Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier

This paper examines the dilemma of value-ladenness, which suggests that either the social world is inherently value-laden, requiring normative concepts to explain human actions and thoughts (anti-naturalism), or norms lack explanatory role, equating the social with the natural world (naturalism). The first horn implies a methodological gap between the social and natural sciences and risks representing humans as causally idiosyncratic, while the second risks ending up in relativism. My strategy is to treat normative propositions as constitutive principles in empirical research, retaining the explanatory role of norms without presupposing any methodological uniqueness for the social sciences qua social. The contribution of the present paper lies primarily in the philosophy of the social sciences. My argument, in brief, is this: if we take for granted the role of the functional a priori in empirical inquiry, and if we understand norms based on Anscombe’s notion of direction of fit, then the dilemma of value-ladenness can be dissolved.

In this paper, I argue that recent efforts in the conceptual engineering of sexual orientation are practically misguided. More precisely, I argue that philosophers cannot implement a revision to the concept of sexual orientation because we lack conceptual authority over the concept. Furthermore, in virtue of how philosophy is currently structured, we are unlikely to acquire the relevant kind of conceptual authority. Along the way, I critically discuss an argument from Herman Cappelen for a more global pessimism about the implementation problem. I also discuss some alternative strategies to achieving the political goals that motivate these recent efforts to engineer the concept of sexual orientation. Ultimately, I argue that philosophers should instigate a sort of conceptual abandonment by exploiting their social role as a conceptual gadfly.

Social metaphysics raises intriguing questions about realism and antirealism. I focus on properties because other social entities arguably involve the instantiation of socially constructed properties, properties are relevant to discussions of causation, and their reality may have implications for the reality of other social entities. I delineate a possible distinction between socially constructed, social, and nonsocial properties. I outline and then resist recent attempts to revise the criteria for realism and antirealism about such properties, specifically about the mind‐independence criterion for existence, relative frame manipulability, and kind projectibility. Instead, I propose that realism and antirealism about socially constructed properties should be understood in terms of the existence of socially constructed universals or tropes. If we accept this alignment, we can draw on the traditional arguments for and against the existence of specific kinds of properties within a given domain, without having to revise the conditions for realism that we have traditionally relied on.

This paper outlines and defends a disjunctive neo-Humean account of action. It seeks to unify and elucidate actions stemming from many disparate causal pathways by relating them to well-understood central, or paradigmatic, cases of action. This also allows the view to deal with many objections to the default version of the Humean theory of motivation (HTM) and be metaethically fruitful. The paper first sets out actions that stem from appropriately combined beliefs and pro-attitudes, as per HTM, as features of a central, paradigmatic kind of action. This kind of action involves causing bodily movement events with appropriately combined belief/pro-attitude-pairs: in other words, manifesting these agential abilities. Then kinds of action that involve more than beliefs and pro-attitudes can be accommodated as approximating actions par excellence based on beliefs, pro-attitudes, and additional features. These include actions based on things like irreducible intentions, structural rationality, and the ability to act for normative reasons. Furthermore, kinds of action that involve less than belief/pro-attitude-pairs can be accommodated as they make lesser use of the agential abilities involved in the paradigmatic kind of action. These include actions without movement, actions out of pro-attitudes, and sub-intentional actions – and we can accommodate various kinds of failed actions similarly.

Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, along with other philosophers, have argued for a metaethical position, the natural goodness approach, that claims moral evaluations are, or are on a par with, teleological claims made in the biological sciences. Specifically, an organism’s flourishing is characterized by how well they function as specified by the species to which they belong. In this essay, I first sketch the Neo-Aristotelian natural goodness approach. Second, I argue that critics who claim that this sort of approach is inconsistent with evolutionary biology due to its species essentialism are in- correct. Third, I consider the prospects of understanding ethical normativity as a species of biological teleology claiming that this would be incompatible with our considered moral judgments. Fourth, after presenting gene-culture coevolution theory, I argue that the only way of reconciling naturalism and normativity in accordance with the natural goodness approach requires amending the selected effects function account to include cultural evolution. However, this approach, though not biologically reductionistic, still generates claims incompatible with our considered moral judgments. Finally, I end with a discussion of methodology and revisionistic moral theories.

Contrarian CT Views maintain that those things typically referred to as “conspiracy theories” deserve a pejorative connotation because they oppose or reject their epistemically superior official counterparts. Taking a position contrary to an official account characterized by epistemic superiority and rigor is only irrational insofar as there is a contending theory that makes good on those epistemic promises. Three problem cases are presented where we find a conspiracy theory in one corner, but no epistemic promised land in the form of a rival and officially sanctioned explanation in the other. A fourth problem emerges with the introduction of the concept of epistemic forgeries, which show how the appearance of officialdom can be deliberately fabricated, misleading both experts and laypeople. These forgeries complicate the epistemic environment in ways that Contrarian CT Views fail to track. This means that we ought to be particularists, not only in the face of conspiracy, but in the face of official explanations too.

In this paper, I argue for an often-neglected solution to the conceivability argument: the reconciliatory response. Its advocates state that, even if zombies are metaphysically possible, it does not follow that all versions of physicalism are false. To make the reconciliatory response, we must construct a theory that counts as a version of physicalism (because it makes higher-level facts count as physical) but also allows for the metaphysical possibility of zombies. Call any physicalist theory that can make the reconciliatory response type-R physicalism. In this paper, I discuss one version of type-R physicalism: stochastic ground physicalism (SGP). First, I argue that type-R physicalism, construed as SGP, offers physicalists an attractive rationalist package that no other version of physicalism can provide. Second, I address two concerns that have been underexplored in the literature. First, the charge that SGP is incoherent because it fails to provide metaphysical explanations. Second, the charge that type-R physicalism is not a genuine form of physicalism because the supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical is a necessary condition for any formulation of physicalism. I argue that both concerns are ill-founded.