Three experiments explored how hypocrisy affects attributions of criminal guilt and the desire to punish hypocritical criminals. Study 1 established that via perceived hypocrisy, a hypocritical criminal was seen as more culpable and was punished more than a non-hypocritical criminal who committed an identical crime. Study 2 expanded on this, showing that negative moral emotions (anger and disgust) mediated the relationships between perceived hypocrisy, criminal guilt, and punishment. Study 3 replicated the emotion finding from Study 2 using new scenarios where (...) group agents were clearly aware of the hypocrisy of their actions, yet acted anyway. Again, perceived hypocrisy worked through moral emotions to affect criminal guilt and punishment. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating hypocrisy and moral transgressions to moral emotions, also informing the literature on the role of moral emotions in moral reasoning and legal decision making. (shrink)

To characterize human emotions, researchers have increasingly utilized Automatic Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), which automates the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and translates the facial muscular positioning into the basic universal emotions. There is broad interest in the application of FACS for assessing consumer expressions as an indication of emotions to consumer product-stimuli. However, the translation of FACS to characterization of emotions is elusive in the literature. The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of how FACS (...) has been used to investigate human emotional behavior to consumer product-based stimuli. The search was limited to studies published in English after 1978, conducted on humans, using FACS or its action units to investigate affect, where emotional response is elicited by consumer product-based stimuli evoking at least one of the five senses. The search resulted in an initial total of 1,935 records, of which 55 studies were extracted and categorized based on the outcomes of interest including (i) method of FACS implementation; (ii) purpose of study; (iii) consumer product-based stimuli used; and (iv) measures of affect validation. Most studies implemented FACS manually (73%) to develop products and/or software (20%) and used consumer product-based stimuli that had known and/or defined capacity to evoke a particular affective response, such as films and/or movie clips (20%); minimal attention was paid to consumer products with low levels of emotional competence or with unknown affective impact. The vast majority of studies (53%) did not validate FACS-determined affect and, of the validation measures that were used, most tended to be discontinuous in nature and only captured affect as it holistically related to an experience. This review illuminated some inconsistencies in how FACS is carried out as well as how emotional response is inferred from facial muscle activation. This may prompt researchers to consider measuring the total consumer experience by employing a variety of methodologies in addition to FACS and its emotion-based interpretation guide. Such strategies may better conceptualize consumers' experience with products of low, unknown, and/or undefined capacity to evoke an affective response such as product prototypes, line extensions, etc. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world's scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement 'Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus'. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

The United States is currently the linchpin of global trade, technology, and finance, and a military colossus, extending across the world with a network of bases and alliances. This book anticipates the possible issues raised by a transition between American dominance and the rise of alternative powers. While a 'post-American' world need not be any different than that of today, the risk associated with such a change provides ample reason for attentive study. Divided into four parts, 50 international relations scholars (...) explore and discuss: Power Transitions: addressing issues including the rise of China; the passing of American primacy and the endurance of American leadership. War and Peace: addressing nuclear weapons; the risk of war; security privatization and global insecurity Global Governance: addressing competition, trade, the UN, sovereignty, humanitarian intervention, law and power. Energy and the Environment: addressing resource conflict, petrol, climate change and technology. This unique project offers a compilation of disparate arguments by scholars and policy practitioners, encompassing a plurality of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. By providing clarity and focus to this essential debate on the future of the world in the next several decades, Debating a Post-American World will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations and global politics, American politics, US Foreign policy and International Security. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

I am grateful to Sean Carroll, Paul Horwich, and Sarah McGrath for their stimulating responses to Morality and Mathematics (M&M). Their arguments concern the reality of unapplied mathematics, the practical import of moral facts, and the deliberative and explanatory roles of evaluative theories. In what follows, I address their responses, as well as some broader issues.

The title of Andy Clark's book is, among other things, a reference to one of the central terms in Martin Heidegger's early work: "Dasein" (being there) is the word that Heidegger uses to refer to beings like ourselves. Clark is no Heidegger scholar, but the reference is deliberate; among the predecessors to his book he lists not only Heidegger himself, but also the American Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus and the French Heideggerean phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This triumvirate has played an increasingly (...) important role in recent years among the "alternative" cognitive science set, owing largely to the influence of Dreyfus's 1979 book What Computers Can't Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), which enlisted Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontean arguments in the fight against classical symbolic processing approaches to artificial intelligence. Clark's book fits squarely in this "alternative" tradition, and it is an important contribution to the existing literature. It surveys a large array of results in cognitive scientifically oriented fields ranging from robotics to developmental psychology, and it argues convincingly that these results should encourage us to embrace a radical new research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. The central claim is that mainstream cognitive scientists should, like their more revolutionary colleagues, learn to substitute for "the disembodied, atemporal intellectualist vision of mind ... the image of mind as a controller of embodied action" (p. 7). As a clear and brightly written account of this alternative movement in cognitive science, and perhaps even as a kind of mission statement for the new paradigm, Clark's book is one of the finest I have read. It is limited, however, by the fact that the interesting and well-described empirical work that forms the center of his presentation does not always provide sufficient resources for addressing the equally important philosophical problems lurking. (shrink)

