v. 1. Theory and practice in the democratic revolution.

The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to (...) luck than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck; non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Levy argues that because epistemic conditions on control are so demanding that they are rarely satisfied, agents are not blameworthy for performing actions that they take to be best in a given situation. It follows that if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; but even these are unacceptably subject to luck. Levy goes on to discuss recent non-historical compatibilisms, and argues that they do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. He suggests that luck undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.4 (2001) 527-531 [Access article in PDF] A Virgilian Crux: Aeneid 8.342-43 Neil Adkin When Evander conducts Aeneas around the future site of Rome, the objects of interest he points out to his guest include the following: "hinc lucum ingentem, quem Romulus acer asylum / rettulit, et gelida monstrat sub rupe Lupercal" (8.342-43). John Conington (1883, 119) complained that rettulit had "not been satisfactorily (...) explained." A century later, Gerhard Binder (1971, 118 with n. 27) repeated the complaint: "Über Vergils rettulit ist viel gerätselt worden." Binder's study was then followed by the unprecedented appearance of three different commentaries on this book of the Aeneid in three successive years. 1 None of them was however able to offer a satisfactory explanation of rettulit: the latest discussion of this passage is obliged to reiterate Conington's original complaint. 2 The purpose of the present article is to suggest a possible solution to this vexatious and long-standing crux.Servius Danielis was himself perplexed by this Virgilian passage, for which he felt the need to offer two alternative explanations: "retulit aut restituit aut nominavit" (Aen. 8.342). The second of these was accepted by Heyne (1833, 221: "retulit est appellavit"); however Conington rightly objected that there is no evidence for such a meaning of referre. The first exegesis proposed by Servius has on the other hand found widespread support. 3 It must however be pointed out that those who accept the equation of referre with restituere appear to have forgotten that the object of rettulit is not asylum, but lucum: while the "re-establishment" of an asylum makes excellent sense, the same can hardly be said of "re-establishing" a grove of trees. Servius himself detected an allusion to the asylum founded at Athens by the Heraclidae: "ideo ergo ait 'quod Romulus acer asylum retulit,' hoc est fecit ad imitationem [End Page 527] Atheniensis asyli" (Aen. 8.342). This interpretation of referre as signifying "to reproduce from a model" has similarly been widely accepted. 4 Such a construe is however open to the same objection that can be raised against restituere: while this rendering would have been admirably suited to asylum as direct object, the notion of "reproducing" a grove "from a model" is likewise far less satisfactory. 5 In support of both these explications it has been customary to adduce Aeneid 5.596-98: "hunc morem cursus atque haec certamina primus / Ascanius, Longam muris cum cingeret Albam, / rettulit." The supposed parallel is however illusory, since here referre simply governs a direct object, whereas in book 8 the same verb is instead employed in conjunction with the predicative apposition asylum. K. W. Gransden's commentary on this latter book (1976, 129) accordingly proposed the novel rendering "instituted as," which was however rejected by P. T. Eden's postscript (1986, 439) to his own commentary as "emphatically not a meaning of refero." Eden's commentary itself had taken rettulit as equivalent to reddidit. 6 This view that referre is here being used in the sense of "to render" had already been tentatively advanced by Conington himself; it too has received a certain measure of support. 7 In his latest contribution to the debate, however, Eden (1986, 440) changes his mind and instead adopts the unsatisfactory notion of Fordyce's commentary that rettulit signifies "reproduced from a model." Eden's reason for this volte-face is the following: "even if... the construction here of referre with a double accusative is an analogical imitation of reddere with the same construction, it cannot therefore also be presumed to share its meaning." Perhaps it is nonetheless possible to indicate how this objection of Eden's can be circumvented by a novel hypothesis which would at last appear to provide a key to this troublesomely enigmatic text. [End Page 528]Quintilian (Inst. 8.6.37) illustrates the rhetorical figure of metalempsis or transumptio with a reference to Odyssey 15.299 where thoos ("quick") is employed in the sense of oxus ("sharp"). Heinrich Lausberg (1990, 295) explains the figure as follows: "Die... (shrink)

This paper has two aims. First, I explore the scope and limitations of the doctrine of double effect (DOE) by focusing specifically on the notion of "effect classification." Turning my attention to some hard cases, I argue that the DOE has to be supplemented by additional principles that specify how effects are to be discriminated from one another and how the various aspects of the relevant actions are to be classified as intended or simply foreseen. Secondly, I draw some general (...) lessons from this specific investigation of the ODE bearing on the way in which moral principles of this sort can be seen to function helpfully in moral reflection. (shrink)

