L. A. Paul

In this paper, I explore subjective constancy: the subjective endurance of the perceiving mind. I relate subjective constancy to our experience of persisting through time, arguing that, in order for a perceiver to perceive change, the perceiver's first person point of view must be continuous in the sense of being constant "from the inside," that is, from the subjective perspective of the perceiver. I begin with a thought experiment about replication, using it as a foil to defend the role of the persisting first person point of view in understanding ourselves as persisting and changing subjects. After developing my account of subjective constancy as the persisting first person point of view, I'll discuss models for how the brain constructs representations of persisting objects in in contemporary vision science. These models hold that the brain makes an identity inference in order to represent external change. Understanding why the brain makes this inference can help us understand the conceptual role for subjective constancy in the perceiving mind. Further, understanding how the brain makes this inference can inform our approach to the accompanying temporal ontology. I'll close by returning to the metaphysics of replication to discuss the role of the first person in thought experiments involving duplication and teleportation, ending with a brief discussion of how different object ontologies, including Humean-friendly bundle theories, could support subjective constancy.

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories, to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context

I claim that Mill has a theory of poetry which he uses to reconcile nineteenth century associationist psychology, the tendency of the intellect to dissolve associations, and the need for educated members of society to desire utilitarian ends. The heart of the argument is that Mill thinks reading poetry encourages us to feel the feelings of others, and thus to develop pleasurable associations with the pleasurable feelings of others and painful associations with the painful feelings of others. Once the associations are developed, they are supported and maintained by our natural capacity for sympathy and by external elements in society, and provide motivation for the pursuit of utilitarian ends. Further, the additional support causes the associations to be strengthened to the extent that they come to be seen as ‘natural and necessary’, and as such are immune from the dissolving force of the intellect.

I address two related questions: first, what is the best theory of how objects have de re modal properties? Second, what is the best defence of essentialism given the variability of our modal intuitions? I critically discuss several theories of how objects have their de re modal properties and address the most threatening antiessentialist objection to essentialism: the variability of our modal intuitions. Drawing on linguistic treatments of vagueness and ambiguity, I show how essentialists can accommodate the variability of modal intuitions while holding that objects have their modal properties independently of contexts.

If an object has a property essentially, it has that property in every possible world according to which it exists.2 If an object has a property accidentally, it does not have that property in every possible world according to which it exists. Claims about an object’s essential or accidental properties are de re modal claims, and essential and accidental properties are de re modal properties. Take an object’s modal profile to specify its essential properties and the range of its accidental properties. Note that “world” as I am using it is a term of art: a modal realist believes that there are many concrete worlds, while the actualist believes in only one concrete world, the actual world. The ersatzist is an actualist who takes nonactual possible worlds and their contents to be abstracta. Essentialism is the view that objects have properties essentially, but one should distinguish deep essentialism from shallow essentialism. Deep essentialists take the (nontrivial) essential properties of an object to determine its nature— such properties give sense to the idea that an object has a unique and distinctive character, and make it the case that an object has to be a certain way in order for it to be at all.3 As Stephen Yablo (1987, 297) describes it, the essence of a thing is “an assortment of properties in virtue of which it is the entity in question,” as well as “a measure of what is required for it to be that thing.” Intuitively, on the deep essentialist picture, an ordinary object has essential properties, and it must have its essential properties in order for it to exist. On this view, objects’ essential properties are absolute, i.e., are not determined by contexts of describing (or thinking, etc.) about the object, and truths about such properties are absolute truths.4 Shallow essentialists oppose deep essentialists: they reject the view that objects can be said to have essential properties independently of contexts of description or evaluation, and so substitute context-dependent truths for the deep essentialist’s context-independent ones..

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to traditional philosophical debates.

Monists about material constitution typically argue that when Statue is materially constituted by Clay, Statue is just Clay. Pluralists about material constitution deny that constitution is identity: Statue is not just Clay. When Clay materially constitutes Statue, Clay is not identical to Statue. I discuss three familiar puzzles involving grounding, overdetermination and conceptual issues, and develop three new puzzles stemming from the connection between mereological composition and material constitution: a mereological puzzle, an asymmetry puzzle, and a structural puzzle.

