Bar Luzon

Causalists contend that you see a specific object (rather than a lookalike, or no object at all) because that object sits at the beginning of an appropriate causal chain that terminates in your visual experience. We argue that neither standard causalists nor their non‐causalist opponents can adequately accommodate a striking asymmetry between perception and thought. The asymmetry concerns the conditions under which a thought or sensory experience can inherit its object from another thought or sensory experience. Accommodating this asymmetry instead requires adopting a new and radical causalist view with important implications for the metaphysics of sensory experience.

This paper develops several challenges to recent accounts of incoherence, inspired by familiar challenges to accounts of analyticity. I focus on accounts that claim certain combinations of attitudes are incoherent—i.e., structurally irrational—iff each of their instances satisfies some condition C. After distinguishing between Type-1 and Type-2 accounts of incoherence, I argue that the former face problems similar to those facing metaphysical accounts of analyticity, while the latter face challenges similar to those facing epistemological accounts of analyticity. The paper concludes by outlining three paths forward for work on incoherence.

A core tenet of Bayesian epistemology is that Bayesian conditionalization is the rule of rational credal revision. But it has been pointed out in the recent literature that if learning can be nontransparent, then Bayesian conditionalization does not universally maximize expected accuracy. This result raises an explanatory challenge for any externalist Bayesian who does not want to give up on a connection between accuracy and epistemic rationality: Why is Bayesian conditionalization the rule of rational credal revision, despite the fact that it does not universally maximize expected accuracy? This article proposes an answer to this challenge. The article argues that an updating rule can be evaluated, not only on the basis of its expected accuracy in particular learning situations, but also on the basis of its total expected accuracy across different learning situations. The article proposes a notion of global evidential constancy, and shows that, out of all globally evidentially constant rules, Bayesian conditionalization has the highest total expected accuracy across all learning situations, including nontransparent ones. Bayes is back!

Ontic structuralists claim that there are no individual objects, and that reality should instead be thought of as a “web of relations”. It is difficult to make this metaphysical picture precise, however, since languages usually characterize the world by describing the objects that exist in it. This paper proposes a solution to the problem; I argue that when discourse is reformulated in the language of the calculus of relations ‐ an algebraic logic developed by Alfred Tarski ‐ it can be interpreted without presupposing the existence of objects. What is distinctive about the language of the calculus is that it contains no operator that resembles a quantifier, and yet it can be used to paraphrase any sentence expressible in first‐order logic. Since the use of a first‐order quantifier (or some similar operator) is usually what establishes commitment to an ontology of objects, and since the calculus of relations eschews the quantifier in favor of a composition operator that can be given a natural interpretation consistent with structuralist metaphysics, the calculus is an ideal language for the structuralist to use to describe the world.

Joe Horton argues that partial aggregation yields unacceptable verdicts in cases with risk and multiple decisions. I begin by showing that Horton’s challenge does not depend on risk, since exactly similar arguments apply to riskless cases. The underlying conflict Horton exposes is between partial aggregation and certain principles of diachronic choice. I then provide two arguments against these diachronic principles: they conflict with intuitions about parity, prerogatives, and cyclical preferences, and they rely on an odd assumption about diachronic choice. Finally, I offer an explanation, on behalf of partial aggregation, for why these diachronic principles fail.

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous.

The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing as she does, not that she is justified for so believing. This general strategy—which I call the “unjustified-but-blameless maneuver”—is motivated, in part, by the assumption that the distinction between epistemic justification and blamelessness is merely an extension of the familiar distinction between moral justification and blamelessness. In this paper, I consider three ways of drawing the distinction between justification and blamelessness familiar from the moral domain: the first in terms of a connection with reactive attitudes, the second in terms of the distinction between wrongness and wronging, and the third in terms of reasons-responsiveness. All three ways of drawing the distinction, I argue, make it difficult to see how an analogous distinction in the epistemic domain could help externalists explain away the intuitions which underwrite the New Evil Demon Problem. Motivating the unjustified-but-blameless maneuver, I conclude, is a much less straightforward task than its proponents tend to assume.