I assume that there exists a general phenomenon, the phenomenon of the explanatory gap, surrounding consciousness, normativity, intentionality, and more. Explanatory gaps are often thought to foreclose reductive possibilities wherever they appear. In response, reductivists who grant the existence of these gaps have offered countless local solutions. But typically such reductivist responses have had a serious shortcoming: because they appeal to essentially domain-specific features, they cannot be fully generalized, and in this sense these responses have been not just local but (...) parochial. Here I do better. Taking for granted that the explanatory gap is a genuine phenomenon, I offer a fully general diagnosis that unifies these previously fragmented reductivist responses. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how Soldiers make hard choices between competing options. To understand the psychological processes behind these types of decisions, we present qualitative data collected from...

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide (...) make-believe play. -/- Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance. -/- It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. [Abstract writing credit: book editor Andrew Kinney, HUP]. (shrink)

Because autonomy is regarded as central to modern bioethics; there is a considerable focus on the criteria by which autonomy may be judged. The most significant criterion used in day-to-day practic...

Michael Friedman maintains that Carnap did not fully appreciate the impact of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem on the prospect for a purely syntactic definition of analyticity that would render arithmetic analytically true. This paper argues against this claim. It also challenges a common presumption on the part of defenders of Carnap, in their diagnosis of the force of Gödel's own critique of Carnap in his Gibbs Lecture. The author is grateful to Michael Friedman for valuable comments. Part of the research (...) towards this paper was carried out while the author was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. The paper was presented to the Center's Fellowship Reunion Conference in Athens in 1992. It was committed for publication in the Proceedings of that conference, but those Proceedings never appeared. By the time it became evident that they would never appear, both the hard copy and the source file had been mislaid. The hard copy re-surfaced in 2007. The literature on this topic since 1992 appears to leave some space for the ideas and arguments presented here. Although the paper has been updated in light of the more recent literature, its basic thesis, presented in 1992, remains the same. Only 3 is new, questioning a basic presumption made by more recent commentators in their presentation of Gödel's criticism of Carnap in his Gibbs Lecture. For helpful comments on the current version, the author is indebted to Robert Kraut, Stewart Shapiro, and Adam Podlaskowski. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Rightly or, wrongly I am going to take it that the doctrine of simple qualities says three things. First, that yellow, for example, is a simple unanalyzable quality. I don’t really believe this to be true, except in what it denies, but I have no immediate quarrel with it. Second, a simple quality, such as yellow, is what it is quite independently of its pattern of exemplification. Third, yellow is somehow ineffable, the sheer dazzling yellowishness of yellow things cannot be (...) conveyed in words. In the third case, I do not mean the commonplace that words are different from things, that the word ‘yellow’ is not itself yellow. I mean the view that there is something about color qualities as immediately apprehended by us that eludes description. Now all these views are somewhat old-fashioned. The third is hardly mentioned nowadays. Yet I am not so sure that we are not still very much in their grip. In any case, philosophical hemlil)eS oscillate almost as frequently as do those of high fashion so it should not surprise anyone if these views were to come back into vogue, especially if phenomenology becomes important in this country. Now it may be more a matter of convenience than of historical accuracy that I am lumping these three doctrines together as “the doctrine of simple qualities”. Perhaps “doctrine of atomistic qualities” would be better. I am reasonably certain that the second and third doctrines mutually entail each other, although it has to be conceded that the situation is fairly complicated. I shall have something to say about the third doctrine–the doctrine of ineffability, but I shall be mostly concerned to refute the second doctrine–the doctrine that the identity of a quality is independent of its extension–and to put something else in its place. I shall be concerned incidentally to examine certain puzzling statements like ‘Red is a color’, ‘Red is between orange and purple’ and ‘Whatever is green is extended’, which seem to be necessary but don’t seem to be analytic. (shrink)