This chapter examines eighteenth-century British discussions of human freedom, which focused on the question of whether the will is a self-determining, or active power, or whether the will is determined, or necessitated, by motives. The chapter begins with a consideration of the libertarian position of Samuel Clarke, which was taken up by the later libertarians Richard Price and Thomas Reid. It considers two necessitarians: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. Although David Hume was taken to be a necessitarian, both by (...) his contemporaries and recent commentators, the chapter suggests that Hume challenged assumptions about the nature of the very problem of liberty and necessity shared by his contemporaries, libertarians and necessitarians alike, although this challenge remained unanswered, because ignored, in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

In Morality & Mathematics, Justin Clarke-Doane argues that it is hard to imagine being "a realist about, for example, the standard model of particle physics, but not about mathematics." I try to explain how that seems very possible from the perspective of a physicist. What is real is the physical world; mathematics starts from descriptions of the natural world and extrapolates from there, but that extrapolation does not imply any independent reality. -/- Submitted to an Analysis Reviews symposium on (...) Clarke-Doane's Morality & Mathematics. (shrink)

Extended Cognition (EC) hypothesizes that there are parts of the world outside the head serving as cognitive vehicles. One criticism of this controversial view is the problem of “cognitive bloat” which says that EC is too permissive and fails to provide an adequate necessary criterion for cognition. It cannot, for instance, distinguish genuine cognitive vehicles from mere supports (e.g. the Yellow Pages). In response, Andy Clark and Mark Rowlands have independently suggested that genuine cognitive vehicles are distinguished from supports in (...) that the former have been “recruited,” i.e. they are either artifacts, or, products of evolution. I argue against this proposal. There are counter examples to the claim that “Teleological” EC is either necessary or sufficient for cognition. Teleological EC conflates different types of scientific projects, and inherits content externalism’s alienation from historically impartial cognitive science. (shrink)

Modal Security is an increasingly discussed proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat. Modal Security says, roughly, that if evidence undermines (rather than rebuts) one’s belief, then one gets reason to doubt the belief's safety or sensitivity. The primary interest of the principle is that it seems to entail that influential epistemological arguments, including Evolutionary Debunking Arguments against moral realism and the Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism, are unsound. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Modal Security in detail. (...) We develop and discuss what we take to be the strongest objections to the principle. One of the aims of the paper is to expose the weakness of these objections. Another is to reveal how the debate over Modal Security interacts with core problems in epistemology — including the generality problem, and the distinction between direct and indirect evidence. (shrink)

On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals possess a “number sense,” or approximate number system, that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques that question whether the ANS genuinely represents number. We distinguish three lines of critique – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. We then provide positive reasons to think that the ANS genuinely represents numbers, and not just non-numerical confounds or exotic substitutes for (...) number, such as “numerosities” or “quanticals,” as critics propose. In so doing, we raise a neglected question: numbers of what kind? Proponents of the orthodox view have been remarkably coy on this issue. But this is unsatisfactory since the predictions of the orthodox view, including the situations in which the ANS is expected to succeed or fail, turn on the kind of number being represented. In response, we propose that the ANS represents not only natural numbers, but also non-natural rational numbers. It does not represent irrational numbers, however, and thereby fails to represent the real numbers more generally. This distances our proposal from existing conjectures, refines our understanding of the ANS, and paves the way for future research. (shrink)

Sometimes someone does something morally wrong in clear-eyed awareness that what she is doing is wrong. More commonly, a wrongdoer fails to see that her conduct is wrong. Call the latter behavior unwitting wrongful conduct. It is generally agreed that an agent can be blameworthy for such conduct, but there is considerable disagreement about how one’s blameworthiness in such cases is to be explained, or what conditions must be satisfied for the agent to be blameworthy for her conduct. Many theorists (...) hold that an agent’s blameworthiness for unwitting wrongful conduct must stem from—or trace back to—her blameworthiness for something else. And appeals to tracing in these cases lead some writers to a highly revisionist view, on which people are blameworthy for wrongdoing much less often than we ordinarily think (and our mistake, unfortunately, isn’t about how much wrongdoing there is). In this chapter, I set out the main claims of an argument for such a view and respond to it. I offer grounds for retaining a good many of the judgments that the revisionist would have us reject. The defense rests to a significant extent on commonsense views about the psychological capacities and abilities to act that people ordinarily possess, views that, as far as I can tell, revisionists have not shown to be mistaken. (shrink)

