Synthese最新文献

We contend that the experience of effort should be understood as the experience arising from resisting an affective behaviour-guiding signal such as hunger, pain, fatigue, or anxiety. We argue that this provides a more satisfactory account than the cost based accounts that have become popular. We distinguish an account of the experience of effort from an account of effort itself, and argue against the reification of efforts.

In this paper, I propose an account of behavioral addiction in terms of what I call addictive motivational scaffolds (AMSs). Taking inspiration from recent work concerning psychiatric externalism and addiction, I propose and describe the concept of motivational scaffolding: external structure that enhances, supports, or regulates motivational processes in the mind-brain. I then argue that some motivational scaffolds are likely difference-makers in that they make an activity more addictive. The paper proceeds in three main parts. First, I describe the concept of a motivational scaffold and how it builds on recent literature in 4E cognition/psychiatric externalist accounts of addiction. Using gambling and gaming as paradigm cases of addictive activities, I then identify and empirically justify four addictive motivational scaffolds (AMSs): (1) quantified metrics, (2) reward uncertainty, (3) short time-horizon to reward, and (4) physically salient features. Finally, I apply my account to social media to showcase its philosophical usefulness: analyzing behavioral addiction in terms of AMSs uniquely elucidates the more structural aspects of the addictiveness of social media, which are undertheorized.

This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the "classical" extended mind, characterised by conditions such as "trust and glue" and phenomenal transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent's biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind.

Epistemicism explains ignorance due to vagueness through semantic plasticity: the propensity of intensions of vague terms to shift across close linguistic communities. In the case of moral vagueness, e.g. when it's vague whether it's permissible to terminate a pregnancy after a certain number of days, epistemicism predicts that 'permissible' denotes distinct properties in different close linguistic communities. This epistemicist prediction has been pressured by arguments due to Miriam Schoenfield (Ethics 126: 257-282, 2016) as well as certain interpretations of the Moral Twin Earth cases. Schoenfield (Ethics 126: 257-282, 2016) argues that epistemicist account of moral vagueness leads to an unfeasible treatment of moral deliberation. A related worry comes from the Moral Twin Earth cases, which produce the intuition that the reference of moral terms such as 'permissible' remains stable across different linguistic communities. The problem for epistemicism is that metasemantic models that are meant to account for the Moral Twin Williams (Philosophical Review 127(1): 41-71, 2018) or Billy Dunaway and Tristram McPherson (Ergo 3(25): 239-279, 2016), predict that moral vocabulary is stable, which makes them incompatible with epistemicism. My aim is to make use of the inferentialist metasemantic framework presented by Robbie Williams (Philosophical Review 127(1): 41-71, 2018), and I refine it to give an epistemicist account of moral vagueness.

It has been argued that adult humans are absolutely time biased towards the future, at least as far as purely hedonic experiences (pain/pleasure) are concerned. What this means is that they assign zero value to them once they are in the past. Recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this claim, suggesting that while adults hold asymmetrical hedonic preferences - preferring painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future - these preferences are not absolute and are often abandoned when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is greater in the past than in the future. Research has also examined whether such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign to experiential memories, since the recollection of past events can itself be pleasurable or aversive. We extend this line of research, investigating the utility people assign to experiential memories regardless of tense, and provide - to our knowledge - the first quantitative attempt at directly comparing the relative subjective weightings given to 'primary' experiences (i.e., living through the event first-hand) and 'secondary' (i.e., recollective or anticipatory) experiences. We find that when painful events are located in the past, the importance of the memory of the pain appears to be enhanced relative to its importance when they are located in the future. We also find extensive individual differences in hedonic preferences, reasons to adopt them, and willingness to trade them off. This research allows for a clearer picture of the utility people assign to the consumption of recollective experiences and of how this contributes to, or perhaps masks, time biases.

Against mathematical platonism, it is sometimes objected that mathematical objects are mysterious. One possible elaboration of this objection is that the individuation of mathematical objects cannot be adequately explained. This suggests that facts about the numerical identity and distinctness of mathematical objects require an explanation, but that their supposed nature precludes us from providing one. In this paper, we evaluate this nominalist objection by exploring three ways in which mathematical objects may be individuated: by the intrinsic properties they possess, by the relations they stand in, and by their underlying 'substance'. We argue that only the third mode of individuation raises metaphysical problems that could substantiate the claim that mathematical objects are somehow mysterious. Since the platonist is under no obligation to accept this thesis over the alternatives, we conclude that, at least as far as individuation is concerned, the nominalist objection has no bite.

