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Facial profiling technology and discrimination: a new threat to civil rights in liberal democracies Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-05-15 Michael Joseph Gentzel
This paper offers the first philosophical analysis of a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which the author calls facial profiling technology (FPT). FPT is a type of facial analysis technology designed to predict criminal behavior based solely on facial structure. Marketed for use by law enforcement, face classifiers generated by the program can supposedly identify murderers, thieves, pedophiles
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An unjustly neglected theory of semantic reference Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-05-10 J. P. Smit
There is a simple, intuitive theory of the semantic reference of proper names that has been unjustly neglected. This is the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speakers reference, i.e. the view that a name semantically refers to an object if, and only if, there exists a convention to use the name to speaker-refer to that object. The theory can be found in works dealing primarily with other
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Safety’s coordination problems Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Julien Dutant, Sven Rosenkranz
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Incommensurability and healthcare priority setting Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Anders Herlitz
This paper argues that accepting incommensurability can be a useful step for developing attractive hybrid theories to how to distribute scarce health-related resources. If one provides opportunity for distributive options to be incommensurable with respect to substantive criteria, one can hold on to substantive criteria while also providing room for decision processes to play a significant role. The
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States’ culpability through time Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Stephanie Collins
Some contemporary states are morally culpable for historically distant wrongs. But which states for which wrongs? The answer is not obvious, due to secessions, unions, and the formation of new states in the time since the wrongs occurred. This paper develops a framework for answering the question. The argument begins by outlining a picture of states’ agency on which states’ culpability is distinct
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Expected choiceworthiness and fanaticism Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Calvin Baker
Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options
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Logicality in natural language Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Gil Sagi
Is there a relation of logical consequence in natural language? Logicality, in the philosophical literature, has been conceived of as a restrictive phenomenon that is at odds with the unbridled richness and complexity of natural language. This article claims that there is a relation of logical consequence in natural language, and moreover, that it is the subject matter of the bulk of current theories
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Normativity, prudence and welfare Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Michael Ridge
Most discussions of discourse about welfare and discourse about prudence are a “package deal” when it comes to their normativity—either both or neither are normative. In this paper I argue against this conventional “package deal” assumption. I argue that discourse about welfare is not normative in one useful sense of that term, but that prudential discourse is normative. My argument draws in part on
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Methodological worries for humean arguments from evil Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Timothy Perrine
Humean arguments from evil are some of the most powerful arguments against Theism. They take as their data what we know about good and evil. And they argue that some rival to Theism better explains, or otherwise predicts, that data than Theism. However, this paper argues that there are many problems with various methods for defending Humean arguments. I consider Philo’s original strategy; modern strategies
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In defense of genuine un-forgiving Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Anna-Bella Sicilia
Despite much philosophical attention on forgiveness itself, the phenomenon of un-forgiving is relatively neglected. Some views of forgiveness commit us to denying that we can ever permissibly un-forgive. Some go so far as to say the concept of un-forgiving is incomprehensible—it is the nature of forgiveness to be permanent. Yet many apparent cases of un-forgiving strike us as both real and justified
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Symmetries and ground Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Martin Glazier
If the tiles of a mosaic are arranged symmetrically, then the image those tiles constitute must be symmetric as well. This paper formulates and defends the general principle at work in this case: roughly, that a symmetry cannot ground an asymmetry. It is argued that the principle supports strong objections to four metaphysical views: qualitativism, relationalism, the tenseless or ‘B’ theory of time
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The presumption of realism Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Nils Franzén
Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It
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The good life as the life in touch with the good Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Adam Lovett, Stefan Riedener
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The self-reinforcing nature of joint action Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-27 Facundo M. Alonso
Shared intention normally leads to joint action. It does this, it is commonly said, only because it is a characteristically stable phenomenon, a phenomenon that tends to persist from the time it is formed until the time it is fulfilled. However, the issue of what the stability of shared intention comes down to remains largely undertheorized. My aim in this paper is to remedy this shortcoming. I argue
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Existentialist risk and value misalignment Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Ariela Tubert, Justin Tiehen
We argue that two long-term goals of AI research stand in tension with one another. The first involves creating AI that is safe, where this is understood as solving the problem of value alignment. The second involves creating artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that operates at or beyond human capacity across all or many intellectual domains. Our argument focuses on the human capacity to make
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Fictions that don’t tell the truth Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Neri Marsili
Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we
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Metanormative regress: an escape plan Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Christian Tarsney
How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some “second-order” norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a
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Indiscernibility and the grounds of identity Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Samuel Z. Elgin
I provide a theory of the metaphysical foundations of identity: an account of what grounds facts of the form \(a=b\). In particular, I defend the claim that indiscernibility grounds identity. This is typically rejected because it is viciously circular; plausible assumptions about the logic of ground entail that the fact that \(a=b\) partially grounds itself. The theory I defend is immune to this circularity
