Mariam Thalos

This essay is not concerned exclusively with procedure. In addition to developing and promoting an alternative methodology, I will also be utilizing it to defend, systematically, an unfashionable proposition nowadays. This is the proposition that the question of how a particular judgment, on a particular occasion, is to be justified, is independent of the question of how that judgment comes to be formed by the individual who forms it. This thesis, which I shall call j-independence, is deplored in certain (self-styled as ‘naturalized’) schools of epistemology. Its denial is one of the two dogmas of this essay’s title. The other dogma is the metaphysical one on which it rests, which I shall call personalism.

The goal of the essay is to articulate some beginnings for an empirical approach to the study of agency, in the firm conviction that agency is subject to scientific scrutiny, and is not to be abandoned to high-brow aprioristic philosophy. Drawing on insights from decision analysis, game theory, general dynamics, physics and engineering, this essay will examine the diversity of planning phenomena, and in that way take some steps towards assembling rudiments for the budding science, in the process innovating (parts of) a technical vocabulary. The key is focus upon the organization of effort in time. This paper categorizes forms of organization of effort in time, and yields an analysis of both individual agency and coalitions of agents as forms of effort organized in time. Finally, it articulates precise questions pertaining to the natural (evolutionary) history of forms of agency (once upon a time referred to as ‘Will’) that we now find on the ground.

A superselection rule advanced in the course of a quantum-mechanical treatment of some phenomenon is an assertion to the effect that the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is to be restricted in the application at hand. Superselection accounts of measurement all have in common a decision to represent the indicator states of detectors by eigenspaces of superselection operators named in a superselection rule, on the grounds that the states in question are states of a so-called classical quantity and therefore not subject to quantum interference effects. By this strategy superselectionists of measurement expect to dispense with use of projection postulates in treatments of measurement. I shall argue that superselection accounts of measurement are self-contradictory, and that treatments of infinite systems, if they can avoid the contradiction, are not true superselection accounts.

The radical probabilist counsels the prudent never to put away uncertainty, and hence always to balance judgment with probabilities of various sizes. Against this counsel I shall advise in favor of the practice of full belief — at least for some occasions. This advice rests on the fact that it is sometimes in a person's interests to accept certain propositions as a means of bringing it about that others recognize oneself as having accepted those propositions. With the pragmatists, therefore, I shall reject the view that belief formation must in every instance be a truth-directed affair. Unlike the pragmatists, however, I shall conclude that the enterprise of belief formation is not directed exclusively, or even primarily, at attaining knowledge. In other words, pursuit of that which it profits to believe, on the one hand, and pursuit of knowledge on the other, are distinct enterprises, which overlap (when they do) only accidentally.

The twin conceptions of (1) natural law as causal structure and (2) explanation as passage from phenomenon to cause, are two sides of a certain philosophical coin, to which I shall offer an alternative – Humean – currency. The Humean alternative yokes together a version of the regularity conception of law and a conception of explanation as passage from one regularity, to another which has it as an instance but of which it is not itself an instance. I will show that the regularity conception of law is the basis of a distinguished branch of physical mechanics; thus the Humean conception of law, like its better-loved rival, enjoys the support of a venerated tradition in mechanical theory – in fact, that strand which culminates in quantum theory. I shall also offer an account of explanatory asymmetry, a natural companion to the Humean conception of explanation as passage from one regularity to another of greater scope, as an alternative to van Fraassen’s unsatisfactory account. My account of asymmetry is just as free of reliance on context as it is free of reliance on cause. I shall thus proclaim that explanatory asymmetry is at once a reality deserving of philosophical treatment – one not to be given over to the care of psychology or linguistics – and at the same time susceptible of an account worthy of Hume.

On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on by way of practical reasoning on the ground involves a certain simple inference schema—to be called “imitative reasoning”—that involves mobilization of what has been alternately referred to as archetypes, scripts, stereotypes and schemas including most importantly self-schemas or self-concepts. Imitative reasoning, as the paper will argue, is especially hostile to deliberations that involve the sorts of tradeoffs that applications of utility theory routinely advise. It is therefore no expression or realization, however imperfect, of the notion of maximization. What is more, this framework routinely evokes as authoritative the norms of privilege, however removed from or irrelevant to the matter at hand, which might be as simple as where to go for dinner. For it is the basis of—among other things—class and race consciousness. Furthermore, it is highly subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous; such as, for example, by those who market consumer goods, especially to children. For this form of reasoning is employed so as to protect or enhance self-concepts: imitative reasoning is a form of motivated reasoning. Laying it out in schema form will shed light on the sort of reasoning processes that transpire in many cases of cognitive dissonance reduction.