This paper explores the idea that deep disagreements essentially involve disputes about what counts as good reasoning, whether it is theoretical or practical reasoning. My central claim is that deep disagreements involve radically different paradigms of some principle or notion that is constitutively basic to reasoning-I refer to these as "basic concepts". To defend this claim, I show how we can understand deep disagreements by accepting the indeterminacy of concept-formation: concepts are not set in stone but are responsive to human needs, and differences in individuating and ordering concepts lead to clashes in paradigms of reasoning. These clashes can be difficult to resolve because linguistic concepts, especially basic concepts, impose a normative structure onto thought to make reasoning possible at all. This, I also argue, is an authentically Wittgensteinian account of the nature of reasoning. While deep disagreements involving theoretical and practical reasoning both stem from the same root problem of clashing paradigms of basic concepts, I will also draw attention to the particularly radical indeterminacy of moral concept-formation, which makes moral deep disagreements more difficult to resolve. Over the course of the paper, I will discuss two examples of deep disagreements to illustrate and defend my central claim: deep disagreements over vaccines and the concept of "evidence" (theoretical reasoning) and deep disagreements over affirmative action and the concept of "fairness" (practical reasoning). I conclude by suggesting how my account of reasoning does not lead to moral relativism.

This paper defends the role of lotteries in fair decision-making. It does so by targeting the use of decision thresholds to convert algorithmic predictions and classifications into decisions. Using an account of fairness from John Broome, the paper argues that decision thresholds are sometimes unfair, and that lotteries would be a fairer allocation method. It closes by dealing with two objections. First, it deals with the objection that lotteries should only be used to break ties in cases where individuals' claims are equally strong. Here, the paper gives a new argument for Broome's view, targeting decision criteria that are arbitrary and highly standardized. It then defends the arguments of the paper against the objection that lotteries are not morally superior to other methods of arbitrary choosing.

Recent work on the phenomenon of self-illness ambiguity has sought to not only understand how tensions arise between one's experience of self and one's disorder experiences, but also how best to resolve said ambiguities to relieve the suffering of the person in question (Sadler, Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 70(2), 113-129, 2007; Dings & Glas, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 27(4), 333-347, 2020; Dings & de Bruin, American Journal of Bioethics, 22(6), 58-60, 2022; Jeppsson, Philosophical Explorations, 25(3), 294-313, 2022). While the involvement of other people has been emphasised as important in regulating the self and thus will play a part in self-illness ambiguity, the impact of this social dimension has not been sufficiently explored. The goal of this paper is to provide an account of how social norms may be implicated in the enactment of the 'self' and experiences of self-illness ambiguity. To do this, I will provide a plausible account of what it means to have a coherent or understandable self, drawing on the mind-shaping view of social cognition (McGeer, Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, 137-156, 2007; Mameli, Biology & Philosophy, 16(5), 595-626, 2001; Zawidzki, Philosophical Explorations, 11(3), 193-210, 2008; Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013; Zawidzki, Mindshaping and self-interpretation. In J. Kiverstein (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind, 495-513. London & New York: Routledge, 2016). Mind-shaping suggests that we are successful in social coordination tasks because we are able to negotiate and follow shared norms that facilitate understanding. These norms indicate and shape what kinds of people we understand ourselves to be, as well as how others understand us, which we might refer to as the 'self'. Given that disorder experiences can be transformative, fundamentally changing how the world is meaningful for someone, we may therefore expect that disorder experiences can transform norms of the self that may undermine seamless social coordination. Following this, I argue that individuals with self-illness ambiguity face unique challenges when it comes to navigating social problems that other individuals with disorder experiences may not face. This is because, as I argue, some discourses around mental disorder are deemed more or less valuable strategies for conceptualising the relationship between self and disorder. Since self-illness ambiguity doesn't 'fit' into these discourses, individuals with self-illness ambiguity may feel isolated not just from their wider community but also from mental disorder communities themselves. I suggest, then, that individuals with self-illness ambiguity might experience an acute form of alienation that is yet to be discussed in the literature.