Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469577
James Foster
In Dark Matters, Mara Van Der Lugt attempts to rehabilitate pessimism as a moral stance. Critical to this task is the distinction between what she calls “future-oriented” and “value-oriented” pessimism (10). The former is what most people presently understand the word pessimism to mean: a gloomy view about the future, an attitude of premature defeat.Although this kind of fatalism can be found alongside value-oriented pessimism, Van Der Lugt is chiefly interested in the latter, which she portrays as a sympathetic appreciation of suffering that, although not without hope, does not attempt to explain—let alone explain away—the existence of evil.To make this case, Dark Matters proceeds in three sections. The first section, comprising the introduction and first two chapters of the book, sets up the contrast between future- and value-oriented pessimism by examining various approaches to the classic problem of evil, as summarized by Epicurus’s classic trilemma among God’s power, God’s goodness, and the existence of evil.Some of these are what she calls “negative” strategies, which deny the premise that there is evil—or, more generously, a problematic amount of evil—in the world (33). And some are “positive” strategies, which accept the premise of evil in the world but attempt to explain the origin of evil by, for example, casting it as the inevitable side effect of free will and/or sin (35). Whatever their views about the future, those who take up these strategies are, in Van Der Lugt’s terms, “optimists.” And they are so by virtue of believing the problem of evil can be satisfactorily answered.On the other hand, those who take the contrasting approach, believing that the problem of evil is so acute that it cannot be rationally resolved, are pessimists. And first among them, for Van Der Lugt’s purposes, is Pierre Bayle, who set the terms of the pessimist/optimist debate in the early modern era by making the problem of evil primarily a problem of suffering.For Bayle, the primary task of addressing Epicurus’s query is not to justify or undermine belief in the existence of a good God. It is, rather, to understand, or at least appreciate, the irrefutable experience of human suffering. This focus on suffering alone does not make Bayle a pessimist. Rather, what makes him a pessimist is his insistence that there is far more suffering than pleasure in life, that we have little power to choose whether we suffer or flourish in any given circumstance, and that most of our pains cannot be explained as just punishment.In opposing Bayle’s diagnosis, Van Der Lugt suggests that most optimists employ a rhetorical strategy that she calls “the optics of optimism.” This strategy first attempts to meet Bayle head-on by denying his first two assertions. That is, optimists hold that there is far more joy in life than suffering and that we have significant capacity to choose happiness over sorrow. In this dispute, disagreement centers around a thought experiment proposed by Ba
在《暗物质》一书中，玛拉·范德卢特试图恢复悲观主义的道德立场。这项任务的关键在于区分她所说的“面向未来”和“面向价值”的悲观主义(10)。前者是目前大多数人对悲观一词的理解:对未来的悲观看法，过早失败的态度。虽然这种宿命论可以与价值导向的悲观主义并存，但范德卢特主要对后者感兴趣，她将后者描绘为对苦难的同情欣赏，尽管并非没有希望，但并不试图解释——更不用说解释了——邪恶的存在。为了证明这一点，《暗物质》分为三个部分。第一部分，包括本书的引言和前两章，通过考察对恶的经典问题的各种方法，建立了以未来为导向和以价值为导向的悲观主义之间的对比，伊壁鸠鲁的经典三困境总结了上帝的力量，上帝的善良和邪恶的存在。其中一些是她所谓的“消极”策略，这些策略否认世界上存在邪恶——或者更慷慨地说，邪恶的数量有问题——的前提(33)。还有一些是“积极”策略，它们接受世界上存在邪恶的前提，但试图解释邪恶的起源，例如，将其视为自由意志和/或罪恶不可避免的副作用(35)。无论他们对未来的看法如何，那些采取这些策略的人，用范德卢格特的话来说，都是“乐观主义者”。他们相信邪恶的问题可以得到令人满意的回答。另一方面，那些持相反观点的人是悲观主义者，他们认为邪恶的问题是如此尖锐，以至于无法理性地解决。首先，根据范德卢格特的目的，是皮埃尔·贝利，他在现代早期设定了悲观主义者和乐观主义者的争论，他把邪恶的问题主要看作是苦难的问题。对于Bayle来说，解决伊壁鸠鲁问题的首要任务不是证明或破坏对善神存在的信仰。更确切地说，是理解，或者至少是欣赏，人类痛苦的无可辩驳的经验。仅仅关注苦难并不能使贝尔成为悲观主义者。相反，使他成为悲观主义者的是他坚持认为生活中的痛苦远比快乐要多，我们几乎没有能力选择在任何特定的情况下是受苦还是繁荣，我们的大多数痛苦不能被解释为仅仅是惩罚。在反对Bayle的诊断时，Van Der Lugt认为大多数乐观主义者采用了一种修辞策略，她称之为“乐观主义的光学”。这一策略首先试图通过否定贝尔的前两个主张来正面对抗他。也就是说，乐观主义者认为生活中的快乐远远多于痛苦，我们有很大的能力选择快乐而不是悲伤。在这场争论中，分歧集中在Bayle提出的一个思想实验上:如果你问那些上了年纪的人，他们是否愿意以同样的善恶比例再过一次他们的生活，大多数人会给出否定的答案。乐观主义者，如威廉·金和莱布尼茨，不同意。在他们看来，如果另一种选择是被遗忘，大多数人会欣然同意重新过他们的生活。对于乐观主义者来说，问题不在于他们的答案不可信。事实上，他们对人类的普遍看法似乎是正确的。更确切地说，这不足以达到他们的目的。因为，尽管贝勒认为大多数人会选择遗忘而不是生命中的第二次轮回的观点可能确实是错误的，但即使有一种生物会合理地选择遗忘，也足以让那些主张存在良好的普遍秩序的人感到不安。这就是乐观主义发挥作用的地方。因为，当面对一个可能存在的可怜虫时，乐观主义者将他们的论点从“受造物”转向“宇宙”的观点(71)。他们承认，这个世界并不是没有被悲惨的可怜虫玷污的，但他们的痛苦要么是整体良好秩序所必需的，要么是在来生得到足够的回报。在这一点上，根据Van Der Lugt，关于早期现代邪恶问题的辩论结构已经确定。悲观主义者追随Bayle，发现乐观主义者对理性神正论的尝试是对实际经历的痛苦的残酷蔑视。与此同时，乐观主义者认为悲观主义者夸大了他们的情况，从而通过宣扬一种悲观的存在观而造成不必要的痛苦。正如范德卢格特所指出的，这两种立场都具有深刻的伦理意义;他们都关心哲学和神学试图解决邪恶问题的实际效果。在《暗物质》的第二部分，她带我们进行了一次“大旅行”，穿越了这场辩论在18世纪和19世纪的演变过程。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469590
Danielle Bromwich
Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car without my permission, and that is a rights violation. There is a lot riding on determining which actions are permitted by my consent. Fortunately, Tom Dougherty offers us a novel way to determine this in their excellent book The Scope of Consent.It is natural to think that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intended to permit. This captures the intuition that the scope of consent is controlled by the person giving consent. This used to be Dougherty’s view. However, this Permissive Intentions View is implausible. Suppose I had no intention of lending you my car—I only said you could borrow it because I falsely believed it would not start. Despite saying you could use it, this view implies that your use would not fall under the scope of my consent since I did not, in fact, intend you to use it. Cases like these lead Dougherty to reject the Permissive Intentions View in parts 1 and 2 of the book. And, since this view is implied by the Mental View of Consent—the view that we consent only if we have a certain mental attitude—they reject that too.Another plausible idea is that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver successfully communicates to the consent-receiver. This is intuitive in two respects. First, while most people agree that the consent-giver should determine what has been permitted, they also think that the consent-receiver should have epistemic access to whatever falls within the scope of consent. Second, this view implies that consent is a public phenomenon. Dougherty agrees with the second implication, and this provides them with another reason to reject the Mental View in favor of a Behavioral View of Consent. However, they are not persuaded by the Successful Communication Principle itself. Since successful communication requires uptake, the view implies that the consent-giver has not waived their rights until the consent-receiver finds out. So, even if I leave you a note saying that you can borrow my car, I have not succeeded in consenting until you have read the note. Dougherty finds this counterintuitive, and they therefore reject the view.Dougherty agrees that consent requires public behavior, and so the Successful Communication Account is the closest rival to the view they end up defending. And yet, despite engaging with arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of private intention in part 1 of the book, there is no discussion of arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of public performance in part 2. As a result, Dougherty
{"title":"<i>The Scope of Consent</i>","authors":"Danielle Bromwich","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469590","url":null,"abstract":"Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car without my permission, and that is a rights violation. There is a lot riding on determining which actions are permitted by my consent. Fortunately, Tom Dougherty offers us a novel way to determine this in their excellent book The Scope of Consent.It is natural to think that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intended to permit. This captures the intuition that the scope of consent is controlled by the person giving consent. This used to be Dougherty’s view. However, this Permissive Intentions View is implausible. Suppose I had no intention of lending you my car—I only said you could borrow it because I falsely believed it would not start. Despite saying you could use it, this view implies that your use would not fall under the scope of my consent since I did not, in fact, intend you to use it. Cases like these lead Dougherty to reject the Permissive Intentions View in parts 1 and 2 of the book. And, since this view is implied by the Mental View of Consent—the view that we consent only if we have a certain mental attitude—they reject that too.Another plausible idea is that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver successfully communicates to the consent-receiver. This is intuitive in two respects. First, while most people agree that the consent-giver should determine what has been permitted, they also think that the consent-receiver should have epistemic access to whatever falls within the scope of consent. Second, this view implies that consent is a public phenomenon. Dougherty agrees with the second implication, and this provides them with another reason to reject the Mental View in favor of a Behavioral View of Consent. However, they are not persuaded by the Successful Communication Principle itself. Since successful communication requires uptake, the view implies that the consent-giver has not waived their rights until the consent-receiver finds out. So, even if I leave you a note saying that you can borrow my car, I have not succeeded in consenting until you have read the note. Dougherty finds this counterintuitive, and they therefore reject the view.Dougherty agrees that consent requires public behavior, and so the Successful Communication Account is the closest rival to the view they end up defending. And yet, despite engaging with arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of private intention in part 1 of the book, there is no discussion of arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of public performance in part 2. As a result, Dougherty","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"158 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469499
