Thus the radical character of Hume's causal theory lies far more in its denial of externality to necessary causal connection than in any change he made in the character or status of the connection. It is obvious Hume did not mean his sceptical denial of the "reality" of the causal connection to imply that there is no association or connection between causes and effects. For to him the anarchy of chance, or "liberty," was the only alternative to the truth of (...) causal necessity; and his own "habit" necessity is designed to account for the fact that the universe and human life are not in reality anarchic. Yet in making causal connection a matter of mental association Hume came very close to subverting the idea of necessity despite himself. Had he developed his notion that necessity consists in the unopposable habit our minds form of passing from the idea of the cause to the idea of its effect, he might have seen that causal theory can be divested altogether of the idea of necessity without loss of order and regularity on either the mental or physical levels. Even though he did not do so, Hume's idea of necessity based on habit seems a somewhat attenuated version of causal necessity, since habit is not an inexorable force, and past conjunctions of a given cause and its effect in our experience do not in the least imply that future conjunctions will be the same. For when we anticipate the issue of an effect similar to past effects because the cause is similar to past causes, it is only by a mental presumption that we do so, a "determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant.". (shrink)

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus, this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

The ontology of the "tractatus", In terms of which objects are characterized as propertyless simples, Is coherent provided wittgenstein is not mistakenly taken to be a constructive atomist building complexes from simples. A geometrical model is given to illustrate this. It is also shown that an ontology like that of the "tractus" removes much of the conceptual puzzlement of modern particle physics and has implications for current debates about realism, Possible worlds and rigid designators.

The book highlights important research strategies in the quest to find thecause of SLI and to develop methods of prevention and treatment.

The Rockwell Lectures Of The Rice Institute.

In this paper, I argue that there is a picture of how law works that most legal theorists are implicitly committed to and take to be common ground. This Standard Picture (SP, for short) is generally unacknowledged and unargued for. SP leads to a characteristic set of concerns and problems and yields a distinctive way of thinking about how law is supposed to operate. I suggest that the issue of whether SP is correct is a fundamental one for the philosophy (...) of law, more basic, for example, than the issue that divides legal positivists and anti-positivists, at least as the latter issue is ordinarily understood. The goals of the paper are fourfold: 1) to identify and articulate in some detail the Standard Picture; 2) to show that SP is widely held and has important consequences for other debates in the philosophy of law; 3) to show that SP leads to a serious theoretical problem; 4) to sketch an alternative picture that promises to avoid this problem. I emphasize the modesty of these goals in one respect. I make no claim to refute SP or to fully develop and defend an alternative picture. (shrink)

The present article attempts to evaluate various tenets of moral philosophy by reviewing empirical data from the field of organizational justice bearing on: (a) people''s concerns about fairness in organizations, and (b) the consequences of following or not following rules of justice. With respect to concerns about fairness in organizations, utilitarian claims that people believe that fairness requires distributions of reward based on merit were assessed. Similarly, evidence was reviewed bearing on the claim of psychological egoists that judgments of fairness (...) reflect a self-interested bias. Finally, Kant''s view that people should never lie was evaluated in light of evidence describing people''s actual attitudes toward lying. In all three cases, the underlying philosophical premises were concluded to be overly simplistic in view of complexities about human nature revealed in empirical research. In addition, evidence was reviewed that shed light on the teleological claims of utilitarians regarding the purported benefits of following two common organizational practices — using merit-based pay, and punishing harmdoers. Here, too, the empirical evidence (findings that these techniques do not consistently yield the greatest good for the greatest number) suggests that the premise underlying utilitarian thought is based on unfounded, overly simplistic assumptions about the effects of following various allegedly moral ideas. It is concluded that our analyses provide a useful first step toward the desired goal of business ethicists of integrating prescriptive and descriptive approaches to justice. (shrink)

