Mariam Thalos

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

This essay aims to examine the forms of reasoning that are specific to collective (social and political) life. I offer them as a way of organizing the most general framework for navigating social life, more general even than norms or principles. I will advance a taxonomy of reasoning forms that emerge in group and institutional contexts, building on the four-models taxonomy of relations first articulated by anthropologist Alan Fiske (1991). My 2x2 taxonomy of reasoning maps readily onto Fiske’s taxonomy: it organizes Fiske’s models, as building blocks that structure social life across overlapping institutions and cultures. Finally, I will show that there is room in an account of reasoning for representing the sort of human freedom that is unavailable in certain moral psychologies (represented, for example by the work of Jonathan Haidt) and linguistic theories (Steven Pinker and George Lakoff). According to Haidt (2013), we are only conscious of our rationalisation processes, not of anything that is truly the basis of our moral or political judgements. According to Pinker (2007), the tools we use for reasoning – the cognitive models or analogies – are all too often frozen, subject neither to examination nor modification. But according to the account I shall articulate, we are conscious of our moral reasonings because they require intervening and interrupting (default) processes that would proceed, in many cases, below the level of consciousness, otherwise. The account on offer here shares the philosophical temperaments examplified by W. D. Ross and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Philosophy has long wrongfully imprisoned reasoning within the isolated chambers of the individual mind. This book shatters this confinement, laying foundations of a groundbreaking framework that conceptualizes reasoning as protocol-articulated action governed by socially shared norms and unfolding across diverse sites of processing. While logicians portray reasoning as inhabiting an abstract system of rules applied to propositions, this book argues that this portrayal distorts the truth of the matter. Reasoning in the Wild is founded on the principle that the relation of logical consequence is best understood as a relation between concrete acts, not between abstract propositions inhabiting inference systems. This is the zeroeth principle of logic. Consonant with this principle, the book proceeds to illuminate: the vital concept of the common mind—the shared understandings and ways of thinking that exist within a community; how reasoning is inherently social, a public work that unfolds across various sites of processing, operating on principles of trust; that communication shapes action within the context of the common mind, but subject to manipulation that can contribute to polarization; that public sentiment is a powerful, macrosocial force shaped by interlocking processes of shared understanding and strategic communication; and finally, how a disjointed common mind can result from persistent false narratives. The book provocatively considers the role of generative AI in either exacerbating or ameliorating this condition. Reasoning in the Wild is a keen philosophical intervention on a broad range of interconnected topics around the public works of reasoning, for scholars and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences, particularly the sciences of mind, logic, the social world and communication. It promises to reshape fundamentally our understanding of how we reason, not in terms of isolated mental activity but within the rich tapestry of human connection and public life.

_The Classics of Western Philosophy_ brings together 61 newly-commissioned essays on classic texts ranging from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. Surveying the history of philosophy, the book focuses on historical texts rather than historical figures and covers the entire range of classics in a single volume. Provides 61 chapters written by leading experts on the classics of Western thought. Includes current references to the scholarly literature in addition to a select bibliography of major articles and books. Contributors include C.D.C. Reeve on Plato's _Republic_, Terrence Irwin on Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_, Dominic O'Meara on Plotinus' _Enneads_, James Ross on Aquinas' _Summa Theologiae_, Don Garrett on Spinoza's _Ethics_, Allen Wood on Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, Stephen Houlgate on Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_, Michael Dummett on Frege's ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung,' Hanjo Glock on Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and David Woodruff Smith on Husserl's _Logical Investigations_. Surveys the history of philosophy by focussing on the historical texts rather than historical figures. Covers the entire range of classics in a single volume.

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.

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.

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.

There is a certain tangle of philosophical questions around which much philosophy, especially in our time, has circled, to the point where now there is something that deserves to be called a holding pattern around these issues: What are causes? How do they compare with reasons? What is Reason, with a capital R? How does it participate in the production of intentions that lead to action, particularly in arenas rife with uncertainty? Where do formal systems of symbols come into all of this? And how - if at all - can formal methods be harnessed to serve science and public policy, through guiding belief formation and decision-making? Henry Kyburg, Jr., has himself circled around this tangle of questions, at least once or twice. And so in his honor, and in the no-nonsense spirit of empiricism that marks his work as the work of a scientist, I'd like to sketch a way to cut through some of the Gordian knots at the center of this tangle. The theme will be that natural science has much of value to offer that has been willfully neglected by philosophers. This by itself is nowise surprising, as philosophy, particularly in the most exclusive parts of the academy, has suffered from an excessive transcendentalism - a theme to which I will return in this piece periodically. Now Kyburg has not been guilty of contributing to the causes for the decline of philosophy. He has, instead, been courageously working out the implications of his convictions regarding the virtues of vigorous formal systems, contributing to the advancement of empiricist methodologies, and generously supporting the causes of realism. In emulation of that courage, I offer this essay in the service of bold and vigorous formal systems, realism and - most emphatically - empiricism.