Kevin Dorst
Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469564
Dorit Ganson
Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions that seem to indicate that mere changes in practical context can impact the propriety of assertions and knowledge attributions. For example, in Keith DeRose’s famous pair of low stakes versus high stakes bank cases, the consequences of Keith’s acting on The bank is open on Saturday if it were false change from trivial in low stakes to catastrophic in high stakes. We are to suppose that the proposition is true, and that Keith has access to the same quantity and quality of evidence for it in both cases. In low stakes, but not in high stakes, we are inclined to think that Keith can appropriately assert to his inquiring wife “The bank is open on Saturday.” In low stakes, Keith’s knowledge ascription “I know that the bank is open on Saturday” strikes us as aptly asserted and true. In high stakes only a knowledge denial on Keith’s part strikes us as aptly asserted and true.If we want to hang on to KNA, it looks like we will have to abandon CI and concede that ‘knows’ or knowledge is sensitive to changes in practical considerations. If we want to retain CI, we can try to say that, while Keith does still know that the bank is open on Saturday in high stakes, he does not have sufficient warrant to properly assert that it is. But such a move seems to run counter to KNA. We appear to be stuck in the Shiftiness Dilemma.Keen to get us out of the dilemma and to preserve the idea that epistemically good thinking and asserting are independent of practical concerns, Simion suggests a strategy that can also be used to protect other epistemic speech-act norms and notions from similar threats of practical shiftiness. She notes that having an impact on the degree of epistemic warrant required is not enough to make a norm an epistemic one. Fair enough. If I am given strong practical reason (a million dollars, or a gun to the head) not to adopt full belief until I have gathered more evidence, there is potentially some nonepistemic norm at work in the demand for further evidence. So it is a live possibility (indeed, a plausible one, as Simion would say) that our intuitions in the Shiftiness Dilemma are being misdescribed: they are tracking all-things-considered propriety of assertion, not epistemic propriety. In high stakes, practical norms override the epistemic norm KNA. Keith’s asserting “The bank is open on Saturday” would be epistemically proper but all-things-considered improper.Simion backs up her account with an etiological-function origin story and typology for the norms of assertion. Here is her characterization of etiological function for traits, artifacts,
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469629
Kevin Vallier
Sustaining Democracy is Robert Talisse’s well-argued follow-up to his previous book, Overdoing Democracy. Talisse has argued that American political polarization endangers democracy. The problem occurs when Americans allow their politics to become their identity and, in doing so, lose crosscutting identities, religious, familial, and civic. We not only lose the intrinsic value of those identities; we overdo democracy, and make it worse.In Sustaining Democracy, Talisse explores the political mindset that can sustain a democratic society. How must a citizen regard her opponents? The requisite attitude requires facing up to what Talisse calls the democrat’s dilemma. This is “the tension between the moral requirement to recognize the equality of political opponents and the moral directive to pursue and promote political justice” (4). This state of mind means allowing injustice to win for a time. If citizens do not allow injustice to rule, they must reject the political equality of their opponents. Our opponents see justice differently than we do. They sometimes win elections. If we insist on our own vision of justice, we will want to restrict the political equality of others. So, democratic citizens either allow injustice or violate political equality. What do we do?Talisse argues that sustaining democracy involves honoring political equality. The good citizen must recognize political equality and his biases about justice. Bearing both in mind, the good citizen can allow injustice to prevail for a time. And in doing so, he honors his opponents and sustains democracy with them.Many people fear that we must sometimes suspend democracy to promote justice, but if people are political equals, we cannot do this. Not always.Chapter 1 stresses that democracy involves political equality: politics is how equal persons govern themselves together. So democracy is a moral proposal, not merely a practical one. Citizens have to see others as part of a collective project, which means everyone gets an equal say. Indeed, they are entitled