The Neurodiversity (ND) movement demands that some psychiatric categories be de-pathologized. It has faced much criticism, leading some to despair whether it can ever be brought together with psychiatry. In this paper, we argue for a particular understanding of this central demand of the ND movement. We argue that the demand for de-pathologizing is the rejection of (paradigmatically) autism as a hypostatic

We care about whether the people around us can take a joke. And this care has a moral tinge to it: we're more likely to trust good-humoured people, and are prone to accusing humourless people of being ‘sanctimonious buzzkills’ who need to ‘get over themselves’. But are these moralized reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? This paper discusses the moral value of humour in terms

A consensus is emerging in the philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from scientific inquiry. Which values should then be chosen by scientists? This paper proposes a novel answer to this question, labelled the public reason view. To place this answer on firm ground, I first redraw the boundaries of the political forum; in other words, I broaden the range of actors who have a

Many people believe that it is better to extend the length of a happy life than to create a new happy life, even if the total welfare is the same in both cases. Despite the popularity of this view, one would be hard-pressed to find a fully compelling justification for it in the literature. This paper develops a novel account of why and when extension is better than replacement that applies not just

Is acceptance an act or a state? Jonathan Cohen is often seen as a proponent of the view that acceptance is a mental act. In contrast, Michael Bratman claims that acceptance is a mental state. This paper argues that the evidence supports a more subtle approach. Linguistic intuitions about the lexical aspect of the verb ‘accept’ support the view that there is an act of acceptance and a state of acceptance

I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally due to Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g., ‘property’, ‘grounding’) refer to entities and structures (e.g., properties, grounding) in the world? I distinguish a meta‐metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (‘deflationism’) from a meta‐metaphysical view for which this explanatory

This is a contribution to a book symposium on Bias: A Philosophical Study, in which I respond to commentaries by Gabbrielle Johnson, Daniel Greco, and Selim Berker. In response to Johnson, I argue that many paradigmatic cases of bias are not best understood as involving underdetermination, and I defend my alternative account of bias against the concerns that she raises. In response to Greco, I note

It is essential that formal models come with interpretations: accounts of how the models relate to the phenomena. The traditional representation of degrees of belief as mathematical probabilities comes with a clear and simple interpretative story. This paper argues that the model of degrees of belief as imprecise probabilities (sets of probabilities) lacks a workable interpretation: The standard interpretative

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while

Recent work in social epistemology has begun to make use of the behavioral-scientific concept of the nudge, but without sustained attention to how it should be translated from behavioral to epistemic contexts. We offer an account of doxastic nudges that satisfies extensional and theoretical desiderata, defend it against other accounts in the literature, and use it to clarify ongoing discussions of

In this paper, I aim to identify the wrong that is done by the hearer to the testifier in all cases of testimonial injustice. I introduce the concept of testimonial injustice, as well as the existing accounts of this characteristic wrong, and I argue that the latter don’t work. Then I present my favoured account, which adapts Rachel Fraser’s account of the wrong of aesthetic injustice. I argue that

Among theories of vagueness, supervaluationism stands out for its non–truth functional account of the logical connectives. For example, the disjunction of two atomic statements that are not determinately true or false can, itself, come out either true or indeterminate, depending on its content—a consequence several philosophers find problematic. Smith (2016) turns this point against supervaluationism

The conventional discourse on existential risks (x-risks) from AI typically focuses on abrupt, dire events caused by advanced AI systems, particularly those that might achieve or surpass human-level intelligence. These events have severe consequences that either lead to human extinction or irreversibly cripple human civilization to a point beyond recovery. This decisive view, however, often neglects

The normative challenge of AI alignment centres upon what goals or values ought to be encoded in AI systems to govern their behaviour. A number of answers have been proposed, including the notion that AI must be aligned with human intentions or that it should aim to be helpful, honest and harmless. Nonetheless, both accounts suffer from critical weaknesses. On the one hand, they are incomplete: neither

Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that

According to the standard Humean account of laws of nature, laws are selected as a result of an optimal trade-off between the scientific virtues of simplicity and strength. Roberts and Woodward have objected that such trade-offs play no role in how laws are chosen in science. We first discuss an example from automated scientific discovery which provides support for Roberts and Woodward’s point that

According to perspectivism, what I ought to do depends on my perspective. While recently popular, perspectivism faces a central puzzle. In some deliberative practices, facts outside our perspective are clearly relevant. In deliberation, we are concerned with acquiring new information. In advising, a better-informed adviser possesses relevant information I do not have. The latter case distinctly highlights

Many philosophers and linguists have been attracted to counterpart theory as a framework for natural language semantics. I raise a novel problem for counterpart theory involving simple declarative sentences with proper names. To resolve this problem, counterpart theorists must introduce the notion of a counterpart in the semantics of the non‐modal fragment of language. I develop my preferred solution:

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or

Standard decision theory ranks risky prospects by their expected utility. This ranking does not change if the values of all possible outcomes are uniformly shifted or dilated. Similarly, if the values of the outcomes are negated, the ranking of prospects by their expected utility is reversed. In settings with unbounded levels of utility, the expected utility of prospects is not always defined, but

Teitel (Mind 128:39-68, 2019) argues that the following three doctrines are jointly inconsistent: i) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity reduces to essence; ii) the doctrine that possibly something could fail to exist; and iii) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity obeys a modal logic of at least S4. This paper presents a novel solution to Teitel’s puzzle, regimented in a higher-order logical

Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about an astronomical amount of good (or agent‐neutral value). As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to engage in long‐term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that

This paper challenges Sosa’s account of the epistemic propriety of suspension of judgment. We take the reader on a test drive through some common problem cases in epistemology and argue that Sosa makes accurate and apt suspension both too easy and too hard.

This paper investigates a novel question about the relationship between belief and deliberation: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe an answer to a question Q prior to concluding one's deliberation about Q? This question differs from a more commonly discussed one, insofar as it asks about the rationality of believing that p before settling on p as the answer to some question Q. By contrast

The modal theory of luck, according to one influential version of it, holds that an event is lucky if and only if it actually obtains but fails to obtain in some close possible worlds, holding fixed certain initial conditions for the event. There have been some notable critiques of the theory. But they are not fully satisfactory, for they succumb to two typical and compelling strategies of defending

Let's say that I fully know that if I know that , I know that I know that , I know that I know that I know that , and so on. Let's say that I partially know that if I know that but I don't fully know that . What, if anything, do I fully know? What, if anything, do I partially know? One response in the literature is that I fully know everything that I know; partial knowledge is impossible. This response

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Nietzsche makes a number of remarks that suggest that he thinks that art and truth are antithetical – indeed that he thinks that the value of art lies in its falsification of aspects of the world that would otherwise prove unbearable. ‘Truth is ugly,’ he says: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ But the argument of the present paper is that the falsification reading is unsustainable, and

Not all actions are intentional actions. What separates merely doing something from intentionally doing something? One point of separation seems to be luck. Too much luck, or luck of a certain variety, seems to undermine the possibility of acting intentionally. This naturally leads to the idea that intentional action presupposes reliable success. I argue against this idea. Taking inspiration from Gareth

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 1, March 2025.

This paper examines cases in which an individual’s misunderstanding improves the scientific community’s understanding through “corrective” processes that produce understanding from poor epistemic inputs. To highlight the unique features of valuable misunderstandings and corrective processes, we contrast them with other social-epistemological phenomena including testimonial understanding, collective

AI technologies have shown remarkable capabilities in various scientific fields, such as drug discovery, medicine, climate modeling, and archaeology, primarily through their pattern recognition abilities. They can also generate hypotheses and suggest new research directions. While acknowledging AI’s potential to aid in scientific breakthroughs, the paper shows that current AI models do not meet the

Russell (Proc Aristot Soc 11:108–128, 1911; The Problems of Philosophy, Thornton Butterworth Limited, London, 1912) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient

Some modal expressions in language—for example, “can” and “able”—describe what is possible in light of someone's abilities. Ability modals are obviously related to other modalities in language, such as epistemic or deontic modality, but also give rise to anomalies that make them unique. This paper develops a general theory of ability modals that is broadly compatible with standard modal semantics,

Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not

This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before

Many philosophers believe that it counts against one morally if one is close and good friends with a bad person. Some argue that one acts badly by counting a bad person as a good friend, because such friendships carry significant moral risks. Others locate the moral badness in one’s moral psychology, suggesting that one becomes objectionably complacent by being good friends with a bad person. In this

I provide an overview of some of the main ideas presented in my book Bias: A Philosophical Study.

The notion of causation that Mary Shepherd develops in her 1824 An Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (ERCE) has a number of surprising features that have only recently begun to be studied by scholars. This relation is synchronic, rather than diachronic (ERCE pp. 49–50); it always involves a ‘mixture’ of pre-existing objects (ERCE pp. 46–7); and the effect must be ‘a new nature, capable of

The Curry–Howard correspondence, according to which propositions are types, suggests that every paradox formulable in natural deduction has a type-theoretical counterpart. I will give a purely type-theoretical formulation of Curry’s paradox. On the basis of the definition of a type $\Gamma (A)$, Curry’s reasoning can be adapted to show the existence of an object of the arbitrary type A. This is paradoxical

In Piñeros Glasscock (2020) I presented a version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument against the Anscombean thesis that intentional action entails knowledge. I defend this argument from recent criticisms by Beddor and Pavese (2022) and Valaris (2021). I argue that contrary to what my past self and these critics suggest, the conclusion of this anti-luminosity argument does not rest on the existence