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Incommensurability and hardness Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Chrisoula Andreou
There is growing support for the view that there can be cases of incommensurability, understood as cases in which two alternatives, X and Y, are such that X is not better than Y, Y is not better than X, and X and Y are not equally good. This paper assumes that alternatives can be incommensurable and explores the prominent idea that, insofar as choice situations that agents face qua rational agents
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Proximal intentions intentionalism Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Victor Tamburini
According to a family of metasemantics for demonstratives called intentionalism, the intentions of speakers determine the reference of demonstratives. And according to a sub-family I call proximal intentions (PI) intentionalism, the intention that determines reference is one that occupies a certain place—the proximal one—in a structure of intentions. PI intentionalism is thought to make correct predictions
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Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Robert Weston Siscoe
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Who’s afraid of common knowledge? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Giorgio Sbardolini
Some arguments against the assumption that ordinary people may share common knowledge are sound. The apparent cost of such arguments is the rejection of scientific theories that appeal to common knowledge. My proposal is to accept the arguments without rejecting the theories. On my proposal, common knowledge is shared by ideally rational people, who are not just mathematically simple versions of ordinary
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Rights reclamation Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-03 William L. Bell
According to a rights forfeiture theory of punishment, liability to punishment hinges upon the notion that criminals forfeit their rights against hard treatment. In this paper, I assume the success of rights forfeiture theory in establishing the permissibility of punishment but aim to develop the view by considering how forfeited rights might be reclaimed. Built into the very notion of proportionate
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Superconditioning Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Simon M. Huttegger
When can a shift from a prior to a posterior be represented by conditionalization? A well-known result, known as “superconditioning” and going back to work by Diaconis and Zabell, gives a sharp answer. This paper extends the result and connects it to the reflection principle and common priors. I show that a shift from a prior to a set of posteriors can be represented within a conditioning model if
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Mind the gap: noncausal explanations of dual properties Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Sorin Bangu
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Why, Delilah? When music and lyrics move us in different directions Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Laura Sizer, Eva M. Dadlez
Songs that combine happy music and sad, violent, or morally disturbing lyrics raise questions about the relationship between music and lyrics in song, including the question of how such songs affect the listener, and of the ethical implications of listening – and perhaps singing along with – such songs. To explore those perplexing cases in which the affective impact of music and lyrics seem entirely
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Nativism and empiricism in artificial intelligence Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Robert Long
Historically, the dispute between empiricists and nativists in philosophy and cognitive science has concerned human and animal minds (Margolis and Laurence in Philos Stud: An Int J Philos Anal Tradit 165(2): 693-718, 2013, Ritchie in Synthese 199(Suppl 1): 159–176, 2021, Colombo in Synthese 195: 4817–4838, 2018). But recent progress has highlighted how empiricist and nativist concerns arise in the
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Quine, evidence, and our science Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Gary Kemp
As is reasonably well-appreciated, Quine struggled with his definition of the all-important notion of an observation sentence; especially in order to make them bear out his commitment to language’s being a ‘social art’. In an earlier article (Mind 131(523):805–825, 2022), I proposed a certain repair, which here I will explain, justify and articulate further. But it also infects the definition of observation
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Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition account Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Michael Strevens
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Zetetic indispensability and epistemic justification Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Mikayla Kelley
Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful
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Policing, undercover policing and ‘dirty hands’: the case of state entrapment Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Daniel J. Hill, Stephen K. McLeod, Attila Tanyi
Under a ‘dirty hands’ model of undercover policing, it inevitably involves situations where whatever the state agent does is morally problematic. Christopher Nathan argues against this model. Nathan’s criticism of the model is predicated on the contention that it entails the view, which he considers objectionable, that morally wrongful acts are central to undercover policing. We address this criticism
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Relevant entailment and logical ground Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Pierre Saint-Germier, Peter Verdée, Pilar Terrés Villalonga
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Why Is Oppression Wrong? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Serene J. Khader
It is often argued that oppression reduces freedom. I argue against the view that oppression is wrong because it reduces freedom. Conceiving oppression as wrong because it reduces freedom is at odds with recognizing structural cases of oppression, because (a) many cases of oppression, including many structural ones, do not reduce agents’ freedom, and (b) the type of freedom reduction involved in many
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Inquiry and trust: An epistemic balancing act Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Heather Rabenberg
It might initially appear impossible to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p. At the very least, it might appear that doing so would be irrational. In this paper, I shall argue that things are not as they appear. Not only is it possible for a person to inquire into whether p while trusting someone that p, it is very often rational. Indeed, combining inquiry and trust in this way is
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Still no lie detector for language models: probing empirical and conceptual roadblocks Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Benjamin A. Levinstein, Daniel A. Herrmann
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Contingentism and paraphrase Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Jonas Werner
One important challenge for contingentists is that they seem to be unable to account for the meaning of some apparently meaningful modal discourse that is perfectly intelligible for necessitists. This worry is particularly pressing for higher-order contingentists, contingentists who hold that it is not only contingent which objects there are, but also contingent which semantic values there are for
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Two-step approaches to healthcare allocation: how helpful is parity in selecting eligible options? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-12 David Wasserman