to one. That does not mean one must give in to their opponents’ views, only honor them in the democratic process. There is no complicity in injustice here. Citizens acknowledge a moral burden to discharge their civic duties to promote justice. Nonetheless, chapter 2 explains why democracy requires letting the opposition govern.Chapter 3 shows how belief polarization can exacerbate the democrat’s dilemma. Talisse suggests ways to overcome belief polarization. If Reba resists belief polarization, she can see the values and views she shared with others. Reba’s reflections may reduce her temptation to view political losses as disastrous. So she must scrutinize her own political thinking to locate her biases and correct them where she can (especially biases that lead her to delegitimize electoral victories). The belief that others misunderstand justice does not undermine the legitimacy of an election.Chapter 4 explores strategies to engag
{"title":"<i>Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side</i>","authors":"Kevin Vallier","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469629","url":null,"abstract":"Sustaining Democracy is Robert Talisse’s well-argued follow-up to his previous book, Overdoing Democracy. Talisse has argued that American political polarization endangers democracy. The problem occurs when Americans allow their politics to become their identity and, in doing so, lose crosscutting identities, religious, familial, and civic. We not only lose the intrinsic value of those identities; we overdo democracy, and make it worse.In Sustaining Democracy, Talisse explores the political mindset that can sustain a democratic society. How must a citizen regard her opponents? The requisite attitude requires facing up to what Talisse calls the democrat’s dilemma. This is “the tension between the moral requirement to recognize the equality of political opponents and the moral directive to pursue and promote political justice” (4). This state of mind means allowing injustice to win for a time. If citizens do not allow injustice to rule, they must reject the political equality of their opponents. Our opponents see justice differently than we do. They sometimes win elections. If we insist on our own vision of justice, we will want to restrict the political equality of others. So, democratic citizens either allow injustice or violate political equality. What do we do?Talisse argues that sustaining democracy involves honoring political equality. The good citizen must recognize political equality and his biases about justice. Bearing both in mind, the good citizen can allow injustice to prevail for a time. And in doing so, he honors his opponents and sustains democracy with them.Many people fear that we must sometimes suspend democracy to promote justice, but if people are political equals, we cannot do this. Not always.Chapter 1 stresses that democracy involves political equality: politics is how equal persons govern themselves together. So democracy is a moral proposal, not merely a practical one. Citizens have to see others as part of a collective project, which means everyone gets an equal say. Indeed, they are entitled to one. That does not mean one must give in to their opponents’ views, only honor them in the democratic process. There is no complicity in injustice here. Citizens acknowledge a moral burden to discharge their civic duties to promote justice. Nonetheless, chapter 2 explains why democracy requires letting the opposition govern.Chapter 3 shows how belief polarization can exacerbate the democrat’s dilemma. Talisse suggests ways to overcome belief polarization. If Reba resists belief polarization, she can see the values and views she shared with others. Reba’s reflections may reduce her temptation to view political losses as disastrous. So she must scrutinize her own political thinking to locate her biases and correct them where she can (especially biases that lead her to delegitimize electoral victories). The belief that others misunderstand justice does not undermine the legitimacy of an election.Chapter 4 explores strategies to engag","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469538
Jeffrey K. McDonough
In his impressive Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity, Ric Arthur manages to juggle a daunting array of tasks: tracking the chronological development of Leibniz’s views over more than half a century; explicating Leibniz’s groundbreaking mathematics; assembling texts—primary and secondary—in at least five languages; and, as if in passing, offering original translations and assessments of countless source materials. All this erudition is put to the service of offering detailed interpretations of Leibniz’s challenging theories of time, space, and motion. Arthur’s performance is a lifetime in the making, and his Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity is certain to be essential reading for those interested in the topics it covers for many years to