Sortal terms, such as table or horse, are count nouns (akin to a basic-level terms). According to some theories, the meaning of sortals provides conditions for telling objects apart (individuating objects, e.g., telling one table from a second) and for identifying objects over time (e.g., determining that a particular horse at one time is the same horse at another). A number of psychologists have proposed that sortal concepts likewise provide psychologically real conditions for individuating and identifying things. However, this paper (...) reports five experiments that cast doubt on these psychological claims. Experiments 1-3 suggest that sortal concepts do not determine when an object ceases to exist and therefore do not decide when the object can no longer be identical to a later one. Experiments 4-5 similarly suggest that sortal concepts do not provide determinate conditions for individuating objects. For example, they do not always decide whether a room contains one table or two. All five experiments feature ordinary objects undergoing ordinary changes. (shrink)

As the subtitle indicates, this article examines Russell Ford's new book on Deleuze's 1953 Empiricism and Subjectivity. Ford's book especially illuminates Deleuze's book on Hume in two ways. First, he shows how Deleuze's first book intervenes in an ongoing debate in French philosophy between transcendence and immanence. Second, Ford provides an intense reading of Deleuze's first book. The question, however, that Ford's book aims to answer is the nature of empiricism itself. My article reconstructs the precise definition of empiricism found (...) in Experience and Empiricism. But also, because Ford stresses the priority of the practical in Deleuze's interpretation of Hume, my article, near the end, shows how Deleuze's view of the practical in his 1968 Difference and Repetition contests the view of the practical presented in Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity. (shrink)

Lawlor discusses major theoretical trends in the work of these philosophers -- immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics.

We statisticians, with our specific concern for uncertainty, are even more liable than other practical men to encounter philosophy, whether we like it or not. For my part, I like it comparatively well. That is why the honor of opening this session of discussion has come to me, though my background makes my knowledge and idiom somewhat different from your own.

This paper aims to establish three major theses: (1) Not only declarative sentences, but also interrogatives and imperatives, may be classified as true or as false. (2) Declarative, imperative, and interrogative utterances may also be classified as honest or as dishonest. (3) Whether an utterance is honest or dishonest is logically independent of whether it is true or is false. The establishment of the above theses follows upon the adoption of a principle for identifying what is meant by any sentence, (...) declarative, interrogative, or imperative. The analysis aims to show that meaning is to be attributed to the uttered or written sentence-token, rather to the thereby exhibited sentence-type. Further, the meaning of the sentential token is to be identified with a purpose of the speaker, that the speaker would reveal to the addressee by uttering the sentence. The to be revealed purpose is analysed into two components: an ultimate concern (that the addressee stand in such and such a relation--e.g., of believing, or informing the speaker about, or making it true that) and an ultimate topic of concern (the state of affairs, i.e., proposition, relative to which the speaker would have the addressee stand in the specified relation). Sentential utterances "signify" different purposes by "expressing" different ultimate concerns and "indicating" different ultimate topics of concern. Variations in expressed concern are correlated with variations in sentential form, such as declarative, interrogative and imperative. Variations in indicated topic of concern are correlated with variations in the subject and predicate of the uttered sentence. Thus, for example, utterances of "Johnny will jump in the lake," "Will Johnny jump in the lake?" and "Johnny, go jump in the lake!" all indicate one and the same ultimate topic of concern but express different ultimate concerns with this topic. A sentential utterance is true or false according as its indicated topic of concern is true or false. Hence, declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives may all be classified as true or as false. But honesty or dishonesty is a function (explained in the paper) of the expressed concern, rather than of the topic of concern. Hence, although utterances of all sentential forms are honest or dishonest, their honesty or dishonesty is logically independent of their truth or falsity. (shrink)

Scientific method interests the linguist not only as it interests every scientific worker, but also in a special way, because the scientist, as part of his method, utters certain very peculiar speech-forms. The linguist naturally divides scientific activity into two phases: the scientist performs “handling” actions and utters speech. The speech-forms which the scientist utters are peculiar both in their form and in their effect upon hearers.