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle promises a causal account of how social facts are constructed by human acts of intention, but specifically disavows a special theoretical space in that account for human motivation. This paper argues that such a story as Searle tells cannot serve as a causal account of society. A causal account must illuminate motivations, because doing so illuminates the aims and interests lacking which we cannot explain why these social practices come to be and not potential others. Thus Searle’s would-be account of society has a problem analogous to that of Hobbes, which Hobbes’s own Foole poses, and that Hobbes never answers to anyone’s satisfaction.

This chapter focuses on finding better ways to conceptualize precaution. Precaution has now become an established principle of environmental governance, although it has not been distinguished from conventional risk assessment. It has been considered by some as the antithesis of risk assessment in the sense that it is done to avoid serious potential harm, without scientific certainty as to the likelihood, magnitude, or causation of that harm. The first and foremost task of this chapter is to show that these concepts are non-overlapping. It also elaborates on the reasons why precaution should be taken seriously, and that, on the flipside, traditional risk assessment, or cost-benefit analysis, does not take precaution seriously because of its pervasive nature. This fact represents the ascendancy of a decision-making calculus that grew out of twentieth-century British moral theory and culminated in 1944 with the presentation of the doctrine now familiarly known as the theory of expected utility.

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Hacking is a gripping writer with an ear for wickedly good turns of phrase. The joyous playfulness of his language can arouse interest in any topic whatsoever. He is also a skilled philosophical conversationalist, who can put long-dead philosophers into dialogue with those still living, because he has his finger deftly positioned on the pulse of our discipline. His most recent book is on a topic that has bedevilled a good many philosophers in history, Hacking no less than anyone else. It concerns the place of mathematical reasoning and other mathematical activity in the economy of human thought, and in the natural world generally. On display in this book, page after page, is that bedevilment.The book began as...

This essay argues that, in place of the present hit-and-miss system of specialist advisement (a system of scientific experts performing case-by-case studies at numerous regulatory agencies, the US Office of Technology Assessment, for example), we require a corps of professional public servants for the dissemination of credible, learned, relevant and useful information pertaining to the issues of the day. This is necessary because scientists as a group are poorly prepared for the task of advising (as contrasted with the quite different task of conducting research in their subject area), and, more importantly, because governments cannot ask scientists to provide that information without also incentivizing third parties (albeit unintentionally) to compromise the institution of science itself. This corps must also be poised to perform such aggregations of opinion (or arbitrations between conflicting opinions and interests) when requests are duly submitted by both governmental and citizen bodies. The product of this corps will be a dynamic, massively cross-referential, virtual document that I shall refer to as the Citizenpedia. This essay is devoted to justifying the government subsidy of such a document, as well as to evaluating the best role for scientists in a democracy. It will contrast the Citizenpedia proposal with practices that have been tried: (1) governmental agencies and (2) citizen panels. Most importantly, it is devoted to showing that a world in which the Citizenpedia advises governments is substantially different from one in which either citizens or “experts” do, just as it is substantially different from a world (our own) in which the media plays the largest role in educating the public on science policy matters.

What do we learn when we focus analysis – not so much on the content of experience – as on its universal features and functioning? Descartes believed that such focus (when exercised by someone employing his first-personal method of inquiry) held the key to the fundamental metaphysics of our universe – that it could reveal fundamental truths about the nature of substance, or at any rate could reveal some fundamental metaphysical categories and their contrasts. He believed such focus could lead to a certain doctrine of dualism. Philosophers now widely hold that Descartes’ method was profoundly wrongheaded, in no way a candidate method for illuminating the material universe that is our own. In fact, however, Descartes’ method is considerably more serviceable. While unable to do what Descartes thought it could do, nonetheless it is ideal for examining a taxon that this essay will refer to as grammar or structure in the most general sense. Grammar is a contrary of content or materiality, though not the only one since materiality enjoys multiple contraries. Thus Descartes’ method can lead us to a certain dualism, but not the one that Descartes imagined.