come.Leibniz’s subtle theory of time defies easy summary. According to Arthur, Leibniz’s theory of time is ultimately grounded in relations among states of substances. States of substances are representations of a world from a perspective. States that do not contradict one another occur at the same time. States that do contradict one another are successive. Among successive states, some provide reasons for others. A state that provides a reason for another state is temporally prior to that state. One thing exists before, after, or at the same time as another thing not because of the way both things are related to some special, independent third thing—namely, time—but rather because of the relations they bear to one another (and other similar things). A occurs before, after, or at the same time as B because of the relations between A and B. For Arthur’s Leibniz, time itself is an abstract ordering relation that structures not only all actual temporal relations but also all possible temporal relations. It guarantees not only that my fifth birthday must precede my fiftieth but also that my fiftieth must precede my merely possible five hundredth.Is Leibniz eliminating time? Many commentators have thought so. Leibniz was a nominalist, and nominalists typically deny that abstract objects exist. In holding that time is abstract, mustn’t Leibniz also hold that time doesn’t really exist? “No,” says Arthur. Abstract objects, for Leibniz, have a home in the “divine mind” (61). Thus, while the abstract structure that orders all possible existing things can’t itself exist in the concrete world, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist at all. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, the temporal relations holding between things in the world are not abstract. Even if time itself were not real, Arthur’s Leibniz would still insist that my fifth birthday occurred before my fiftieth birthday and at roughly the same time as my older brother’s seventh birthday. Even if time is abstract, temporal relations are not.But wait, doesn’t Leibniz also hold that relations are ideal? And in holding that temporal relations are ideal, isn’t Leibniz suggesting that temporal relations themselves are not real? Again, Arthur thinks no
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469551
H. K. Andersen
Questions about idealizations in science are often framed along the lines of, How can science be so effective when it gets so much wrong? Rice’s book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science offers a refinement on this framing, where we need not commit to the premise that idealizations are, in fact, wrong, that they need to be contained to the irrelevant parts of a model, or should be explained away as mere appearance. Rice takes a holist approach in which idealization is more like a process by which models as a whole are leveraged into better fit with their targets. Idealizations should not be carved out one by one on this approach; they make sense in the context of the models in which they figure, and they distort in ways that illuminate features like universal behavior in the systems being modeled. This is a refreshing approach to how idealizations work, one that does not require the common presupposition that idealizations are simply false.By universality, Rice means “the stability of certain patterns or behaviors across systems that are heterogeneous in their features. Universality classes are, then, just the group of systems that will display those universal patterns or behaviors” (155). Universality enables a more abstract description of systems than what scientists may have started with, and this process of making the description of the behavior more universal serves to identify common causal structures implemented in very different physical mediums. Different descriptions of causal relata facilitate identification of more unifying patterns of behavior. Given how often philosophers think of abstraction as somehow eliminating causation, by identifying causation too strongly with microphysical details, universality is a helpful way to bring the process of abstracting description back into contact with the way in which models inevitably involve causal structure, and how that causal structure itself can be better understood by connecting classes of systems with heterogeneous physical media and similar behavior, by showing how the more abstract descriptions of causal structure are deployed in each.There are two specific features of his view that set Rice’s book apart from most other contemporary views on idealizations. The first is the explicit emphasis on holism. Often, idealizations are isolated from models and then assessed on their own after extraction from the modeling context in which they were made. In evaluating idealizations as individual propositions removed from surrounding context, it is somewhat unsurprising that many look inaccurate. Rice aptly shows how idealization plays a key role in identifying universality behavior by distorting a whole, undecomposed model. This focus on holism and the role idealizations play in a larger modeling context helps Rice’s treatment of idealizations stand apart from many others, including those he explicitly engages with, such as Angela Potochnik (2017), Mich