This paper engages with one debate in the emerging field of neuroethics. It is sometimes claimed on the strength of neuroscientific research that our actions are causally determined and therefore not truly free, or more modestly that brain structures or processes constrain some choices and actions, raising questions about our moral responsibility for them. I argue that a Reformed account of providence, sin and grace offers an account of causation able to resist hard determinism, reframes concepts of freedom and responsibility, (...) and provides a theological perspective for evaluating medical interventions in brain activity. Thus the paper not only contributes to a neuroethical debate, but also illustrates the capacity of Reformed ethics to respond creatively to novel problems. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases are widely taken to show that agents do not need alternative possibilities to be morally responsible for their actions. Many philosophers take these cases to constitute a powerful argument for compatibilism: if we do not need alternative possibilities for moral responsibility, it is hard to see what the attraction of indeterminism might be. I defend the claim that even though Frankfurt-style cases establish that agents can be responsible for their actions despite lacking alternatives, agents can only be responsible (...) if they possess certain powers, and possession of these powers is - arguably - incompatible with determinism. Because this is the case, Frankfurt-style cases fail to advance the debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism. (shrink)

This paper argues that analyses of the ways in which Big Data has been enacted in other academic disciplines can provide us with concepts that will help understand the application of Big Data to social questions. We use examples drawn from our Science and Technology Studies analyses of -omic biology and high energy physics to demonstrate the utility of three theoretical concepts: primary and secondary inscriptions, crafted and found data, and the locus of legitimate interpretation. These help us to show (...) how the histories, organisational forms, and power dynamics of a field lead to different enactments of big data. The paper suggests that these concepts can be used to help us to understand the ways in which Big Data is being enacted in the domain of the social sciences, and to outline in general terms the ways in which this enactment might be different to that which we have observed in the ‘hard’ sciences. We contend that the locus of legitimate interpretation of Big Data biology and physics is tightly delineated, found within the disciplinary institutions and cultures of these disciplines. We suggest that when using Big Data to make knowledge claims about ‘the social’ the locus of legitimate interpretation is more diffuse, with knowledge claims that are treated as being credible made from other disciplines, or even by those outside academia entirely. (shrink)

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A burgeoning human rights movement followed, yielding many treaties and new international institutions and shaping the constitutions and laws of many states. Yet human rights continue to be contested politically and legally and there is substantial philosophical and theoretical debate over their foundations and implications. In this volume distinguished philosophers, political scientists, international lawyers, environmentalists and anthropologists discuss some of the most difficult questions of human rights (...) theory and practice: What do human rights require of the global economy? Does it make sense to secure them by force? What do they require in jus post bello contexts of transitional justice? Is global climate change a human rights issue? Is there a human right to democracy? Does the human rights movement constitute moral progress? For students of political philosophy, human rights, peace studies, and international relations. (shrink)

Christopher Franklin argues that the hard luck view, which I have recently defended, is misnamed: the arguments turn on absence of control and not on luck. He also argues that my objections to agent-causal libertarianism depend on a demand, for a contrastive explanation that guarantees the choice the agent makes, which would be question-begging in the dialectical context. In response to the first objection, I argue that though Franklin may be right that it is absence of control that matters to (...) freedom and not luck, we often are unable to discern whether an agent lacks sufficient control without asking whether the event is lucky for the agent; hence we cannot dispense with worries about luck in favor of concern about control. In response to the second worry, I argue that though Franklin is right in claiming that there is a perfectly good explanation regarding how the agent-causal power is exercised, it is not an adequate explanation given the context, because the same kind of explanation is available on event-causal theories. Agent-causal libertarians aim to avoid the luck objection which they acknowledge is powerful against event-causal libertarians; if it is true that they can offer nothing more than the latter kinds of theories in the way of control over actions, they fail in their aim. (shrink)

abstract Allen Buchanan argues that conventional applied ethics is impoverished and would be enriched by the addition of social moral epistemology. The aim here is to clarify this argument and to raise questions about whether such an addition is necessary about how such enrichment would work in practice. Two broad problems are identified. First, there are various kinds and sources of epistemic inertia, which act as an obstacle to epistemic change. Religion is one striking example and seems to pose a (...) deep problem for Buchanan's liberal social moral epistemology. Philosophy also exhibits a distinctive kind of epistemic inertia (metaphilosophical beliefs about the impropriety of applying philosophy are hard to shift), but also suffers from epistemic isolationism: (its arguments and conclusions are isolated from practical influence). It is concluded that not only will a liberal social moral epistemology have to overcome a pernicious epistemic inertia with regard to religious belief, but also a different kind of epistemic inertia closer to home. (shrink)