Practitioners of science treat evidence as a separate and objective body of materials that is independent of, and possibly also prior to, all of theorizing. Philosophers of science, by contrast, are increasingly wary of the role of theory in testing and measurement contexts, and hence have problematized the notion of evidence as prior or independent, even in the context of measurement. This paper argues that there is an important sense in which empirical certification of a quantity, via measurement, is indeed prior to theorizing, albeit not necessarily in order of time. The case for this priority distinguishes between the certification of the measurability of a given quantity, as a quantity appropriately measured on a specified scale, and the epistemic warrant due to an assignment of a specific magnitude to that quantity on a given occasion. The result is an account of the certification of a measurable quantity, independent of any theory in which that quantity features. The effect is to render certification of quantities theory-neutral. The aim of the essay is thus to bolster and re-establish a more nuanced empiricist view, via building a case for quantity certification as the epistemic basis (i.e., foundation) of the scientific enterprise.

It is a perennial philosophical enterprise to propose the reduction of causal facts to facts of some other kind. Just as it is also a perennial enterprise to proclaim that certain such proposed reductions are doomed to failure. Here I shall champion a certain family of reductionist proposals—namely, those that quantify the notion of causality—referring to them as quantitative reductions. The opposition to quantitative reductionism proclaims that an antireductionist analysis of causation is to be preferred, because such an analysis of causal matters can code for either more information, or for information of a radically nonquantitative sort also. The charge is that purely quantitative models have no means of handling this surplus. I will undertake to show that it is not so.

Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed to solve this metaphysical problem with social sciences in mind, fails to treat the problem in any importantly new way. Then I will propose a more modest approach, and show how it does not deserve the criticism directed at a prototype by Jackson and Pettit.

Chemistry possesses a distinctive theoretical lens—a distinctive set of theoretical concerns regarding the dynamics and transformations of a perplexing variety of organic and nonorganic substances—to which it must be faithful. Even if it is true that chemical facts bear a special (reductive) relationship to physical facts, nonetheless it will always still be true that the theoretical lenses of the two disciplines are distinct. This has consequences for how chemists pursue their research, as well as how chemistry should be taught.

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one.

Is it possible to measure a people’s capacity for containing the ambitions of any regime at its helm—its ability to resist the power of a tyrant? We begin here from the premise that this power has to be in proportion to individuals’ capacity (both individually and in groups) for communicating, at least among themselves, dissatisfaction with the regime. As the paper subsequently shows, by articulating an ontology of information diffusion on a communication network structure, it is possible to take some stock of the features of a communications network that facilitate resistance to tyranny (among other things), and so to begin answering questions about the sort of power that people living within them might be able to mobilize, while not yet answering outright the question of how to measure the power to resist.

We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y, whether I think of myself as someone’s who’s civic-minded and whether someone who’s civic-minded would do X can both play a huge role in influencing whether I decide to do X. What does all that have to do with freedom? Our guest this month thinks that freedom just is the ability to affect, shape, or even create these sorts of labels, before then applying them to yourself. It isn’t as though anyone invents every label they apply to themselves; plenty of them are handed down to us from popular culture and other sources. But Mariam Thalos thinks that if you’re living freely, you are playing at least some creative role in fashioning your own self-conception.

This chapter explores connections among death, meaning, and belief in a divine being. It wrestles with questions around whether it is possible for an atheist to live a meaningful life, especially in the face of the twin realities of individual death, on the one hand, and human extinction, on the other. Can theists and atheists think about the meaning of life in the same way? The conclusion is that most likely there are unbridgeable chasms between the theists’ and the atheists’ conceptions of meaningfulness – more specifically, around questions of whether meaningfulness can be objective.

The subfield of philosophy that treats fundamental questions pertaining to science. The philosophy of science explores the fundamental principles, purposes, methodologies, implications, and reliability of the human enterprise known as science. It seeks to describe our best understanding of the universe, at all scales, as well as to engage with the question of how we can—as fallible organisms—reliably come to possess such knowledge. How can it be possible for us to arrive at theories that describe the world as it really is, seeing as how our efforts to model it are based on the qualities and features available to human perception and experience, as limited and biased as we know these can be?