PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES最新文献

How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation of the action not done, the agent cannot further process the possibility of her own action; she cannot intentionally try to not do something, resist performing an action, or decide or choose to not perform an action. The literature on people with frontal lobe damage suggests that without metacognitive control of action, a person automatically follows what the environment affords or what others are doing. Through at least procedural metacognitive control of action, agents are able to intentionally omit. This view has explanatory power over a variety of intentional omissions and over a variety of agents. It answers central questions in the philosophy of intentional omissions: who is capable of intentionally omitting, when and where intentional omissions unfold, and what are the relevant guiding mental states on which the control of intentional omissions is based? The answers to these questions contribute in part to naturalizing agency, at least when it comes to negative agency, our ability to guide the non-performance of our actions.

Some theories are alleged to be implausible because they are committed to systematic ‘overdetermination’. In response, some authors defend ‘compatibilism’: the view that the putative overdetermination is benign, like other unproblematic cases of a single effect having many sufficient causes. The literature has tended to focus on the following question: which relations between sufficient causes of a single effect ensure that problematic overdetermination is avoided? This paper argues that several widely endorsed answers to this question are subject to counterexample. It then proposes a diagnosis of this failure: the standard answers neglect what really matters––how the causes are connected to their shared effect. In particular, overdetermination is avoided when there are no independent causal connections.

Climate change is one of the most important issues we are currently facing. There are many ways in which states can fight climate change. Some of them involve interfering with citizens’ personal lives. The question of whether such interference is justified is under-explored in philosophy. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of people’s personal lives, namely their informational privacy. It discusses the question of whether, given certain empirical assumptions, it is proportional of the state to risk its citizens’ privacy or to risk infringing its citizens’ right to privacy to fight climate change. The main claim this paper argues for is that if fighting climate change and protecting our privacy conflict, we have good reason to fight climate change rather than protect our privacy.

Many philosophers endorse “exclusionism”, the view that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of genuine remembering, and vice versa. Appealing to simulationist, distributed causalist, and trace minimalist theories of remembering, I develop three conditional arguments against exclusionism. First, if simulationism is right to hold that some cases of remembering involve reliance on post-event testimonial information, then remembering does not exclude relearning. Second, if distributed causalism is right to hold that memory traces are promiscuous, then remembering does not exclude relearning. Finally, if trace minimalism is right to hold that vicarious experiences sometimes produce the minimal traces that ground remembering, then remembering does not exclude relearning. While advocates of these theories might incorporate additional conditions designed to accommodate exclusionism, the only reason they can appeal to in favor of doing so is intuition: neither the fundamental components of the theories nor the empirical results on which they are based provide a reason to endorse exclusionism. An investigation of exclusionism thus raises metaphilosophical questions, so far overlooked in philosophy of memory, about the appropriate role of intuition in theorizing about remembering.

The article discusses the relation between skills (or competences), creditability, and aptness. The positive suggestion is that we might make progress understanding the relation between creditability and aptness by inquiring more generally about how different kinds of competences and their exercise might underwrite allocation of credit. Whether or not a competence is acquired and whether or not a competence is actively exercised might matter for the credit that the agent deserves for the exercise of that competence. A fine-grained taxonomy of competences opens up the possibility of instinctual knowledge (knowledge by mere instincts) as well as the possibility of habitual knowledge (knowledge by mere habits), alongside knowledge by skills (or alongside knowledge by yet other sorts of competences). If instinctual knowledge were possible, it is suggested that it might not be of the sort that deserves credit at all. By piggybacking from the literature in evolutionary psychology, I suggest that, as inborn social learners, merely instinctual—and so not fully creditable—knowledge might be a reality for us.

The value alignment problem for artificial intelligence (AI) asks how we can ensure that the “values”—i.e., objective functions—of artificial systems are aligned with the values of humanity. In this paper, I argue that linguistic communication is a necessary condition for robust value alignment. I discuss the consequences that the truth of this claim would have for research programmes that attempt to ensure value alignment for AI systems—or, more loftily, those programmes that seek to design robustly beneficial or ethical artificial agents.

According to directionalism, non-symmetric relations are distinct from their converses. Kit Fine (2000a) argues that the directionalist faces a dilemma; they must either (i) reject the principle Uniqueness, which states that no completion (fact, state of affairs, or proposition) is a completion of more than one relation, or (ii) reject the principle Identity, which states that each completion of a relation is identical to a completion of its converse (e.g., Dante’s loving Bice is identical to Bice’s being loved by Dante). Fine’s argument has been regarded as a decisive blow to directionalism. But new strategies for replying to it can be developed with the tools of the postmodal metaphysician, who is comfortable individuating relations and their completions hyperintensionally, allowing for necessary connections between distinct entities, and making use of hyperintensional notions like essence and grounding. In what follows, I develop postmodal strategies for denying both horns of Fine’s dilemma, concluding that the postmodal directionalist need not be concerned with Fine’s argument.

This paper considers two recent views on the structure of justification and closure of knowledge by Ernest Sosa. It provides reason to believe that neither view is ultimately viable and sketches a better alternative.

In Epistemic Explanations, Sosa continues to defend a model of judgment he has long endorsed. On this complex model of judgment, judgment aims not only at correctness but also at aptness of a kind of alethic affirmation. He offers three arguments for the claim that we need this model of judgment instead of a simpler model, on which judgment aims only at correctness. The first argument cites the need to exclude knowledge-spoiling luck from apt judgment. The second argument uses the complex model to distinguish judgment from mere guessing. The third argument involves the assessment of suspension of judgment as a performance. This paper shows why none of these arguments succeeds, and so recommends adopting the simpler model of judgment.

Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. If my argument is successful, it provides a distinctive reason to prefer a deliberative account of moral complicity: it can capture cases of silent complicity that other views of moral complicity cannot. And further, by turning our attention toward our interpersonal deliberative obligations, a deliberative account of complicity can incorporate helpful resources from recent work in social epistemology and speech act theory as we set out to determine when and why silence amounts to complicity. And when it does, we cannot stay silent. We must speak.