We show, under the assumption that factoring is hard, that a model of PV exists in which the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse to the linear hierarchy; that a model of S21 exists in which NP is not in the second level of the linear hierarchy; and that a model of S21 exists in which the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the linear hierarchy. Our methods are model-theoretic. We use the assumption about factoring to get a model in which the weak (...) pigeonhole principle fails in a certain way, and then work with this failure to obtain our results. As a corollary of one of the proofs, we also show that in S21 the failure of WPHP (for Σb1 definable relations) implies that the strict version of PH does not collapse to a finite level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 368-370 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich; xvii & 256 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; $49.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. In his preface to this gathering of his essays and reviews on twentieth-century American and British poetry, David Bromwich regrets that it is "too late to suppress the (...) evidence of a critic educating himself in public" (p. xi). But even the earliest work reprinted in Skeptical Music--"The Making of the Auden Canon," published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, when the author was still a graduate student at Yale--hardly qualifies as juvenilia. Indeed, in Bromwich's case, evidence of a critic educating himself in public seems to have been suppressed from the start. No single explanation will account for an author's precocity, but the consistency of Bromwich's critical voice over the last quarter century is certainly related to his early preoccupation with William Hazlitt, the subject of his first book. In choosing Hazlitt as his model, Bromwich rejected what he took to be the legacy of systematic and professional literary theory extending from Coleridge to each new school of academic criticism. Bromwich's own development as a critic has therefore been subtler and more introspective than the critical retooling of so many of his colleagues. Although never far from the evaluative art of the reviewer, Bromwich has come to favor the more speculative dimension of his work. The more recent the piece, the more overt the attempt to imagine "what was in the poet's mind, or what was in the poem's mind, on the theory that certain thoughts and feelings are worth the trouble to characterize because of their strangeness and originality" (p. xi).Some of the most compelling chapters in Skeptical Music imagine what was in the poet's mind, or the poem's mind, by telling stories about complex relationships between poems by different poets--between the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, or T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. These are stories about literary influence, or deep temperamental affinity. As in Harold Bloom's work, the stories are grounded in close readings, usually of the passages the critic prizes for their aesthetic superiority.A related procedure is at work in "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero"--a long speculative piece on Wallace Stevens's transfer of allegiance, at a crucial moment in his career, from the pragmatism of Nietzsche to the pragmatism of William James. What Stevens found "most persistently attractive" in Nietzsche's pragmatism, Bromwich coolly explains, was "the suggestion that the good of existence is change" and that "our most vivid acknowledgment of that good comes from the ability to imagine a life wiped clear of ourselves" (p. 71). But the Nietzschean sublime proved insufficient for Stevens. During the Second World War, the poet was confronted by "the reality of American soldiers going off to fight... for a cause which, as Stevens saw it, they could only make true by their fighting" (p. 68). Stevens turned to James for "the less brutal idea of a [End Page 368] man or woman who is made great by an enterprise in which others have a part" (p. 78).Bromwich's argument that Stevens became a more valuable poet when he located heroism in human solidarity, not just Nietzschean contingency and self-creation, bears a family resemblance to the work of one of James's heirs, Richard Rorty. Like Rorty, Bromwich often feels the pressure to adjudicate between the claims of the individual artist and the claims of the community; and like Rorty, he makes his judgements on a case by case basis, without recourse to a set standard, rule, or theory. In the closing chapter of Skeptical Music--"Is Taste Moral?"--Bromwich directly addresses the tension between aestheticism and the social good, a subject that also surfaces at the close of his preface and at numerous moments throughout the book. But the claims of the community seem relatively muted... (shrink)

