Neil McDonnell

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used as a teaching and learning tool, however scaling this technology is difficult due to technological and cost considerations. An alternative approach that helps to address these problems is VR-by-proxy, where teaching takes place within a VR environment that is controlled by one lecturer and broadcast to students online. This allows the content to be accessed without specialist equipment while still offering an immersive and interactive experience. Taking advantage of the enforced move to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study evaluates the implementation of a novel VR-by-proxy disease diagnostic laboratory VR simulation within an undergraduate life sciences course in a higher education setting. Student participants were randomly allocated into two groups: the test group, who took part in a VR-by-proxy lesson; and a control group, who worked with interactive online lab manual material. We assessed improvement in learning and enjoyment through questionnaires before and after these tasks and collected qualitative data on student attitudes towards VR through focus groups. Our results indicate that although there is no observable difference in learning outcomes between the two groups, students in the test group reported an improved learning experience, confidence and enjoyment of learning. In our focus groups, confidence was understood in two ways by participants: firstly, as ‘understanding’ of the various steps involved in conducting a quantitative polymerase chain reaction experiment and secondly as a more general ‘familiarity’ with the laboratory setting. This study adds to the growing body of research into the effectiveness of VR for learning and teaching, highlighting that VR-by-proxy may provide many of the same benefits.

This paper offers two novel conceptual tools: one concerning the semantics of counterfactuals and what should be held fixed when assessing them (the modal moat), and the other concerning the pragmatics of counterfactual assertions and how to avoid the potential pitfalls of meaning more than we say (antecedent gluttony). These allow us to address existing issues with the assessment of backwards counterfactuals within a framework that applies equally to forwards cases. In addition to solving a thorny problem from the time travel literature, what we learn teaches us something quite general about our evaluation of counterfactuals.

This policy report arises from the research project Augmented Reality: Ethics, Perception, Metaphysics, conducted at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience between November 2021 and November 2023. It was funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The project brought together experts in various academic fields, with partners from industry and regulatory bodies, to explore the nature of augmented and mixed reality technology, the theories underpinning them, and the ethical and legal questions prompted by new technology in this domain.

How can you steal something that doesn’t exist? This question confronts those of us who take an irrealist view of virtual objects and agree with the Supreme Court of the Netherlands that robbery took place when two boys used non-virtual violence to coerce a third boy into relinquishing his virtual amulet and mask. Here we outline this Puzzle of Virtual Theft, along with the closely related Puzzle of Virtual Value. After demonstrating how these puzzles are deeply problematic for the irrealist, we go on to sketch a solution that not only circumscribes the puzzles but also offers a framework by which legal scholars can make sense within existing legal codes of the new phenomenon of virtual theft.

Are the objects and events that take place in Virtual Reality genuinely real? Those who answer this question in the affirmative are realists, and those who answer in the negative are irrealists. In this paper we argue against the realist position, as given by Chalmers (2017), and present our own preferred irrealist account of the virtual. We start by disambiguating two potential versions of the realist position—weak and strong— and then go on to argue that neither is plausible. We then introduce a Waltonian variety of ictionalism about the virtual, arguing that this sort of irrealist approach avoids the problems of the realist positions, fits with a unifying theory of representational works, and offers a better account of the phenomenology of engaging in virtual experiences.

What is it for an event not to occur? This is an urgent, yet under explored, question for counterfactual analyses of causation quite generally. In this paper I take a lead from Lewis in identifying two different possible standards of non-occurrence that we might adopt and I argue that we need to apply them asymmetrically: one standard for the cause, another for the effect. This is a surprising result. I then offer a contextualist refinement of the Lewis approach in light of initial problems, and discuss how the asymmetry remained hidden until now. I then relate the non-occurrence problem to issues of transitivity and proportionality in causation, before showing that a parallel problem exists for contrastivist and interventionist approaches to causation too.

Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, and one that generalises: any attempt to rescue the autonomy of the special sciences, or the efficacy of the mental, from exclusion worries had better not look to proportionality for help.

It is commonly assumed that causation is transitive and in this paper I aim to reconcile this widely-held assumption with apparent evidence to the contrary. I will discuss a familiar approach to certain well-known counterexamples, before introducing a more resistant sort of case of my own. I will then offer a novel solution, based on Yablo’s proportionality principle, that succeeds in even these more resistant cases. There is a catch, however. Either proportionality is a constraint on which causal claims are true, and the solution works, or it is not and causation is not transitive after all. I will argue that the first horn has unacceptable consequences and should be rejected, but that the second horn is less costly than it might initially appear.

Causal theories of action, perception and knowledge are each beset by problems of so-called ‘deviant’ causal chains. For each such theory, counterexamples are formed using odd or co-incidental causal chains to establish that the theory is committed to unpalatable claims about some intentional action, about a case of veridical perception or about the acquisition of genuine knowledge. In this paper I will argue that three well-known examples of a deviant causal chain have something in common: they each violate Yablos proportionality constraint on causation. I will argue that this constraint provides the key to saving causal theories from deviant chains.

This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears to fail. Third, CCT can help us resurrect the much-maligned fragility response to the problems of late pre-emption by understanding fragility in counterpart-theoretic terms. Some reasons to prefer this CCT approach to rivals are discussed

Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay greater attention to which elements of our causal talk vary with context and which elements track genuine features of the world around us. I will argue that once these elements are teased apart we will be in a position to better understand some of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of causation: pre-emption cases, absence causation, failures of transitivity and overdetermination. The result is a naturalist account of causation, concordant with the contextual variability we find in our ordinary causal talk, and parsimonious with respect to the theoretical entities posited