Priority setting in healthcare is a highly contentious area of public decision making, in which different values often support incompatible policy options and compromise can be elusive. One promising approach to resolving priority-setting conflicts divides the decision-making process into two steps. In the first, a set of eligible options is identified; in the second, one of those options is chosen
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Pitcovski’s explanation-based account of harm Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Erik Carlson, Jens Johansson, Olle Risberg
In a recent article in this journal, Eli Pitcovski puts forward a novel, explanation-based account of harm. We seek to show that Pitcovski’s account, and his arguments in favor of it, can be substantially improved. However, we also argue that, even thus improved, the account faces a dilemma. The dilemma concerns the question of what it takes for an event, E, to explain why a state, P, does not obtain
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Proportionality and combat trauma Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Nathan Gabriel Wood
The principle of proportionality demands that a war (or action in war) achieve more goods than bads. In the philosophical literature there has been a wealth of work examining precisely which goods and bads may count toward this evaluation. However, in all of these discussions there is no mention of one of the most certain bads of war, namely the psychological harm(s) likely to be suffered by the combatants
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In defence of object-given reasons Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Michael Vollmer
One recurrent objection to the idea that the right kind of reasons for or against an attitude are object-given reasons for or against that attitude is that object-given reasons for or against belief and disbelief are incapable of explaining certain features of epistemic normativity. Prohibitive balancing, the behaviour of bare statistical evidence, information about future or easily available evidence
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Structuring embodied minds: attention and perceptual agency Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Jelle Bruineberg, Odysseus Stone
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Algorithmic profiling as a source of hermeneutical injustice Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Silvia Milano, Carina Prunkl
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Taught rules: Instruction and the evolution of norms Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Camilo Martinez
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Collective procedural memory Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Sean Donahue
Collective procedural memory is a group’s memory of how to do things, as opposed to a group’s memory of facts. It enables groups to mount effective responses to periodic events (e.g., natural hazards) and to sustain collective projects (e.g., combatting climate change). This article presents an account of collective procedural memory called the Ability Conception. The Ability Conception has various
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A trilemma for the lexical utility model of the precautionary principle Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 H. Orri Stefánsson
Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory
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Attention, moral skill, and algorithmic recommendation Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Nick Schuster, Seth Lazar
Recommender systems are artificial intelligence technologies, deployed by online platforms, that model our individual preferences and direct our attention to content we’re likely to engage with. As the digital world has become increasingly saturated with information, we’ve become ever more reliant on these tools to efficiently allocate our attention. And our reliance on algorithmic recommendation may
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Ground by Status Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Lisa Vogt
What is the explanatory role of ‘status-truths’ such as essence-truths, necessity-truths and law-truths? A plausible principle, suggested by various authors, is Ground by Status, according to which status truths ground their prejacents. For instance, if it is essential to a that p, then this grounds the fact that p. But Ground by Status faces a forceful objection: it is inconsistent with widely accepted
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Why bother with so what? Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-16 N. D. Cannon
I address a family of objections I label the So What? objection to robust non-naturalist realism (or, just non-naturalism). This objection concludes that non-naturalism fails to identify the moral properties in virtue of failing to explain why non-natural properties would have all the features we expect moral properties to have and can be extended to provide the conclusion that the non-naturalist is
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Epistemic blame as relationship modification: reply to Smartt Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-06 Cameron Boult
I respond to Tim Smartt’s (2023) skepticism about epistemic blame. Smartt’s skepticism is based on the claims that (i) mere negative epistemic evaluation can better explain everything proponents of epistemic blame say we need epistemic blame to explain; and (ii) no existing account of epistemic blame provides a plausible account of the putative force that any response deserving the label “blame” ought
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Broad, subjective, relative: the surprising folk concept of basic needs Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Thomas Pölzler, Tobu Tomabechi, Ivar R. Hannikainen
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Implicating fictional truth Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Nils Franzén
Some things that we take to be the case in a fictional work are never made explicit by the work itself. For instance, we assume that Sherlock Holmes does not have a third nostril, that he wears underpants and that he has never solved a case with a purple gnome, even though neither of these things is ever mentioned in the narration. This article argues that examples like these can be accounted for through
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Raz’s appeal to law’s authority Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Ben Martin
Joseph Raz’s Argument from Authority is one of the most famous defences of exclusive positivism in jurisprudence, the position that the existence and content of the law in a society is a wholly social fact, which can be established without the need to engage in moral analysis. According to Raz’s argument, legal systems are de facto practical authorities that, like all de facto authorities, must claim
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Humean learning (how to learn) Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19
Abstract David Hume’s skeptical solution to the problem of induction was grounded in his belief that we learn by means of custom . We consider here how a form of reinforcement learning like custom may allow an agent to learn how to learn in other ways as well. Specifically, an agent may learn by simple reinforcement to adopt new forms of learning that work better than simple reinforcement in the context
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Predicative subject matter Philosophical Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Matteo Plebani, Giuseppe Spolaore
The notions of subject matter and aboutness have been objects of considerable attention among philosophers over the last few years. Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: “sentences have aboutness properties if anything has” (Yablo, Aboutness, Princeton University Press, 2014). However, some subsentential expressions can also be thought of as