This paper presents an oral history of farming in the Southern Yangtze Valley in China, covering the period from pre-liberation to recent market liberalization. Using the stories and observations of 31 elderly residents of a small water town, the paper describes the hard labor of traditional farming practices and the acquiescence of many when, post-liberation, they could leave farming for better-paid factory work. However, in a departure from conventional analyses, these oral histories suggest that the co-dependency culture of traditional farming (...) has broken down, and farmers are unwilling to return to the land and continue farming. The changes in knowledge cultures of local farmers in recent decades are not likely to lead to pathways to working with incoming modern “outsider farmers,” nor able to be blended with potential new “urbanite” knowledges of those who might wish to increase organic farming. The current knowledge cultures of these farmers has shifted as needed to the optimization of family unit needs, naturally leading them to urbanization and the relinquishing of their ties to the land. For cultural rather than economic reasons, these farmers see themselves as the last peasant farmers of Tianshanzhuang. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 1-7 [Access article in PDF] Clinical Practice, Science, and the Unconscious Douglas McConnell Neil Pickering Keywords psychotherapy, cognitive science, neuroscience, computational view of mind. This volume of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology is devoted to questions about the unconscious mind. The philosophical complexities and difficulties associated with the unconscious are many and, despite widespread confusion and disagreement as to the nature of the (...) unconscious mind, it is used as a concept informing psychotherapy. It is therefore not surprising that papers in a special edition on the unconscious might be weighted heavily toward uncovering a justifiable conceptual niche for the unconscious and elaborating on some of the main conceptual connections. Although this makes for a slightly more philosophical edition of PPP than usual, those perhaps less interested in philosophy and more interested in actual psychiatric practice can incorporate the concepts and insights developed in these papers into their practice as they see fit.The three main articles take three quite distinct approaches to the unconscious. Schechtman (2005) addresses the need for a theory of personal identity to incorporate the unconscious and presents one that does so by developing some central Lockian intuitions. Church (2005) investigates whether the kinds of things happening in the unconscious can be explained by cognitive operations not normally associated with consciousness, specifically, spatial structuring of experience. McConnell and Gillett (2005) clarify some of Lacan's ontology of the mind where the language encountered and used by the subject provides the structure for their unconscious.The aim of this introduction is to ask and try to answer a question that logically precedes those raised in the articles in the light of the therapeutic use of the unconscious. When dealing with psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic concepts in an Anglo-American context, the struggle that psychoanalysis has had and continues to have in a psychiatric domain ruled by science is never far from the spotlight. Indeed Hinshelwood (2005) also picks up the importance of this conflict when replying to McConnell and Gillett. It seems to be historically true that the unconscious has fallen out of favor in scientific and psychiatric circles (it is no surprise that psychiatric training is largely based in "hard," that is, biological and biochemical science) particularly over the last 50 years or so. But is the scientific skepticism to be found about the use of the unconscious well-founded? And how does the continued utilization [End Page 1] of the unconscious by the therapist fit into current practice given this skepticism? Psychotherapy and the Unconscious In psychotherapy, the therapist and the client together construct a story that explains why the client is having some form of difficulty in his or her life. The stated aim is to enable the client to overcome this difficulty by gaining an understanding of what has generated it. Doing so may be a first step to dealing with that conflict. For example, an office worker who is scared of the boss and whose life at work is a misery as result may come to think that the boss is a reminder of some threatening figure from childhood and that the reaction is a regression to infantile behavior. Knowing this, the fear of the boss can be revisited—perhaps reconfigured, perhaps overcome—and life may improve. In the process of therapy, the relation of the figure from childhood to the boss is made conscious. But it was still operative before it was made explicit, even though the client did not realize it and some would say that the client's unconscious had somehow buried the memory from childhood or hidden from the client the relation of this memory of a threatening figure to the boss.A description of the content of the unconscious is, then, an intentional description involving the client's thought life, one made to help an individual understand otherwise unintelligible (to that individual) feelings, beliefs, desires, actions, and so on. Subjects' intentions are their normatively structured mental representations of, and attitudes toward, the world (e.g., "He is my boss"; "I am afraid of him"). An intentional unconscious description then takes an intentional form... (shrink)

Hard incompatibilism is a view about free will and moral responsibility that has been developed and defended by Derk Pereboom for almost three decades (Pereboom 1995, 2001, 2014). Succinctly put, hard incompatibilists argue that we do not have free will because, whether determinism is true or false, we are subject to the freedom-undermining effects of causal luck (i.e. causal factors beyond our control). In recent years, Gregg Caruso has become a vocal advocate of hard incompatibilism, and he rests his “public (...) health-quarantine model” and its non-retributive approach to criminal behavior squarely on the foundation of Pereboom’s free-will metaphysics (e.g. Caruso 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022; Pereboom and Caruso 2018, 2022; Dennett and Caruso 2021). More recently, biologist and science popularizer Robert Sapolsky has raised the public profile hard incompatibilism by claiming to endorse this position in his best-selling book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). -/- In this book, I offer a refutation of hard incompatibilism and all instances of constructive incompatibilism. In short, I argue that two central central explanatory tenets of hard incompatibilism are in tension with one another, making it impossible for someone to argue for one without undermining their defense of the other in the process. I then point out that the arguments against hard incompatibilism also undermine Neil Levy's luck-pincer impossibilism (2011). Along the way, I explain why Robert Sapolsky is not a hard incompatibilist and is actually committed to the falsity of hard incompatibilism. In closing, I propose a way for skeptics like Caruso and Sapolsky to maintain their skepticism without any type of constructive incompatibilism as the foundation. -/- [Building from the arguments in "The Problem of Free Will: An Abductive Approach", "Free Will, Self-Creation, and The Paradox of Moral Luck," and "(In)compatibilism"] -/- . (shrink)