关于科学中理想化的问题通常是这样的，当科学有这么多错误时，它怎么能如此有效?赖斯的书《利用扭曲:科学中的解释、理想化和普遍性》对这一框架进行了改进，我们不需要坚持理想化实际上是错误的前提，不需要将理想化包含在模型的无关部分中，也不需要将其解释为仅仅是表面现象。Rice采用了一种整体的方法，在这种方法中，理想化更像是一个过程，通过这个过程，模型作为一个整体被杠杆化，以更好地适应它们的目标。在这种方法上不应该一个接一个地进行理想化;它们在它们所处的模型环境中是有意义的，它们以扭曲的方式阐明了被建模系统中的普遍行为等特征。这是一种令人耳目一新的理想化工作方式，它不需要通常的假设，即理想化是完全错误的。Rice所说的普适性指的是“某些模式或行为的稳定性，这些模式或行为跨越了具有异质特征的系统”。那么，普遍性类就是将显示这些普遍模式或行为的一组系统”(155)。普适性使得对系统的描述比科学家开始时的描述更加抽象，这种使行为描述更加普适性的过程有助于识别在非常不同的物理介质中实现的共同因果结构。对因果关系的不同描述有助于识别更统一的行为模式。考虑到哲学家经常认为抽象是某种程度上消除因果关系，通过将因果关系过于强烈地与微观物理细节联系起来，普遍性是一种有用的方式，可以将抽象描述的过程重新与模型不可避免地涉及因果结构的方式联系起来，以及如何通过将具有异质物理介质和相似行为的系统类联系起来，更好地理解因果结构本身。通过展示因果结构的更抽象的描述是如何被部署在每个。他的观点有两个特点，使赖斯的书与大多数同时代的理想化观点不同。首先是明确强调整体论。通常，理想化是从模型中分离出来的，然后在从创建理想化的建模环境中提取出来之后，对理想化进行自己的评估。在评估理想化作为从周围环境中移除的单个命题时，许多看起来不准确并不令人惊讶。Rice恰当地展示了理想化如何通过扭曲一个完整的、未分解的模型，在识别普遍性行为方面发挥关键作用。这种对整体主义和理想化在更大的建模背景下所扮演的角色的关注，有助于Rice对理想化的处理与许多其他人区别开来，包括他明确参与的人，如Angela Potochnik (2017)， Michael Strevens(2011)和Kareem Khalifa(2017)。这种方法更适合理想化在科学中的应用，因为它不需要解释许多科学中对理想化的广泛依赖。即使有人认为其他的描述成功地解释了为什么理想化可以在科学中被使用，尽管存在虚假和歪曲，但通过将其描述为明显的非理性来解释它们的广泛使用，也会让人感到不舒服。赖斯的描述并不需要从科学家猖獗地从事显然不合理的实践的框架开始，然后解释为什么它不像看起来那么糟糕。而不是不顾错误地使用理想化，理想化是可以用于解释杠杆的连贯包的一部分。使他的观点与众不同的第二个特征是:理想化是一种积极使用的工具，而不是用来解释的怪癖，也不是用来最小化的可疑承诺。通常，理想化被视为某种代表性的失败，是对认知局限性的一种补偿。在一个认识论上更完美的世界里，根据这种思维，理想化可以被废除。赖斯把这一点颠倒过来:理想化不是我们必须忍受或顺从的东西;它们是一个关键的工具，可以积极地用于产生解释和建立理解体系。这就是标题中“利用”部分的由来:积极地依赖理想化来实现建模技术，否则这是不可能的。它们是一个杠杆，通过它可以使模型更好地对齐。理想化的这种积极特性说明了理想化作为一种特性而不是缺陷的优势。 Rice提出了一些非常明确的观点，说明为什么必须从整体上看待模型，并巩固了他的观点，即理想化是那些模型中的扭曲，当通过尝试分解而脱离上下文时，这些模型就没有意义了。普遍性，这是Rice的其他工作之后的一个艺术术语(例如，Rice 2018, 2019;Batterman and Rice 2014)，在第6章给出了详细的处理。本章列出了一些详细的案例研究，并说明了在理想化中所涉及的整体扭曲是如何在模型中传达或捕获特定模态信息的。第7章继续讨论Rice在其他地方写过的主题:多尺度模型以及如何将普适性纳入尺度和重整化的考虑。第8章继续考虑模型如何提供理解，即使它们没有通过提供解释来提供理解。赖斯的例子涉及到一些科学家解释不完整的情况，所以有些人可能认为这些已经是解释了，因为人们不需要一个解释完全完整才能算作一个解释。本章还将理解与现实主义和科学进步联系起来。理想化常常被视为现实主义的失败，在现实主义中，一个原本成功的模型被分解成元素，其中一些显然在字面上不具有表征上的准确性人们可能会认为这是一个现实主义者对这一组成部分的必要方式(另一种方式是对真理的朴素对应处理通过假设模型的部分应该一对一地映射到世界的部分如果理想化没有以这种简化的方式映射，那么关于模型的现实主义就会失败)。在本章的第一部分，他利用自己对实际理解的描述，提出了一种替代现实主义的方法，这种方法的重点不是孤立的模型组件，而是模型为科学家产生的理解主体。这种理解主体，同样需要整体主义，可以作为关于由此理解的行为的实在论的认识基础。最后，在第9章中，Rice汇集了书中的所有主题，并提出了迄今为止最清晰的案例，说明理想化如何被用作“整体扭曲”，这不仅是科学的一部分，而且是建模技术在提供解释和理解方面的成功的核心和积极贡献。这一章是一个很好的结论，汇集了书中的不同主题。许多其他主题是Rice在其他地方写过的，这一结语有助于理解所有这些工作所适合的概要性项目。如果有人用这段经文来教学，这可能是一个很好的开始，而不是结束的章节。总的来说，这本书做得很好，汇集了Rice以前的工作，同时也扩展了新的例子和更详细的工作，并以一种有凝聚力的方式将不同的主题联系起来，围绕整体主义和理想化作为整体模型扭曲的方向。这使得它成为一系列关于解释、模型、理解和现实主义的当代讨论的一个很好的补充，也是研究生进入这些主题的一个很好的起点。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469616
Melissa Schwartzberg
The question of how communities may author their own laws, thereby manifesting autonomy (“self-legislation”), arises throughout the history of political thought. In Democratic Law, her Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinguished contribution to this long inquiry: she argues that law’s value within democratic societies rests on its communicative capacity, enabling citizens to express their recognition of each other’s equal status.Following an insightful introduction by editor Hannah Ginsborg, Shiffrin’s first lecture, “Democratic Law,” provides the philosophical groundwork for the rest of the volume. Shiffrin characterizes democracy as a system that treats its members with equal concern and respect, and one that enables its citizens to serve as the “equal and exclusive co-authors” of its legal norms and directives (20). Law plays a distinctive and crucial role on this account because it allows us to identify and to communicate our shared moral commitments. Foremost among these joint commitments is that members are due equal recognition of their status as citizens (51) and each of us must intend to convey respect for each other as equal comembers (31). We cannot do so severally, given the scope of the community, but neither can we satisfy our obligation merely by endorsing or complying with existing norms (31–32, 38). Rather, “each of us needs to perform (and receive) a form of communicative action that enacts and thereby expresses our commitment to the respectful treatment that each of us merits as a moral equal and a joint member of our social cooperative venture” (39). Shiffrin argues that law—quotidian or constitutional, common or statutory—is the central means of discharging this communicative duty.The second half of the volume features two lectures on legal applications, “Democratic Law and the Erosion of Common Law” and “Constitutional Balancing and State Interests.” The former focuses on what might seem to be a minor, technical Supreme Court decision concerning frequent-flier programs, yet Shiffrin persuasively argues that it raises far-reaching concerns about the nature of public commitments. The question in Northwest, Inc. v. Ginsberg is