In this paper, I argue that the spatiotemporalist approach way of modeling the fundamental constituents, structure, and composition of the world has taken a wrong turn. Spatiotemporalist approaches to fundamental structure take the fundamental nature of the world to be spatiotemporal: they take the category of spatiotemporal to be fundamental. I argue that the debates over the nature of the fundamental space in the physics show us that (i) the fact that it is conceivable that the manifest world could be exactly as it appears to us, even though spatiotemporal entities are not fundamental, means that a central premise of spatiotemporalism, that we may assume, given ordinary experience, that the world is fundamentally spatiotemporal, is false. (ii) Spatiotemporalism must be seen as a contingent, a posteriori physical truth. Finally, (iii) I argue that a metaphysically deeper conclusion follows from the debate over the nature of the fundamental space. The debate in physics over which sort of space is the fundamental space suggests that physicists have discovered that, even if a spacetime is an actual constituent of the world-space category, there is a world-space category that is more fundamental than the category of spacetime.

In 1976, Hilary Putnam set forth his model-theoretic argument, claiming that it showed that the semantic realist’s program1 was ‘unintelligible’, since it implied, contra the realist view, that reference is radically indeterminate. Although I find the conclusion that reference is indeterminate unattractive, I argue that the descriptivist position needs to be supplemented with a premise about the sorts of kinds or structure that our world includes. The need for this premise gives a counterintuitive result: the descriptivist account of reference makes the very possibility of determinate reference contingent upon the kinds that happen to make up the world. The need for this premise paves the way towards a new kind of skepticism about what we may and may not assume about the nature of the world.

I summarize the main argument of Transformative Experience (OUP 2014). The book develops familiar examples from classical philosophical debates, as well as original examples, to argue that an agent’s decision to undergo a transformative experience—an experience constituted by radical personal and epistemic change for the agent—must either be authentic or irrational, but not both. The Precis of Transformative Experience walks the reader through the main ideas involved in epistemically and personally transformative experiences, the problems they pose for rational decision-making, and discusses a number of key original examples of transformative experiences.

In “What you can’t expect when you’re expecting,” I argue that, if you don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, you cannot make this decision rationally—at least, not if your decision is based on what you think it would be like for you to become a parent. My argument hinges on the idea that becoming a parent is a transformative experience. This unique type of experience often transforms people in a deep and personal sense, and in the process, changes their preferences. In section 1, I will explain transformative experience in terms of radical first-personal epistemic and self change. In section 2, I’ll explain the notion of subjective value that I use to develop the decision problem. In section 3, I will discuss the way we ordinarily combine our introspective assessments with testimony and evidence. In section 4, I will discuss the problems for rational decision-making. In section 5, I will explore the problem of first-personally transformed future selves. In section 6, I will engage with the main themes and arguments and ideas of the authors of the papers contributed to this volume.

The discovery of a new kind of experience can teach an agent what that kind of experience is like. Such a discovery can be epistemically transformative, teaching an agent something they could not have learned without having that kind of experience. However, learning something new does not always require new experience. In some cases, an agent can merely expand their existing knowledge using, e.g., inference or imagination that draws on prior knowledge. We present a computational framework, grounded in the language of partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), to formalize this distinction. We propose that epistemically transformative experiences leave a measurable“signature” distinguishing them from experiences that are not epistemically transformative. For epistemically transformative experiences, learning in a new environment may be comparable to“learning from scratch” (since prior knowledge has become obsolete). In contrast, for experiences that are not transformative, learning in a new environment can be facilitated by prior knowledge of that same kind (since new knowledge can be built upon the old). We demonstrate this in a synthetic experiment inspired by Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, where an agent learns to navigate a 2D world and is subsequently transferred either to a 3D world (epistemically transformative change) or to an expanded 2D world (epistemically non-transformative change). Beyond the contribution to understanding epistemic change, our work shows how tools in computational cognitive science can formalize and evaluate philosophical intuitions in new ways.

In certain problem-solving contexts, people organize their domain through treating themselves as the perceptual and cognitive center of their world. They identify and solve a particular problem from their perspective as a particular agent, with a particular location, at a particular time, in a particular environment. When they do this, they engage in a distinctive kind of agent-centered problem-solving. For many contexts involving intelligent agents, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), a framework for modeling decision-making in uncertain environments unfolding over time, have effectively become a “standard model.” Yet, as these models are ordinarily interpreted, they do not explicitly represent agent- centered problem-solving. Accordingly, to model this type of problem-solving, we begin by extending the standard POMDP framework to de ne “ePOMDPs.” This formalism models how an agent, once it centers itself on a particular self-and-world representation, plans and acts rationally from its own perspective. To capture the way that such agents choose which problem to solve, we build on our ePOMDPs to develop a“meta-ePOMDP” agent within a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We implement meta-ePOMDP agents for two different suites of“centering game” tasks that highlight different aspects of our theory. We find that our models explain signatures of agent-centered problem-solving not captured by alternative models, in particular, the dif culty of navigating spaces of possible problem representations. We close by suggesting that our model could provide the beginnings of a computational framework for how a person could have a self. Keywords: self, agent, planning, centering, partially observable Markov decision processes