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...) maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. -/- We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos. (shrink)

According to the prevailing scholarly view, made popular by Neil Harding, Lenin is said to have derived his well-known theory of working-class consciousness in What Is To Be Done? from G. V. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism. Is this article I demonstrate, however, that Plekhanov and Lenin disagreed quite sharply on this question. Plekhanov did not believe that workers would fail to develop a socialist consciousness in the absence of external intervention. Indeed, Plekhanov was a thorough-going optimist (...) about proletarian capacities, and while he did assign an important role to the intelligentsia in the process of consciousness-raising, that role was carefully circumscribed. An exhaustive review of Plekhanov's writings before November 1903, when he broke with Lenin, reveals just how unorthodox Lenin's most famous argument was in the context of Russian Social-Democratic theory. (shrink)

This paper argues for thinking about religious commitments as different in kind from everyday ordinary understandings of the world. It argues against the straightforward assertion from the cognitive science of religion that belief in the supernatural is easy. That is, there is a way in which intuitions of invisible presence come very easily to people. Yet to sustain that belief commitment is hard, especially when the invisible other is omnipotent and benevolent. Here I suggest that it makes more sense to (...) understand faith commitments as a kind of frame that coexists with everyday commitments. The approach shares much with Neil van Leeuwen’s understanding of religious commitments and factual commitments as being held with different kinds of cognitive attitudes. Here I suggest that people engage the faith frame the way engage play and fiction—except that in the case of faith, the commitment is a serious claim about the world. (shrink)

I offer a brief review of, and critical response to, Neil Levy’s fascinating recent book Hard Luck, where he argues that no one is ever free or morally responsible not because of determinism or indeterminism, but because of luck. Two of Levy’s central arguments in defending his free will nihilism concern the nature and role of explanation in a theory of moral responsibility and the nature of akrasia. With respect to explanation, Levy argues that an adequate theory of moral (...) responsibility must be able provide contrastive explanations of why an agent performs one action rather than another, and that libertarians lack the resources to provide such explanations. With respect to akrasia, Levy argues that it is impossible to be directly morally responsible for akratic actions. In response I argue that any sense of contrastive explanation that can reasonably be thought to be a requirement on an adequate theory of moral responsibility is a sense that agent-causal libertarians can secure. I then argue that the agent-causal theory of free will offers an alternative and attractive understanding of motivation and self-control that makes it plausible to think that we can be morally responsible for akratic actions. (shrink)

Offers analysis of MacCormick's positivistic account of legal reasoning, partially in response to Dworkin's claim that positivism is inadequate as a theory of law because it cannot account for the nature of legal reasoning. Having analyzed MacCormick's theory and having applied it to some cases, we are now ready to evaluate it. My conclusion is that inmany cases MacCormick's theory can indeed give the judge the kind of concrete guidance he needs when with a hard case. The reason why MacCormick's (...) theory is successful in this regard is that it offers the judge a reasonably firm ranking of the interpretive arguments, and that it is rather easy to understand and apply. The former circumstance is of course important - unless we rank the interpretive arguments, the theory simply will not be able to give the judge any guid ance at all. But the latter circumstance is also cause itmeans that judges will be able to apply the theory even be though they may lack a deep understanding of the relevant field of substantive law. Judges, as is well known, are usually gen eralists, not experts in any particular field. So unlike Ronald Dworkin's subtle and intriguing theory of adjudication,80 MacCormick's theory might actually be applied by real judges in any jurisdiction. This must be considered quite an advantage. To be sure, applying MacCormick's theory to a concrete case is not always easy. But the difficulties we have encountered in applying the theory have been difficulties that would create problems for any theory of legal reasoning. Moreover, with one these difficulties can be handled within the frame work of the theory as it stands. For example, the problem of choosing between a technical and an ordinary version of plain exception which we encountered in the Boxer case, can in most cases be solved by reference to the value that underlies the textual approach, namely predictability. The problem about intentionalist arguments, which we encountered in the case of the Statutory Share, can be solved by simply adding the cate gory of intentionalist arguments toMacCormick's typology of interpretive arguments, or perhaps by placing intentionalist arguments in the category of textual arguments.81 The problem of linguistic indeterminacy, however, which we encountered in theWeber ase, appears to be more or less impossible to solve. If and to the extent that the words that occur in the statute are vague or ambiguous - in their ordinary or in their technical meaning, or in both - the value of the textual approach is clearly reduced. The judge must then proceed to consider systemic and teleological arguments in that order. (shrink)

Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it. Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity (...) quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility. (shrink)

For twenty years, the renowned philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique must inform one another. In The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Harding puts those fields in critical conversation, assembling the anthology that she has long wanted for classroom use. In classic and recent essays, international scholars from a range of disciplines think through a broad array of science and technology philosophies and practices. The contributors reevaluate (...) conventional accounts of the West’s scientific and technological projects in the past and present, rethink the strengths and limitations of non-Western societies’ knowledge traditions, and assess the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. The collection concludes with forward-looking essays, which explore strategies for cultivating new visions of a multicultural, democratic world of sciences and for turning those visions into realities. Feminist science and technology concerns run throughout the reader and are the focus of several essays. Harding provides helpful background for each essay in her introductions to the reader’s four sections. Contributors Helen Appleton Karen Bäckstrand Lucille H. Brockway Stephen B. Brush Judith Carney Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment Arturo Escobar Maria E. Fernandez Ward H. Goodenough Susantha Goonatilake Sandra Harding Steven J. Harris Betsy Hartmann Cori Hayden Catherine L. M. Hill John M. Hobson Peter Mühlhäusler Catherine A. Odora Hoppers Consuelo Quiroz Jenny Reardon Ella Reitsma Ziauddin Sardar Daniel Sarewitz Londa Schiebinger Catherine V. Scott Colin Scott Mary Terrall D. Michael Warren. (shrink)

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we ...

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis (...) technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research. (shrink)

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, several feminist theorists began developing alternatives to the traditional methods of scientific research. The result was a new theory, now recognized as Standpoint Theory, which caused heated debate and radically altered the way research is conducted. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader is the first anthology to collect the most important essays on the subject as well as more recent works that bring the topic up-to-date. Leading feminist scholar and one of the founders of Standpoint (...) Theory, Sandra Harding brings together the a prestigious list of scholars--Dorothy Smith, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock and Hilary Rose--to not only showcase the most influential essays on the topic but to also highlight subsequent developments of these approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and intellectual and political positions. The Reader will be essential reading for feminist scholars. (shrink)

In a recent letter, Dillion et. al (2023) make various suggestions regarding the idea of artificially intelligent systems, such as large language models, replacing human subjects in empirical moral psychology. We argue that human subjects are in various ways indispensable.

What can contemporary machine learning (ML) models do? Given the proliferation of ML models in society, answering this question matters to a variety of stakeholders, both public and private. The evaluation of models' capabilities is rapidly emerging as a key subfield of modern ML, buoyed by regulatory attention and government grants. Despite this, the notion of an ML model possessing a capability has not been interrogated: what are we saying when we say that a model is able to do something? (...) And what sorts of evidence bear upon this question? -/- In this paper, we aim to answer these questions, using the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as a running example. Drawing on the large philosophical literature on abilities, we develop an account of ML models' capabilities which can be usefully applied to the nascent science of model evaluation. Our core proposal is a conditional analysis of model abilities (CAMA): crudely, a machine learning model has a capability to X just when it would reliably succeed at doing X if it 'tried'. The main contribution of the paper is making this proposal precise in the context of ML, resulting in an operationalisation of CAMA applicable to LLMs. We then put CAMA to work, showing that it can help make sense of various features of ML model evaluation practice, as well as suggest procedures for performing fair inter-model comparisons. (shrink)

The field of AI safety seeks to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. A simple and appealing account of what is distinctive of AI safety as a field holds that this feature is constitutive: a research project falls within the purview of AI safety just in case it aims to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. Call this appealingly simple account The Safety Conception of AI safety. Despite its simplicity and appeal, we argue that (...) The Safety Conception is in tension with at least two trends in the ways AI safety researchers and organizations think and talk about AI safety: first, a tendency to characterize the goal of AI safety research in terms of catastrophic risks from future systems; second, the increasingly popular idea that AI safety can be thought of as a branch of safety engineering. Adopting the methodology of conceptual engineering, we argue that these trends are unfortunate: when we consider what concept of AI safety it would be best to have, there are compelling reasons to think that The Safety Conception is the answer. Descriptively, The Safety Conception allows us to see how work on topics that have historically been treated as central to the field of AI safety is continuous with work on topics that have historically been treated as more marginal, like bias, misinformation, and privacy. Normatively, taking The Safety Conception seriously means approaching all efforts to prevent or mitigate harms from AI systems based on their merits rather than drawing arbitrary distinctions between them. (shrink)

Explores what the last few decades of European/American, feminist, and postcolonial science and technology studies can learn from each other. This book proposes new directions for thinking about objectivity, method, and reflexivity in light of the new understandings developed in the post-World War II world.

