PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES最新文献

The ‘great divide’ in the metaphysics of science is between Humean approaches—which reduce scientific laws (and related modalities) to patterns of occurrent facts—and anti-Humean approaches—where laws stand apart from the patterns of events, making those events hold. There is a vast literature on this debate, with many problems raised for the Humean. But a major problem comes right at the start—what’s the motivation for Humeanism in the first place? This is rather unclear. In fact Maudlin, and other anti-Humeans, claim that there is no good motivation for Humeanism. I criticize a few influential approaches to motivating Humeanism—in particular those based on empiricism, pragmatism, and fidelity to science. In their place I suggest a different type of motivation, which has not received much attention in the literature, that rests on considerations of the role of unification in scientific understanding.

Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts.

In this paper, we identify a class of responses to cases of manipulation that we label manipulator-focused views. The key insight of such views is that being subject to the will of another agent significantly affects our freedom and moral responsibility. Though different authors take this key insight in different directions, and the mechanics of their views are quite different, these views turn out to share many key components, and this allows us to discuss several authors’ views at the same time, highlighting a variety of challenges for such views and helping to identify pitfalls to avoid in further developments of views of this type. Moreover, as we survey manipulator-focused views and the challenges that plague them, we go beyond the typical problem cases for such views—natural force variations of manipulation cases—and introduce several new manipulation cases. We conclude by comparing the prospects for this family of views with its main rival, namely bypassing views.

The goal of the debunking social constructionist is to reveal as social kinds that are widely held to be natural (or, in some cases, to reveal as more deeply social kinds that are already widely recognized to be social). The prominent approach to such debunking has been to make a case for thinking that the individuation conditions for membership in the kinds in question are in fact social (or in fact more deeply social than has previously been recognized). In this paper, I argue that adopting the prominent approach to debunking prevents one from answering the implicit question being posed by the debunker, namely, the question of how a plausibly socially constituted kind can come to appear more natural than it in fact is. I then sketch an alternative way of understanding social kinds that enables us to answer the appearance question while remaining neutral on the nature of social kinds. In particular, I argue that the mechanism of covert normativity explains causally the persistence of the social kinds of interest to the debunker, and so also provides an answer to the appearance question.

Some kinds are both socially constructed and perceptible, such as gender and race. However, this gives rise to a puzzle that has been largely neglected in social constructionist accounts: how does culture shape and bias what we perceive? I argue that perceptual learning is the best explanation of our ability to perceive social kinds, in comparison to accounts that require a person acquire beliefs, theories, or concepts of the kind. I show how relatively simple causal factors known to influence perceptual learning in the laboratory can be extended to understand how culture shapes and biases perception. This account makes clear that the process of perceptual enculturation begins at a very early age, and does not in most cases require background beliefs on the part of the learner: the causal pathways by which perceptual learning occur suffice. It has significance for our understanding of how socially constructed kinds are culturally transmitted, as well as for how such kinds might be altered through interventions.

A motivating reason is a reason an agent acts for. There are two pre-theoretical intuitions about motivating reasons that seem irreconcilable. One intuition suggests that motivating reasons are factive, and the other says the opposite. As a result, a divide exists between philosophers, each side prioritizing one intuition to the detriment of the other. In this essay, I present the deliberate theory of motivating reasons and defend the second intuition that motivating reasons are non-factive. To do this, we must understand motivating reasons’ role in our deliberation. I show that non-factive motivating reasons are compatible with the underlying role which gives rise to the intuition of reasons’ factivity.

I defend a form of generalism in ethics and aesthetics. Generalism about a domain D is the view that there are principles that play an explanatory role in the metaphysics of D and can be used in reasoning when thinking about D. I argue that in both aesthetics and ethics, there are generic generalizations that are principles. I do this by (i) explaining the nature of a particularly important kind of generic, (ii) argue that generics of this kind play a explanatory role, and (iii) argue that we licitly use these truths in reasoning about ethics and aesthetics.

D’Arms and Jacobson’s Rational Sentimentalism promises an alchemy: a view that grounds certain values and reasons in facts about human sentiments but also treats the very same facts about values and reasons as fundamental. I examine how they attempt to deliver on the promise, doubt that they succeed, consider their motivations, and offer an alternative interpretation of what they might be doing.

This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying to. An agent’s ability to actively remember depends not only on her being able to determine that some memory event occurs but on her ability to construct the relevant scene at will as well. I claim that the ability to guide construction with respect to imagistic-content is distinctive feature of a subset of active imagining. Episodic remembering is of a kind with that subset of active imagining by being a process of agential construction of imagistic-content, in this case, scene construction that aims at (veridically) representing the personal past. Agential scene construction in the context of remembering is the agent’s exploring her personal past as a highly circumscribed region of modal space.

Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives for self-preservation, dominance and resource accumulation that are typical of evolved creatures. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not compelling as it stands. Evolutionary processes, as we point out, can be more or less Darwinian along a number of dimensions. Making use of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s framework of Darwinian spaces, we argue that the more evolution is top-down, directed and driven by intelligent agency, the less paradigmatically Darwinian it becomes. We then apply the concept of “domestication” to AI evolution, which, although theoretically satisfying the minimal definition of natural selection, is channeled through the minds of fore-sighted and intelligent agents, based on selection criteria desirable to them (which could be traits like docility, obedience and non-aggression). In the presence of such intelligent planning, it is not clear that selection of AIs, even selection in a competitive and ruthless market environment, will end up favoring “selfish” traits. In the end, however, we do agree with Hendrycks’ conditionally: If superintelligent AIs end up “going feral” and competing in a truly Darwinian fashion, reproducing autonomously and without human supervision, this could pose a grave danger to human societies.