This paper studies a family of classical and intuitionistic non-normal monotonic modal logics and their extensions, with particular attention to those extended with transitivity. We establish the (algebraic) finite model property and thus decidability for these logics by a unified and modular proof method. Our proof employs an algebraic proof-theoretic approach, distinct from the common neighbourhood filtration technique.
The concept of inductive risk—commonly understood as the possibility of error in accepting or rejecting a scientific hypothesis—has been a topic of discussion in the philosophy of science since the 1950s. The primary focus has been on its implications for the legitimacy of non-epistemic values in science, particularly their role in weighing risks of false positives against false negatives. This paper examines inductive risk through the lens of contemporary risk science. Drawing on recent developments in the conceptualization of risk, it offers new insights into how inductive risk can be assessed and characterized. The analysis is illustrated with the example of testing a new drug. The paper identifies and discusses several strategies for mitigating inductive risk.
This paper will explore the kind of insights that the phenomenological tradition and its various conceptualisations of the temporalities of agency might have to offer for thinking about our increasingly complex relationship to AI technologies. The phenomenological tradition conceptualises both human agency and our relationship to knowledge – from the kinds of epistemic practices that we engage in, to the various conditions that might enable or constrain those practices – in terms of our relationship to time. For phenomenologists, the ways in which we generate, navigate, and inhabit temporal structures are fundamental to our sense-making and decision-making processes. Given the increasing integration of various kinds of AI technologies into our lives, we might ask then how these technologies could and should impact the temporal dynamics of agency. This paper will focus on three types of what I call ‘temporal hazards’ generated by these impacts: delegation, stagnation, and fragmentation. These refer to tendencies or behaviours that involve ways of navigating time which in some manner undermine, constrain, or distort the development, exercise, or recognition of epistemic agency. Temporal delegation, stagnation, and fragmentation all precede the rise of generative AI, but are arguably amplified by the increasing integration of AI technologies into our lives.
It is tempting to think that in an ideal world our social problems would be little more than coordination games. In such cases, all actors have aligned incentives and, moreover, reliable means of establishing a socially optimal convention. For one thing, those with compatible strategies can learn to interact more often with each other. For another, they can signal to others that they would adopt the optimal convention, so long as enough others are also willing. But what if coordination games are interdependent, such that the value of coordinating in one game depends on the degree of coordination in some other game? We show that in these cases, these once reliable mechanisms become unreliable and even counterproductive. We call this phenomenon the tragedy of the conventions.
Negligence poses a puzzle for theories of moral responsibility: how can agents be responsible for conduct whose morally relevant features were not before their minds at the moment of action? When a devoted father forgets his child in a hot car, blame seems warranted; yet the connection between agent and outcome that ordinarily grounds it appears absent. Three strategies resist a sceptical conclusion. Capacitarianism holds that an agent who had the capacity and opportunity to advert to the risk is an eligible target of blame, but tells us only that the agent may be blamed, not why the failure is the agent’s own. Where capacitarianism leaves the ground of blame open, tracing locates it in culpable prior conduct; attributionism locates it in deficient evaluative judgments that the lapse reflects. A residual class remains, however: cases where neither culpable prior conduct nor deficient evaluative commitments can be identified. To address these stubborn cases, the paper develops precautionism: the agent is blameworthy for violating second-order epistemic duties to maintain her cognitive architecture (habits, routines, safeguards) through which existing knowledge can reliably reach deliberation. These duties govern the availability of knowledge the agent already possesses, rather than its acquisition. The resulting account is pluralist. Tracing, attributionism, and precautionism each address a different dimension of the gap between agent and negligent act: the volitional, the evaluative, and the epistemic.