This is a three-part exchange on the relationship between belief and credence. It begins with an opening essay by Roger Clarke that argues for the claim that the notion of credence generalizes the notion of belief. Julia Staffel argues in her reply that we need to distinguish between mental states and models representing them, and that this helps us explain what it could mean that belief is a special case of credence. Roger Clarke's final essay reflects on the (...) compatibility of the previously discussed views with dualist and monist interpretations of our mental states and our ways of modeling them. (shrink)

According to current hierarchies of evidence for EBM, evidence of correlation (e.g., from RCTs) is always more important than evidence of mechanisms when evaluating and establishing causal claims. We argue that evidence of mechanisms needs to be treated alongside evidence of correlation. This is for three reasons. First, correlation is always a fallible indicator of causation, subject in particular to the problem of confounding; evidence of mechanisms can in some cases be more important than evidence of correlation when assessing a (...) causal claim. Second, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to obtain evidence of correlation (for example, in order to set up and evaluate RCTs). Third, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to generalise and apply causal claims. While the EBM movement has been enormously successful in making explicit and critically examining one aspect of our evidential practice, i.e., evidence of correlation, we wish to extend this line of work to make explicit and critically examine a second aspect of our evidential practices: evidence of mechanisms. (shrink)

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its (...) ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border. (shrink)

Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons (BRR) is a beautiful book – sleek, sophisticated, and programmatic. One of its key aims is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths. In this article, I develop an epistemological problem that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that his “metaphysical pluralism” can be understood as a response to that problem. However, it resolves the problem only if it undercuts the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry.

This paper argues that agents can be directly blameworthy for unwitting omissions. The view developed focuses on the capacities and abilities of agents.

On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom. At a quantum level, this view of change as relative variation leads to a fundamentally timeless formalism for quantum gravity. Here, we will show how one may avoid this acute ‘problem of time’. Under our view, (...) duration is still regarded as relative, but temporal succession is taken to be absolute. Following our approach, which is presented in more formal terms in, it is possible to conceive of a genuinely dynamical theory of quantum gravity within which time, in a substantive sense, remains. 1 Introduction1.1 The problem of time1.2 Our solution2 Understanding Symmetry2.1 Mechanics and representation2.2 Freedom by degrees2.3 Voluntary redundancy3 Understanding Time3.1 Change and order3.2 Quantization and succession4 Time and Gravitation4.1 The two faces of classical gravity4.2 Retaining succession in quantum gravity5 Discussion5.1 Related arguments5.2 Concluding remarks. (shrink)

David Clarke examines the complex relationship between phenomenological and semiological understandings of music and consciousness through the window of time. He also explores the polar tension between Husserl's phenomenology and Derrida's critique of it, considering what the experience of music might have to offer in response to the crucial question of what is most primordial or essential to consciousness: the unceasing, differential movement of meaning, or some pure flow of subjectivity that underpins all our experience.

Holly Smith has done more than anyone to explore and defend the importance of usability for moral theories. In Making Morality Work, she develops a moral theory that is almost universally usable. But not quite. In this article, I argue that no moral theory is universally usable, in the sense that is most immediately relevant to action, even by agents who know all the normative facts. There is no moral theory knowledge of which suffices to settle deliberation about what to (...) do. However, this is unsurprising if the question of what to do is not a question of fact. One upshot of the discussion is that the search for a universally usable moral theory is misconceived. Another is that, contra Smith (341), agents who are radically uncertain need not lack autonomy. (shrink)

I begin by examining a recent debate between John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke over whether the content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual. Although I am sympathetic to Peacocke’s claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual, I suggest a number of ways in which his arguments fail to make that case. This failure stems from an over-emphasis on the "fine-grainedness" of perceptual content - a feature that is relatively unimportant to its non-conceptual structure. I go on to describe two other features of (...) perceptual experience that are more likely to be relevant to the claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual. These features are 1) the dependence of a perceived object on the perceptual context in which it is perceived and 2) the dependence of a perceived property on the object it is perceived to be a property of. (shrink)

This essay examines several varieties of libertarian accounts of free will. Some require free actions to be uncaused, some require agent causation, and some require non-deterministic event causation. Difficulties are raised for all of these varieties.