In _Sciences from Below_, the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be more productively linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as the major contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects (...) refine their thinking to overcome limiting ideas about what modernity and modernization are, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. She also reveals how ideas about gender and colonialism frame the conventional contrast between modernity and tradition. As she has done before, Harding points the way forward in _Sciences from Below_. Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity versus tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge. Yet, for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. _Sciences from Below_ is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive scientific research and policy. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a modified form of the theory of planned behavior in understanding the decisions of undergraduate students in engineering and humanities to engage in cheating. We surveyed 527 randomly selected students from three academic institutions. Results supported the use of the model in predicting ethical decision-making regarding cheating. In particular, the model demonstrated how certain variables (gender, discipline, high school cheating, education level, international student status, participation in Greek organizations or other clubs) and moral constructs (...) related to intention to cheat, attitudes toward cheating, perceptions of norms with respect to cheating, and ultimately cheating behaviors. Further the relative importance of the theory of planned behavior constructs was consistent regardless of context, whereas the contributions of variables included in the study that were outside the theory varied by context. Of particular note were findings suggesting that the extent of cheating in high school was a strong predictor of cheating in college and that engineering students reported cheating more frequently than students in the humanities, even when controlling for the number of opportunities to do so. (shrink)

Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.

This book begins with the question 'Who am I?' and immediately sets off in an astonishingly original direction. Why didn't anyone before Harding think of responding to this question like this? It's so obvious, once you see it. Harding presents a new vision of our place in the universe that uses the scientific method of looking to see what is true. It turns out that the truth about ourselves is not only true but also very good, and breathtakingly (...) beautiful. We live in a sacred, many-layered, living universe - or rather it lives in us. Though it was completed in 1950, this book is still ahead of its time. One day it will surely be widely recognised for its greatness: its all-encompassing vision, its originality and freshness, its depth of insight, its wide-ranging knowledge, the clarity and poetry of its language, its humanity. It is a world-view not dependent on local culture or religion, but on universally verifiable facts. It is also a world-view that respects our manifest differences whilst celebrating our underlying unity - the unity not just of oneself with other people but with all of life, indeed with the whole universe. Harding died in 2007 aged 97, leaving behind him an impressive body of work. He was a highly creative person who was passionate about - he was in love with - this living universe and the immortal treasure that abides at its centre - at our centre. "A work of the highest genius." C. S. Lewis. (shrink)

Where the old objectivity question asked, Objectivity or relativism: which side are you on?, the new one refuses this choice, seeking instead to bypass widely recognized problems with the conceptual framework that restricts the choices to these two. It asks, How can the notion of objectivity be updated and made useful for contemporary knowledge-seeking projects? One response to this question is the strong objectivity program that draws on feminist standpoint epistemology to provide a kind of logic of discovery for maximizing (...) our ability to block might makes right in the sciences. It does so by delinking the neutrality ideal from standards for maximizing objectivity, since neutrality is now widely recognized as not only not necessary, not only not helpful, but, worst of all, an obstacle to maximizing objectivity when knowledge-distorting interests and values have constituted a research project. Strong objectivity provides a method for correcting this kind of situation. However, standpoint approaches have their own limitations which are quite different from the misreadings of them upon which most critics have tended to focus. Unfortunately, historically limited epistemologies and philosophies of science are all we get to choose from at this moment in history. (shrink)

Appearing in the feminist social science literature from its beginnings are a series of questions about methodology. In this collection, Sandra Harding interrogates some of the classic essays from the last fifteen years in order to explore the basic and troubling questions about science and social experience, gender, and politics.

Recent "gender, environment, and sustainable development" accounts raise pointed questions about the complicity of Enlightenment philosophies of science with failures of Third World development policies and the current environmental crisis. The strengths of these analyses come from distinctive ways they link androcentric, economistic, and nature-blind aspects of development thinking to "the Enlightenment dream." In doing so they share perspectives with and provide resources for other influential schools of science studies.