whether a federal statute, the Airline Deregulation Act, preempts a state rule of common law by which parties to a contract have an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Shiffrin objects to Justice Alito’s opinion for a unanimous court in Ginsberg for two main reasons. First, it wrongly characterizes the duty of good faith and fair dealing as subject to preemption, as a form of state action around which the parties could not contract, rather than characterizing the duty as pertaining to the underlying meaning of voluntary agreements (74–75). By incorporating a duty of good faith into contract law, a democratic society expresses the value of keeping commitments to each other, and that respect for each other as citizens means not deliberately acting to undermine the
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469603
Eva Schmidt
Mark Schroeder’s latest book delves deeper into the topic of normativity and reasons, while moving his focus from ethics to epistemology. His central aims are, first, to argue that theorizing in normative epistemology profits from comparison with other normative domains (his “Core Hypothesis” [9]); and second, to defend a picture of epistemic normativity that puts reasons first: they can be used to explain and analyze all other epistemic normative phenomena.Part 1 of the book provides a compelling account of normative reasons as competitors (which compete in determining, for instance, what one ought to do or believe) that are act-oriented rather than outcome-oriented, and can be acted on (my reasons to φ can be the reasons for which I φ). Schroeder assumes that there are both objective reasons, which bear on the correctness of belief, and subjective reasons, which determine its rationality or justification.Part 2 aims to solve the problem of unjustified belief for Reasons First epistemology. On this view, normative standings such as justification/rationality and knowledge bottom out in epistemic reasons. Yet it seems that only justified belief or knowledge can provide a subject S with reasons, so that we cannot take reasons as fundamental. So, apparently, perceptual experience—given that it itself is neither knowledge nor justified—cannot provide us with reasons or evidence. But this cannot be right, since perceptual experience is undoubtedly a privileged source of evidence concerning our surroundings. According to Schroeder, to allow for perceptual justification, we need a world-implicating conception of perceptual evidence, as endorsed by disjunctivism, which takes evidence to entail truths about the external world. At the same time, and contrary to disjunctivism, we must conceive of such evidence as nonfactive—it does not have to be true (or consist in a relation to a truth) and so is available not only in the good case of veridical perception but also in illusion or hallucination. Whether S’s belief is rational cannot hinge on minimal differences, as implied by disjunctivism. Schroeder illustrates this with a pair of cases C1 and C2 that are identical except that in C1, S undergoes a veridical perception, and in C2, she undergoes an indistinguishable illusion. (Say, in C1, S is looking at a red ball, but in C2, she is facing a white ball that appears red due to red lighting.) But, importantly, this illusion is a one-time occurrence—S has an otherwise flawless perceptual track record in C1 and C2. In both cases, S’s belief is equally rational, or so Schroeder argues.Schroeder thus rejects disjunctivism. Instead, he endorses the apparent factive attitude view: basic perceptual reasons are—nonfactive—subjective reasons, such as the proposition that I see that the ball is red. But since they entail worldly facts (such as: the ball is red), they are nonetheless world-implicating. For me to possess the reason, it has to appear to me that I see that
马克·施罗德(Mark Schroeder)的新书深入探讨了规范性和理性的主题，同时将他的关注点从伦理学转移到了认识论。他的中心目标是，首先，论证规范认识论的理论化得益于与其他规范领域的比较(他的“核心假设”[9]);第二，为把理性放在首位的认知规范性理论辩护:理性可以用来解释和分析所有其他认知规范性现象。本书的第1部分提供了一个令人信服的说明，规范性理由作为竞争者(它们在决定，例如，一个人应该做什么或相信什么方面进行竞争)，以行动为导向，而不是以结果为导向，并且可以采取行动(我φ的理由可以是我φ的理由)。施罗德认为，客观原因决定信仰的正确性，主观原因决定信仰的合理性或正当性。第二部分旨在解决理性第一认识论的不正当信仰问题。根据这一观点，正当性/合理性和知识等规范性立场在认识论推理中处于最底层。然而，似乎只有正当的信念或知识才能为主体S提供理由，所以我们不能把理由作为根本。因此，显然，知觉经验——假定它本身既不是知识也不是被证明的——不能为我们提供理由或证据。但这不可能是对的，因为感知经验无疑是我们周围环境证据的特权来源。根据施罗德的观点，为了允许知觉证明，我们需要一个包含世界的知觉证据概念，这得到了分离论的支持，它认为证据包含了关于外部世界的真理。与此同时，与分离论相反，我们必须把这样的证据想象成非事实性的——它不一定是真的(或与真理有关系)，因此不仅在真实知觉的良好情况下，而且在幻觉或幻觉中都是可用的。S的信念是否理性，不能像分离论所暗示的那样取决于最小的差异。施罗德用两种情况C1和C2说明了这一点，除了在C1中，S经历了真实的感知，而在C2中，她经历了难以区分的错觉。(比如，在C1中，S正看着一个红色的球，但在C2中，她面对的是一个由于红色照明而呈现红色的白球。)但是，重要的是，这种错觉是一次性发生的——s在C1和C2中有一个完美的知觉记录。在这两种情况下，S的信念都是同样理性的，至少施罗德是这样认为的。因此，施罗德拒绝分离主义。相反，他赞同明显的事实态度观点:基本的知觉原因是非事实的主观原因，比如我看到球是红色的命题。但由于它们包含了世俗的事实(例如:球是红色的)，它们仍然具有世界意义。要让我拥有理性，就必须让我看到球是红色的。在第三部分中，施罗德提出了充分性的问题——他担心认知理性的平衡本身不能恰当地决定一种信念是正当的还是知识。因为不清楚S关于p的证据要比她关于非p的证据多多少才能使她相信p是合理的或者是知识。解决这个问题似乎迫使我们放弃理性第一认识论，因为它以理性的概念为前提:我们需要的是足够的证据来证明信仰是理性的。近联系的相关问题是证明p的证据至少和证明非p的证据一样好并不总是使相信p合理化;在证据支持和反对(接近)联系的情况下，保留信念反而是理性的。