Jung was fascinated by the east. Through his commentaries on such texts as the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and through his essays on such topics as Zen, meditation and the symbolism of the mandala, Jung attempted to build a bridge of understanding between western psychology and the ancient ideas and practices of eastern religion. By doing so he hoped to relate traditional eastern thought to modern western concerns. John Clarke's latest book seeks to uncover (...) Jung's dialogue with the east. The book will appeal to all those who wish to broaden their understanding of Jung's thought as well as to those who value eastern ways of thinking and who believe that by engaging with it westerners have much to gain both intellectually and spiritually. (shrink)

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even (...) in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory. (shrink)

The concept of alienation: Hegelian themes in modern social thought -- Creative activity and alienation in Hegel and Marx -- The concept of labour -- The individual and society -- Freedom and the "realm of necessity" -- Alienation as a critical concept -- Private property and communism -- The division of labour and its overcoming -- Marx's concept of communism.

In 1826 Americans witnessed the spectacle of President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John C. Calhoun taking to the press to debate the nature of power and liberty under the pseudonyms "Patrick Henry" and "Onslow". In the course of this exchange some of the most salient issues within American politics and liberty are debated, including the nature of political order, democracy, and the diffusion of political power.

Clarke proposes a conception of philosophy that provides an alternative to the reductions of materialism and the search for normative principles. Philosophy's proper role is to describe similarities and differences among differing levels of language, specifically the familiar level of discourse within an ordinary language shared by all and the specialized discourses of social institutions such as science, law, and the arts. By constructing a logical framework in which these comparisons and contrasts can be made, philosophy performs the indispensable (...) role of promoting the integration of disparate elements of our culture. (shrink)

BackgroundEthics consultation is recognized as an opportunity to share responsibility for difficult decisions in prenatal medicine, where moral intuitions are often unable to lead to a settled decision. It remains unclear, however, if the general standards of ethics consultation are applicable to the very particular setting of pregnancy.Main textWe sought to analyze the special nature of disagreements, conflicts and value uncertainties in prenatal medicine as well as the ways in which an ethics consultation service (ECS) could possibly respond to them (...) and illustrated our results with a case example. Ethics facilitation and conflict mediation, currently, have no broadly consented normative framework encompassing prenatal diagnosis and therapy as well as reproductive choice to draw on. Even so, they can still be helpful instruments for ethically challenging decision-making in prenatal medicine provided two additional rules are respected: For the time being, ECSs should (a) refrain from issuing content-heavy recommendations in prenatal medicine and (b) should not initiate conflict mediations that would involve the pregnant woman or couple as a conflict party.ConclusionIt seems to be vital that ethics consultants as well as health care professionals acknowledge the current limitations and pitfalls of ethics consultation in prenatal medicine and together engage in the advancement of standards for this particularly complex setting. (shrink)

Liberal neutrality requires that, given the diversity of conceptions of the good life held by people, the state should be in some sense neutral between these conceptions. Just what that sense is has been a matter of debate but it seems generally accepted that neutrality is a property of the justifications for government action and not of the consequences of such action. In other words, the state must be neutral by avoiding invoking any conception of the good in its justification (...) for laws and policies and by avoiding having any laws and policies that can be justified only by reference to some conception of the good. It need not, so it seems generally accepted, ensure that the consequences of its laws and policies do not favor some conceptions of the good over others. Against this commonly held view, in this chapter I argue that justificatory neutrality is inadequate as a full picture of what liberal neutrality means and that some conception of consequential neutrality is more plausible. (shrink)

The authors of a much discussed recent book A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum argue that ‘a new conspiracism’ has emerged recently. Their examples include Donald Trump’s allegations that elections have been rigged, ‘Birther’ accusations about Barack Obama, ‘QAnon’ and ‘Pizzagate’. They characterize these as ‘conspiracism without the theory’. They argue that the new conspiracism is validated by repetition, disregards experts, and is satisfied with the conclusion (...) that allegations are ‘true enough’. Here I argue that there is no new conspiracism. Muirhead and Rosenblum have misconstrued their chief examples of new conspiracism and mischaracterized classic conspiracism. The non-existence of a new conspiracism matters. If those studying contemporary conspiracism suppose that many of the objects of their study are theory-free then they are liable to fail to examine the theories that actually are driving contemporary conspiracism. Also, if they suppose that they are confronting an entirely new phenomenon then they are in danger of failing to learn lessons from the rich history of conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

This paper offers an unorthodox appraisal of empirical research bearing on the question of the low representation of women in philosophy. It contends that fashionable views in the profession concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat are weakly supported, that philosophers often fail to report the empirical work responsibly, and that the standards for evidence are set very low—so long as you take a certain viewpoint.