports H&X', despite H entailing E. This is known, by those who share that feeling, as the 'tacking problem' for Bayesian confirmation theory. After outlining a generalization of the problem, I argue that the Bayesian response has so far been unsatisfactory. I then argue the following: (i) There exists, either instead of, or in addition to, a two-place relation of confirmation, a three-place, 'contrastive' relation of confirmation, holding between an item of evidence E and two competing hypotheses H₁ and H₂. (ii) The correct analysans of the relation is a particular probabilistic inequality, abbreviated C(H₁, H₂, E). (iii) Those who take the putative counterexamples to TB discussed to indeed be counterexamples are interpreting the relevant utterances as implicitly contrastive, contrasting the relevant hypothesis H₁ with a particular competitor H₂. (iv) The probabilistic structure of these cases is such that ∼C(H₁, H₂, E). This solves my generalization of the tacking problem. I then conclude with some thoughts about the relationship between the traditional Bayesian account of evidential support and my proposed account of the three-place relation of confirmation. (shrink)

Discussions of the issue of iterated belief revision are commonly accompanied by the presentation of three “concrete” operators: natural, restrained and lexicographic. This raises a natural question: What is so distinctive about these three particular methods? Indeed, the common axiomatic ground for work on iterated revision, the AGM and Darwiche-Pearl postulates, leaves open a whole range of alternative proposals. In this paper, we show that it is satisfaction of an additional principle of “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives”, inspired by the literature (...) on Social Choice, that unites and sets apart our three “elementary” revision operators. A parallel treatment of iterated belief contraction is also given, yielding a family of elementary contraction operators that includes, besides the well-known “conservative” and “moderate” operators, a new contraction operator that is related to restrained revision. (shrink)

Survivors of trauma commonly report feeling as though a part of themselves has died. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of this phenomenon, drawing on Waldenfels' notion of the split self. We argue that trauma gives rise to an explicit tension between the lived and corporeal body which is so profoundly distressing that it can be experienced by survivors as the death of part of oneself. We explore the ways in which this is manifest in the posttraumatic phenomena of dissociation; (...) indescribability; and the fragmentation and repetition of time. Acknowledging that the traumatic loss of part of oneself involves significant grief, we then consider whether the bereavement literature might be helpfully applied. We focus specifically upon the continuing bonds model, which emphasizes an ongoing and meaningful relationship with the deceased through an active process of memorializing. In considering how this might be appropriated to the death of the self in trauma, we suggest that the development of an intrapersonal relationship between parts lost and living might, over time, offer a unique way in which to adapt to loss and approach the future. (shrink)

Harry P. Reeder has produced an indispensible tool for the study of Felix Kaufmann's thought. The book opens with an introduction to the thought of Felix Kaufmann followed by chapters on methodology, science, social sciences and philosophy.

Buddhism originated and developed in an Indian cultural context that featured many first-person practices for producing and exploring states of consciousness through the systematic training of attention. In contrast, the dominant methods of investigating the mind in Western cognitive science have emphasized third-person observation of the brain and behavior. In this chapter, we explore how these two different projects might prove mutually beneficial. We lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural cognitive science by using one traditional Buddhist model of the mind (...) – that of the five aggregates – as a lens for examining contemporary cognitive science conceptions of consciousness. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan, by Alfred Archer and Jake Wojtowicz, with contributions from Adam Kadlac, Joe Slater, Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, and Nina Windgätter. The discussion covers a range of topics, including the form of love involved in fandom, the epistemic status of fans, fictionalism, and the role of communities in fandom.

What kind of persons could engage in political torture? Not only the morally impaired who lack empathy or compassion, or even the merely obedient, but also the righteous who struggle with conscience, and the realists who set morality aside.

Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The (...) first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement. (shrink)