Synthese最新文献

Our best current science seems to suggest the laws of physics and the initial conditions of our universe are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. A significant number of scientists and philosophers believe that the fine-tuning is evidence for the multiverse hypothesis. This paper will focus on a much-discussed objection to the inference from the fine-tuning to the multiverse: the charge that this line of reasoning commits the inverse gambler's fallacy. Despite the existence of a literature going back decades, this philosophical debate has made little contact with scientific discussion of fine-tuning and the multiverse, which mainly revolves around a specific form of the multiverse hypothesis rooted in eternal inflation combined with string theory. Because of this, potentially important implications from science to philosophy, and vice versa, have been left underexplored. In this paper, I will take a first step at joining up these two discussions, by arguing that attention to the eternal inflation + string theory conception of the multiverse supports the inverse gambler's fallacy charge. It does this by supporting the idea that our universe is contingently fine-tuned, thus addressing the concern that proponents of the inverse gambler's fallacy charge have assumed this without argument.

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like the meeting is (hereby) adjourned are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like the meeting is (already) adjourned are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker hereby.

Semantic features are components of concepts. In philosophy, there is a predominant focus on those features that are necessary (and jointly sufficient) for the application of a concept. Consequently, the method of cases has been the paradigm tool among philosophers, including experimental philosophers. However, whether a feature is salient is often far more important for cognitive processes like memory, categorization, recognition and even decision-making than whether it is necessary. The primary objective of this paper is to emphasize the significance of researching salient features of concepts. I thereby advocate the use of semantic feature production tasks, which not only enable researchers to determine whether a feature is salient, but also provide a complementary method for studying ordinary language use. I will discuss empirical data on three concepts, conspiracy theory, female/male professor, and life, to illustrate that semantic feature production tasks can help philosophers (a) identify those salient features that play a central role in our reasoning about and with concepts, (b) examine socially relevant stereotypes, and (c) investigate the structure of concepts.

Although academic work on conspiracy theory has taken off in the last two decades, both in other disciplines as well as in epistemology, the similarities between global sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories have not been the focus of attention. The main reason for this lacuna probably stems from the fact that most philosophers take radical scepticism very seriously, while, for the most part, regarding 'conspiracy thinking' as epistemically defective. Defenders of conspiracy theory, on the other hand, tend not to be that interested in undermining radical scepticism, since their primary goal is to save conspiracy theories from the charges of irrationality. In this paper, I argue that radical sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories exhibit importantly similar features, which raises a serious dilemma for the 'orthodox' view that holds that while we must respond to radical scepticism, global conspiracy theories can just be dismissed. For, if, as I will show, both scenarios can be seen to be epistemically on a par, then either radical sceptical scenarios are as irrational as global conspiracy theories or neither type of scenario is intrinsically irrational. I argue for the first option by introducing a distinction between 'local' and 'global' sceptical scenarios and showing how this distinction maps onto contemporary debates concerning how best to understand the notion of a 'conspiracy theory'. I demonstrate that, just as in the case of scepticism, 'local' conspiracies are, at least in principle, detectable and, hence, epistemically unproblematic, while global conspiracy theories, like radical scepticism, are essentially invulnerable to any potential counterevidence. This renders them theoretically vacuous and idle, as everything and nothing is compatible with what these 'theories' assert. I also show that radical sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories face the self-undermining problem: As soon as global unreliability is posited, the ensuing radical doubt swallows its children - the coherence of the sceptic's proposal or the conspiracy theorist's preferred conspiracy. I conclude that radical sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories are indeed partners in crime and should, therefore, be regarded as equally dubious.

Natural language syntax yields an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions. We claim that these are used in the service of active inference in accord with the free-energy principle (FEP). While conceptual advances alongside modelling and simulation work have attempted to connect speech segmentation and linguistic communication with the FEP, we extend this program to the underlying computations responsible for generating syntactic objects. We argue that recently proposed principles of economy in language design-such as "minimal search" criteria from theoretical syntax-adhere to the FEP. This affords a greater degree of explanatory power to the FEP-with respect to higher language functions-and offers linguistics a grounding in first principles with respect to computability. While we mostly focus on building new principled conceptual relations between syntax and the FEP, we also show through a sample of preliminary examples how both tree-geometric depth and a Kolmogorov complexity estimate (recruiting a Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm) can be used to accurately predict legal operations on syntactic workspaces, directly in line with formulations of variational free energy minimization. This is used to motivate a general principle of language design that we term Turing-Chomsky Compression (TCC). We use TCC to align concerns of linguists with the normative account of self-organization furnished by the FEP, by marshalling evidence from theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics to ground core principles of efficient syntactic computation within active inference.