相反，在实际情况中，φ的理由至少与不φ的理由同样有力，以确保φ-ing是理性的。如何解释这种差异呢?施罗德讨论的另一个谜题是由促使哲学家为实用主义侵犯辩护的案例提出的。例如，在Jason Stanley(2005)著名的银行案例中，与相应的低风险情景相比，在高风险情景中，信仰者似乎需要更多的证据才能形成合理的信念或了解。施罗德用这些和其他的谜题来论证，一定有非证据性的认知理由来反对进入理由平衡的信仰;然后，整体平衡决定了哪种态度在认识论上是合理的，从而保留了“原因第一”的认识论。反对信念的非证据性理由包括有关未来证据可获得性的事实或有关错误代价的事实——即拥有或根据错误信念行事的代价。 这样的理由是无处不在的，因此可以解释为什么在紧密联系的情况下，除了(几乎)平衡的证据理由之外，还包括反对信仰的非证据理由的总体平衡，并没有使p的信念合理化。关于充分性问题:考虑到非证据理由，认知理由的平衡本身就可以决定信仰的认知立场。忠实于他的核心假设，Schroeder通过与其他态度(如钦佩)的原因进行比较，来论证一些反对信仰的非证据性原因是正确的原因，它会影响信仰的认知论地位。为了在我们的认知经济中成功地发挥作用，信念必须敏感地考虑到正确的原因——在默认推理或作为政策问题时，为我们提供依赖的考虑因素。与信任相比，信念通过简化推理和决策来做到这一点，因为它们允许我们忽略遥远的错误可能性。根据施罗德的实用主义理智主义，关于错误的(实际的或道德的)代价的事实是反对信仰的正确理由，因为它们是信仰必须对其真理敏感的考虑因素，才能很好地发挥其认知作用。错误的代价解释了为什么在高风险的情况下，充足的证据无法证明信念是正确的:错误的代价如此之高，以至于超过了受试者的证据，以至于p.在第四部分中，施罗德详细介绍了他对知识的康德式描述。他把知识分析为良好的信念，其中信念是对主观上和客观上共同足以压倒所有反对信念的现有理由的原因的反应，从而足以使其成为理性和正确的。他通过类比正确的理性来解释行为的道德价值，并关注理性如何不仅产生某种反应的正确标准，而且作为我们可以采取行动的东西，还产生了行为良好的标准。现在，我转而对施罗德上面所概述的反对分离主义的论点进行批评。他以命题式的习语表达了感性的理由——即我们可以通过相关的命题来赋予理由，而不必受制于任何特定的理由本体论(41)。例如，短语" S看到球是红色的"同样可以用来描述S看到球是红色的心理状态或者S看到球是红色的考虑，作为她的认知原因。我担心的是，使用命题式成语会助长对分离主义的误解——也就是说，它坚持在真实感知与幻觉和幻觉之间划清界限。换句话说，命题习语鼓励了这样一种想法，即认识论的析取论者唯一能得到的形而上学析取论版本是V - V - h观点。这种误解巩固了施罗德反对分离主义的论点。让我详细说明一下。我们可以将认识论的分离论者与书中施罗德的分离论者区分开来，后者支持感知提供了实际的，暗示世界的原因的观点。相比之下，形而上学的分离主义关注的是感性经验的本质。粗略地说，它认为真实知觉是一种本质上与幻觉完全不同的精神状态。关于幻觉的进一步感知状态，它有两种类型，V V IH和VI V H (Byrne和Logue 2009: xi) V V IH认为，作为好情况的真实感知从根本上不同于错觉或幻觉的坏情况;VI v H认为，好情况包括真实知觉和幻觉，它们具有相同的性质，与幻觉的坏情况有根本区别。如果我们以命题的方式来描述由感知经验提供的原因，那么V / h的真理似乎是显而易见的。把我的视觉体验当成一个红球。一个相关的命题是球是红色的。我的经验是真实的就是这个命题是真实的，就像在知觉中一样。在幻觉和幻觉中，相关的命题被证明是错误的——例如，在幻觉中，白球看起来是红色的，尽管它不是;在幻觉中，甚至没有一个球被视觉呈现。这暗示了一种形而上学的错觉分类，幻觉是一种糟糕的情况。然而，如果我们认为知觉经验从根本上是非命题性的，而是指向对象的，那么我们很自然地就会说——用VI v h——知觉和幻觉都成功地使我们熟悉了对象。因此，我真实的和虚幻的经验都使我熟悉我面前的球。错觉仅仅涉及到物体如何呈现的错误——在这个例子中，白球被误认为是红色的。 这种感性经验的形而上学图景可以与认识论的主张相结合，即由知觉提供的原因正是我们所熟悉的对象(Brewer 2018)。对于认识论的分离主义者来说，这开启了一种可能性，即主体在虚幻和真实情
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00318108-10469525
Emily Kress
Here is a fact about humans: we use our senses to pick up on things around us and our intellect to understand whatever is out there to be understood. In Mind and World in Aristotle’s De Anima, Kelsey argues that this fact is, in Aristotle’s view, in need of an explanation. He finds one in De Anima 3.8’s suggestion that “intelligence [is] form of forms, and sensibility form of sensibilia” (432a2–3; quoted on p. 2). Roughly, his proposal is that our sensibility and intelligence “enter into the very idea” of their objects; they know them because they help make them what they are (20).This is an admirably adventurous thesis, and Kelsey’s arguments for it are likewise so. A particular strength, in fact, is the way the book brings out what is at stake philosophically in familiar and seemingly obscure doctrines alike. Two highlights, which I discuss below, are its discussions of how Aristotle’s engagement with his predecessors shapes his questions (and then makes it hard to answer them) and of how his account of perceptible qualities helps him meet this challenge. This book is therefore a significant contribution to scholarship on the De Anima (DA), and it will be of great value to scholars working on Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. Part of what makes it valuable, moreover, is how it encourages us to ask better questions about core Aristotelian doctrines: while some of Kelsey’s proposals (especially his account of per se causation, which I discuss below) are provocative, they are always productively so.The introduction sets up Kelsey’s core question. It is: “What about” our sensibility and intelligence “makes” them “subject[s] of” some “attribute” (6)? What must they be they like—in their essence (8)—to know what they do? The next three chapters argue that the DA is concerned to answer this question, and, moreover, to do so in a particular way: to show why sensibility and intelligence know “real beings” as they really are—not as they appear.Kelsey’s argument for this claim is a highlight of the book. It takes off from the observation that DA 2.5 answers two foundational questions in a way that, according to DA 3.3, should be problematic. These are: (A) whether perceivers and perceptibles “are like or unlike,” and (B) “whether perceiving is a matter of ‘being affected’ or ‘altered’” (40). The difficulty is that 2.5 wants to answer that perception is (A∗) like-by-like and (B∗) a case of being altered—where 3.3 suggests that those very commitments got Aristotle’s predecessors into trouble. Those thinkers held that “both understanding and judging are held to be like a kind of perceiving” (427a17–b6), apparently because they thought these are (A∗) like-by-like and (B∗) being altered (43).This “diagnosis,” Kelsey argues, is interesting because it “connects” (A∗) and (B∗) to another question: whether “how things are” just is “how they appear” (43). (A∗), for instance, reflects the view that “our judgments are … the mere projecting of a random and fluctuating p
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