Self-assembly and self-organization are central concepts in theories of how patterns form in natural systems. However, literature on the topic has for long been riddled with inconsistent uses of these concepts, which often conflate their meaning or define them idiosyncratically. This is problematic as it struggles to make sense of the ubiquitous interaction between self-assembly and self-organization in chemistry and biology. The thermodynamic account is an attempt to draw up clear definitions of the concepts using thermodynamics as the appropriate framework for distinguishing the two concepts from each other. In this paper, I challenge this account and argue that self-assembly shouldn’t primarily be understood in terms of thermodynamics. I offer a philosophical analysis of core conceptual challenges for self-assembly and self-organization and argue that the thermodynamic approach follows a misguided conceptualization strategy. Drawing on recent philosophical work on scientific definitions, I propose an alternative account that treats the concept as a conceptual tool that directs our attention towards the kinds of features that are explanatorily relevant for the pattern-formation process and towards the features the resulting pattern itself will possess.
This paper challenges the traditional tendency in epistemology to privilege memorization over forgetting, and instead underscores the epistemic significance of forgetting, particularly in its intentional or controllable forms. It begins by drawing attention to forms of forgetting that are, to some extent, controllable yet largely overlooked. When properly deployed, such forms of forgetting can help inquirers overcome epistemic obstacles and generate epistemic benefits, thereby facilitating the achievement of epistemic goals. Building on this, the paper argues that an ideal inquirer is disposed to regulate such forgetting forms properly in certain situations—a disposition that can be understood as an intellectual virtue from the perspective of responsibilist virtue epistemology.
Jacob Barandes has recently presented a version of quantum mechanics that dispenses with quantum-mechanical wave-functions. I will begin by describing a new and very simple way of formulating Professor Barandes’ theory, which I think is easier to state, and easier to reason with, and easier to understand, than Barandes’ original formulation was - and the rest of the paper will be devoted to a critical assessment of that theory, and to a discussion of some of its implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics.
The idea that emotional ambivalence may form part of our ordinary psychological life is often regarded with suspicion. Philosophers of emotion have argued that the simultaneous experience of opposed emotions toward the same intentional object, be it a whole object or an aspect of it, is incompatible with rational consistency, such that emotional ambivalence could arise only as a form of rational breakdown. In this paper, I develop a new account of emotional ambivalence grounded in a perceptual theory of emotion and the claim that emotions possess non-conceptual content. On this view, the appearance of contradiction dissolves once one accepts assumptions commonly endorsed by proponents of perceptual theories. Drawing on recent work in emotion categorisation, I further explain why ambivalent emotions nevertheless strike us as contradictory. The resulting account presents emotional ambivalence as a puzzling but entirely compatible feature of our emotional life, rather than as evidence of irrationality.
Belief in conspiracy theories is often considered to be irrational. The cognitive and motivational mechanisms driving such beliefs remain poorly integrated in leading models of the mind. This paper applies the Predictive Processing (PP) framework to account for two central belief-forming biases associated with irrational conspiracy theory belief: confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. While PP readily explains confirmation bias as a result of precision-weighted Bayesian inference, accommodating motivated reasoning, where desires and emotions shape what agents come to believe, is more challenging. We argue that this gap can be addressed by incorporating insights from the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and research on allostasis (i.e. predictive stabilization in response to stressors). We distinguish between beliefs sustained by cognitive reinforcement of prior beliefs and those shaped by emotional and motivational factors. From the point of view of motivated reasoning, interoceptive and affective priors involve high precision that can affect the generative model. Such motivated reasoning downplays epistemic value and information maximisation, instead focusing on affect-regulation – suggesting that PP, when focusing on metabolic and emotional costs tied to belief formation, can accommodate the role of desires and motivations in shaping beliefs. This work advances how we can understand belief systems under the PP framework and offers a nuanced perspective on the rationality of belief in conspiracy theories. Further, it illuminates why belief in poorly supported and disproven conspiracy theories persists, and presents a refined model of rationality under cognitive and emotional constraint.