The apparent ineffectuality of quantum physics to reconcile its evolution rule with measurement phenomena has polarized the community of scholars working on the subject into, roughly, two sorts of camps. On the one side there are those who perceive the problem to be that of finding an interpretation of the conceptual structures of quantum theory whereon the two elements can be reconciled without having to revise the canonical understanding of either. On the other side are those who see measurement phenomena as posing a challenge: the challenge of revising either the canonical equation or its canonical application in such a way that no conflict arises between it and laboratory data. ;This dissertation focuses on proposals of the latter sort. The centerpiece of the thesis is a reinterpretation of the Theory of Macrosystems of Daneri, Loinger and Prosperi. I show that this theory is most charitably interpreted as a proposal for reconciling measurement phenomena, not so much with Schrodinger dynamics, but rather with a constraint on the evolution map. It is, in other words, an account of how measurement phenomena is consistent with a certain set of dynamical behaviors. The focus on behaviors rather than equations and their solutions is characteristic of recent approaches to studying phenomena in classical contexts, both of phenomena to do with the approach to equilibrium and in situations involving far-from-equilibrium phenomena. The focus on behaviors is motivated by recognition that equations of motion for microscopic subcomponents of many-body systems do not wear on their countenances anything useful about the macroscopic behaviors of the systems they collectively describe--and are, in addition, virtually unsolvable. Therefore it profits an investigator to do without microscopic equations of motion in analyzing phenomena. The Theory of Macrosystems likewise "does without" equations of motion; I show that the account it gives is independent of closed-form rules of evolution. For this reason I call it an agnostic solution to the measurement problem--and show that this is an altogether different approach to the problem than any other so far conceived

Talk abounds regarding the loss of public trust in such institutions as science or mainstream news media, but there is little clarity about the nature of public trust. Public trust, as this paper explains, is a correlate of a certain type of power in the sphere of communication—one enjoyed by a broadcast source (such as a scientific publication or a news outlet) in proportion to a number of recipients in its broadcast area who adopt its messages, or at least are open to receiving them. This essay proposes new language and ontological tools for the analysis of this sort of power, because the present crop of concepts currently in circulation for handling questions around power broadly construed, and communicative power specifically, are inadequate. The possibilities of communication, and therefore of power in and through communication, differ—as the paper will also explain—according to whether the network through which they flow is governed by an authoritarian regime or instead a western-style democracy. Communicative power is the fundament of what will be referred to here as “people power”, consonant with its usage by Chenoweth et al. (2019), a nonviolent power that constitutes a natural and enormously potent check on the power of tyrants, and thereby forms one natural limit on tyranny. Communicative power has in recent memory been associated with Science and with the free press. The concepts about power articulated here will also contribute to clear formulation of numerous research questions in connection with the internet.

If—as many scholars aver—gender is not a biological but rather a social fact, then how is it possible for someone assigned to the category Man at birth at some point later to feel or otherwise experience a personal (as contrasted with social) reality as a woman? If gender is social, how could a statement of the form “I feel like a woman” be true for such a person? This paper aims to defuse the apparent tension, by articulating an account of the construction of oneself-as-gendered (which we may refer to as a gender token), within the wider context of social construction. The aim is to illuminate the differences between constructions of gender tokens, on the one hand, and the social constructions of gender types (known just as gender), on the other. Illuminating both as constructions, but of distinct origins and requiring differential degrees of social collaboration, defuses the tension.

Practitioners of science treat evidence as separate and objective body of materials, potentially quite diverse, but importantly “prior to,” or at any rate independent of, all theory. Philosophers of science, by contrast, are increasingly wary about 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 a very real and 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. And 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.

Prevailing in the survey industry is the conception that public sentiment is a simple arithmetic function of individuals’ sentiments, many of them held only privately, maybe even secretly. Against this conception, the present paper argues that public sentiment is better construed as strategic deductions from publicly available evidence—a matter of the public working out a common sentiment from publicly available information. This conception diverges dramatically from a conception of public sentiment as the weight of private thoughts or beliefs—items that may be measured by a poll, at least when the appropriate survey methodologies are correctly administered and analyzed. The reason to prefer a conception emphasizing public materials is perhaps obvious: only that which enjoys public visibility has a chance of effecting change. If measuring public sentiment is truly in service of taking stock of forces at work on the social-political stage, that is quite sufficient—as the arguments presented here will show—to prefer the approach on offer here over those currently prevailing.

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?

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.

Hume and Descartes, arguably the most important figures in modern philosophy, disagreed on everything fundamental save one: that human motivation is divided between two quite different and non-overlapping sources—the mind and the body—and that each of these contributes something very different to behavior. This particular doctrine is deeply rooted in Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy. (Still, while they agreed on the core doctrine, they diverged in important details—with Hume being especially unwilling to attribute much in the way of real control over behavior to Reason.) In not countering Descartes on this important idea about motivation, Hume unwittingly conspired to create a dogma—a doctrine handed down unopposed by a competitor into the next generation’s philosophical legacy. And this is rather unfortunate. Only Hume—or, at any rate, someone coming from his angle on things—could have helped to provide his posterity with philosophical substance that counters the mechanistic option. (And if we are ever to climb out of the mechanistic hole, we will have to invent an anti-mechanistic philosophy that has little or no continuity with others in its immediate history.) The moral is that philosophy adds real value when it is able to provide, in an uninterrupted way, foundations for a variety of different perspectives on a fundamental question—or at any rate, to keep received options alive. Philosophy can, in this way, prevent ossification of opinion into dogma. Because Hume did not provide a counter to Descartes on this particular occasion, one that might have drawn on ideas we find in the ancients (Plato or Aristotle), science has paid an enormous price.

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.