Drawing on philosophical theories of knowledge, I develop a conceptual framework for knowledge in animals and machines. I use this framework to engineer a new concept of large language model (LLM) knowledge and propose a taxonomy of knowledge that spans biological and artificial categories, from C. elegans to LLMs. The approach lays a foundation for a rigorous account of how knowledge can be realized across animals and machines while at the same time respecting the diverse biological and physical sources of such knowledge.

Drawing together the metaphysics of counterfactuals with empirical work on intuitive judgments, this chapter discusses the nature of counterfactual reasoning about self-involving possibilities. It argues that when a person reasons about her self-involving possibilities, especially far-fetched possibilities, this reasoning may be supported by an underlying “self simulator,” a kind of mental engine with an approximate understanding of who she is, which enables her to learn about her preferences and make intuitive judgments and predictions about her self-involving possibilities. On this view, through observing or simulating their own choices, people understand themselves through a process similar to that by which they understand other people. In this way, they learn about their own beliefs and desires. The argument is informed by empirical data from surveys where lay people and philosophers decided what action they would take in vignettes involving a potentially transformative decision.

What has emerged from our discussion is that there is a deep divide in our intuitions about causation, and correspondingly, in how we want to handle two very central issues: problems with redundant causation, most notably with late preemption and overdetermination, and problems with causation involving omissions. We see a deep intuitive tension in the way we want to judge these cases, one that creates serious trouble for any reductive treatment that wants to approach causation in a uniform manner. And we are still looking for an acceptable, suitably reductive treatment of causation involving omissions, and a reductive way of combining causal structures while still drawing distinctions between the different types that are to be analyzed in different ways. We discuss how using the method by counterexample to search for a reductive theory of causation, and its sister search for an analysis of the concept of causation, generates an enormous bounty by opening up a number of interesting and potentially fruitful lines of enquiry, emphasize the importance of keeping track of differences in methodological approach, and close with the observation that a detailed understanding of the twists and turns in the discussion of causation is crucial for a range of debates in philosophy and debates in other fields, like economics, law, sociology and psychology.

Transitivity seems to underlie basic features of our causal reasoning: it is typical to justify a claim that _C_ causes _E_ by pointing out that _C_ causes _D_, which in turn causes _E_. Preserving transitivity seems to be a basic desideratum for an adequate analysis of causation, and appealing to it has often seemed essential for handling problem cases like those involving preemption. But recent work on causation has raised serious challenges to the claim that it is invariably transitive. The aim of this chapter is to distinguish these various challenges and to consider several responses to these challenges in detail. To that end, we critically discuss a causal modelling proposal and a contrastive proposal for handling challenging cases that combine transitivity with double prevention. We also discuss the nuances of switching cases, and show how to avoid mismatch of aspects by changing to a more subtle treatment of causes and effects.

This chapter focuses on examples that, in one way or another, involve omissions, that is, failures of events to occur. We discuss the metaphysical status of omissions, show how omission involving causation exhibits striking dissimilarities from ordinary causation, and look closely at structures involving causation by omission, prevention, and combinations of prevention and preemption. We then look carefully at the problems these structures create for reductive accounts of causation, including causal modeling accounts, and pay particular attention to some recent and sophisticated attempts to connect the treatment of omission-involving causation with a distinction between default states and deviant states. We conclude that we find ourselves in the position of being unable to dismiss causation involving omissions, unable to assimilate it to garden-variety causation, and unable to give a decently unified or complete account of it using any of the standard approaches to causation that we have canvassed.

This chapter introduces some of the problems for analyses of causation, sketches some of the most significant approaches to providing a philosophical account of causation, and discusses the methodological rules we intend to follow. We discuss counterfactual analyses, regularity-based accounts, causal modeling or structural equations accounts, contrastive accounts, de facto accounts, and transference accounts in more detail, with the aim of developing a cleaner understanding of what an account of causation ought to accomplish, and a better appreciation of the point of the close, examples-based kind of analysis featured in the next three chapters. We include a developed discussion of our methodological rules, we sketch some of the metaphysical assumptions we will make, and we discuss and set aside a number of issues that space precludes us from taking up in further detail.