The term “regulation” is often used in biology to refer to the means by which a system keeps or returns to a certain state after perturbation. Feedback mechanisms and the propagation of the perturbation through a network of constitutive components are commonly associated with this phenomenon. Intending to produce a full-fledged theoretical account of regulation in organisms, Bich and colleagues have proposed a stricter concept based on the Theory of Biological Autonomy. According to them, regulation is exerted by specialized subsystems that can change the constitutive regime of a living system while their dynamics is not specified by the latter. As such, regulatory subsystems allow faster and more specific responses, enabling the system to deal with a wider range of perturbations and providing greater robustness. In this paper, we extend this approach to ecological systems, showing how regulatory subsystems can be studied as mechanisms above the level of individual organisms belonging to the same species. Moreover, we differentiate between an ecological regulatory mechanism and an organismal regulatory mechanism with ecological consequences. We model an ecological regulatory mechanism that fits into the organizational approach to regulation. The mechanism involves responses to herbivory, in which plants produce volatile compounds to attract predatory insects from different species. We also model a case in which an organismal regulatory mechanism, related to changes in floral phenology, has important ecological consequences. In this manner, we intend to provide a proof of concept for ecological regulatory mechanisms in the strict sense proposed by Bich and colleagues, as well as for their differentiation from organism-level regulatory mechanisms that bring about ecological consequences. We hope this paper spurs further research that develops theoretical understanding of regulation in ecological systems through the investigation of other cases of ecological regulatory mechanisms.
The W-Defense has been a leading argument in defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. In this paper, I discuss Palmer and Liu’s (2021) recent application of the W-Defense as an argument for action-omission symmetry. I then employ the W-Defense as an argument in favor of leeway compatibilist action-omission symmetry—that is, I show that the W-Defense is compatible with a leeway compatibilist view regarding action-omission symmetry. Afterwards, I extend the W-Defense as a defense for praise-blame asymmetry. The upshot is that the W-Defense may be consistently used to defend both action-omission symmetry and praise-blame asymmetry, resulting in a new and attractive hybrid view available to compatibilists, which I dub semi-symmetry. I close by highlighting significant advantages the semi-symmetry view has over current Frankfurt-style compatibilist views, including Fischer’s (2017) latest asymmetry thesis, Cyr’s (2021) hard-line symmetry, as well as a new compatibilist reply to Swenson’s (2015, 2016, 2024) “No Principled Difference Argument”.
This paper argues for two intertwined theses. The first is that the nature of autism is such that it sometimes presents with corresponding benefits that make it the case that on some legitimate understandings of the concept of disability some autistic individuals might not count as disabled. The second is that the concept of disability can itself be deconstructed into medical, social, legal, and identity components in a manner similar (though not identical) to the concept of gender, as deconstructed in Lindqvist et al. (2021). I explore the notions of medical, social, legal, and identity disability, and argue that some autistics qualify as disabled on some but not others. I suggest that, given the lack of a definitive answer, the default approach should be to defer to individuals’ self-identifications.
Prior (1967) claims that his classical tense logic has destroyed Reichenbach’s distinction between the simple past and the present perfect. In this paper, we first reveal the following surprising result: Prior’s classical tense logic can restore Reichenbach’s distinction between the simple past and the present perfect. This result is obtained from formalizing what we refer to as ‘effect inference’ in the present perfect and in the past perfect in Prior’s classical tense logic, where the past perfect is symbolized as a special (complex) case of the simple past. Second, we show that Blackburn and Jørgensen (Blackburn Jørgensen, 2016)’s basic hybrid tense logic can reformulate this inferentialistic distinction between the simple past and the present perfect in a more faithful manner to Reichenbach’s terminology. Third, however, we find out a common limitation of Prior’s tense logic and Blackburn and Jørgensen (2016)’s hybrid tense logic: neither of them can smoothly slide effect inference in the present perfect into the future perfect in the context of branching time. We then demonstrate that Hosokawa (2023)’s version of hybrid tense logic with time reference operators can overcome this limitation naturally, while preserving the inferentialistic distinction between the simple past and the present perfect in a refined manner.