According to a growing number of researchers, AI may pose catastrophic – or even existential – risks to humanity. Catastrophic risks may be taken to be risks of 100 million human deaths, or a similarly bad outcome. I argue that such risks – while contested – are sufficiently likely to demand rigorous discussion of potential societal responses. Subsequently, I propose four desiderata for approaches to the reduction of catastrophic risks from AI. The quality of such approaches can be assessed by (...) their chance of success, degree of beneficence, degree of non-maleficence, and beneficent side effects. Then, I employ these desiderata to evaluate the promises, limitations and risks of alignment research, timelines research, policy research, halting or slowing down AI research, and compute governance for tackling catastrophic AI risks. While more research is needed, this investigation shows that several approaches for dealing with catastrophic AI risks are available, and where their respective strengths and weaknesses lie. It turns out that many approaches are complementary and that the approaches have a nuanced relationship to approaches to present AI harms. While some approaches are similarly useful for addressing catastrophic risks and present harms, this is not always the case. (shrink)

Elie Wiesel, plucked from the ashes of the Holocaust, became a Nobel Peace laureate, an activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, an award-winning novelist, and a renowned humanist. He moved easily among world leaders but was equally at home among the disenfranchised. Following his Nobel Prize, Wiesel established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; one of their early initiatives was the founding of the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest. The reflections in this volume come from judges of the (...) contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel, providing a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future seems ominous and chaotic at best, these reflections hold on to the promise of an ethically and morally robust possibility. The students whose essays prompt this sense of hope are remarkable for their insight and dedication. The messages embedded in the judges’ reflections mirror Wiesel’s convictions about the importance of friendship, the need to interrogate (without abandoning) God, and the power of remembrance in order to fight indifference. (shrink)

Tyler Burge’s influential arguments have convinced most philosophers that a thinker can have a thought involving a particular concept without fully grasping or having mastery of that concept. In Burge’s (1979) famous example, a thinker who lacks mastery of the concept of arthritis nonetheless has thoughts involving that concept. It is generally supposed, however, that this phenomenon – incomplete understanding, for short – does not require us to reconsider in a fundamental way what it is for a thought to involve (...) a particular concept. In this paper, I argue that the real significance of incomplete understanding has not been appreciated. To the extent that theorists of content address the phenomenon of thoughts involving incompletely grasped contents at all, they tend to assume that some hand-waving about deference to other thinkers who fully grasp the relevant concepts will take care of the inconvenient cases of incomplete understanding. The main lesson of Burge’s arguments is often taken to be that the content of language and thought is socially determined. On this picture, we do not need to change our basic view about what it is to have a concept; we just need to recognize that some thinkers can manage to have a concept by piggybacking on others. In contrast, on the view I defend, taking incomplete understanding seriously forces us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of mental content. Deference is a red herring. The role of society in determining the content of thought is not the main lesson, but at most a useful clue as to the nature of mental and linguistic content. (shrink)

In this work, Mill reflects on the struggle between liberty and authority and defends the view that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” He questions attempts to limit freedom of conscience and religion, freedom to pursue one’s own interests, and freedom to unite, and he defends a liberal political and social order in which there is considerable room for personal development (...) and freedom of association. This new Broadview Edition demonstrates the ways in which Mill’s intellectual landscape differed markedly from our own, while also drawing attention to the reasons why the work remains relevant and essential reading in the present day. Appendices include antecedents to Mill’s work, critical discussions by his contemporaries, and related writings by Mill. Please note: Broadview offers two separate editions of _On Liberty_. The Kahn edition is particularly relevant to readers who are interested in how the work is situated in the history of political philosophy, whereas the Alexander edition is recommended to those most interested in the work’s Victorian literary and social contexts. (shrink)

We introduce a new hierarchy of computably enumerable degrees. This hierarchy is based on computable ordinal notations measuring complexity of approximation of${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$functions. The hierarchy unifies and classifies the combinatorics of a number of diverse constructions in computability theory. It does so along the lines of the high degrees (Martin) and the array noncomputable degrees (Downey, Jockusch, and Stob). The hierarchy also gives a number of natural definability results in the c.e. degrees, including a definable antichain.

This work argues for a Direct Realist view of the perception of public objects. It argues against the need for special intermediary sensory objects, or sense impressions, requiring only stages in a physical process beginning with events at the surface of a physical object, the resultant stimulation of one's sense organs, and finally the excitation of the sensory portions of one's brain.