The world is likely to be indeterministic. As a consequence, agents can never definitely settle anything, because there is always a chance that a random event can interfere with their actions. Yet organisms are able to exploit random processes in order to increase the probability of bringing about certain preferred outcomes. This happens at various scales, from subcellular nanomachines to complex nervous systems. I suggest that free will consists in the capacity of cognitively sophisticated biological agents to bias their own behaviours in ways that better align them with their reflectively endorsed preferences. Thus we are neither fully determined by causes outside of our control, nor entirely at the mercy of randomness; rather, we are among the causes of our own behaviour. In an indeterministic universe, we have the freedom to try to do what we want.
This paper criticizes the semantic theories of interrogative sentences offered by Karttunen, and Groenendijk and Stokhof, and extends those criticisms to many other similar theories. It then proposes an alternative theory. The theories of Karttunen, and Groenendijk and Stokhof, entail that some true ascriptions of interrogative knowledge (aka knowledge-‘wh’ ascriptions) are false. Worse, their theories entail that some common types of interrogative knowledge are humanly unattainable. It is argued that this problem with their theories stems not from their descriptions of the extensions and intensions of interrogative sentences, but rather from their analyses of interrogative knowledge. The proposed alternative theory does not include an analysis of interrogative knowledge; it therefore avoids the previous problems. It is argued that semantic theories should not include analyses of interrogative knowledge, for any correct analysis describes the metaphysical nature of interrogative knowledge, rather than the meanings of interrogative knowledge ascriptions. Furthermore, there are compelling reasons to suspect that there is no correct analysis of interrogative knowledge.
In this paper I discuss an initially very plausible principle about metaphysical explanation, which has recently been explicitly defended. Suppose some q metaphysically explains the metaphysical necessity of p. Does q then also metaphysically explain p’s truth? The principle at issue, call it ‘(NT)’, gives an affirmative answer to that question. I show that (NT), if true, has widespread consequences concerning the metaphysics of modality, of fundamentality, and the debate about metaphysical explanation. Most importantly, under some plausible assumptions, (NT) would render a plethora of well-established views in modal metaphysics plainly false. Luckily, however, despite its initial plausibility, (NT) fails as a general principle about metaphysical explanation. I shall argue that the three discussed general arguments for (NT) all fail, that the specific arguments in its favor all depend on very specific (and, arguably, contentious) metaphysical views on the source of modality, and that (NT) is indeed incompatible with other (arguably less contentious) metaphysical views concerning modality.
According to the causal account of algorithmic fairness, disparities in error rates across socially salient groups are unfair only if they are causally explained by group membership. This paper argues that the causal account of algorithmic fairness fails to correctly label cases of algorithmic redlining as instances of algorithmic unfairness. Because these are canonical cases of algorithmic unfairness, the causal account should be rejected. We suggest that the fundamental error made by proponents of the causal account is to conflate algorithmic unfairness and algorithmic discrimination. Algorithmic unfairness can manifest as direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, or evidentiary unfairness. The causal account errs by recognizing only the first category.
This paper develops a more fine-grained account of how moral considerations can shape credences. Rather than merely defending existing formulations, the paper offers a framework in which moral influences on credence operate through priors and in which prior adoption is constrained by both epistemic and moral considerations. Against the recent objection that moral encroachment conflicts with evidentialism and probabilism, I argue that agents can and should adjust their priors in relevant contexts so that their credences can jointly satisfy both moral and epistemic requirements.
This paper develops an account of omissions as epistemically significant features of cognition. Drawing on a functionalist framework inspired by Fodor and recent theories of attention, I argue that inattention and omissions are not mere absences but structured elements with mental architecture that determine which representations become epistemically operative. Through the case of an inattentive driver who overlooks a cyclist, I show how omissions can shape what counts as evidence in both individual and social contexts. Empirical research on inattentional blindness and social salience supports the view that unconscious attentional processes contour the scope of epistemic justification. Inattention can produce epistemically diminished outcomes by constraining access to relevant information. I conclude that an epistemology of attention must also be an epistemology of inattention.
