Zhexi Zhang

In the philosophical literature, there is growing consensus that while the passage of time alone does not diminish blameworthiness, it can allow agents to undergo changes that mitigate the degree to which they deserve blame and punishment. According to the dilution approach, any notable change to an agent’s psychology alters the degree to which they are blameworthy for past actions. In contrast, the decontamination approach requires agents to alter facts about themselves that are related to their culpability for past wrongs to become less blameworthy. According to these views, wrongdoers must morally improve, experience guilt, and/or offer amends to mitigate their blameworthiness. In this paper, we present a study that investigates the extent to which our responsibility judgments are sensitive to dilution and decontamination changes and why these changes matter. While we found support for both dilution and decontamination approaches, decontamination had a much larger impact on a wider range of responsibility-related judgments than dilution. Our findings indicate that if you want to change people’s minds about how blameworthy you are for past wrongs, altering the facts about yourself that are related to your culpability is often the best way to mitigate the degree to which others blame you.

According to a recent view of analogue representations, the “syntax” of analogue representations is specified in terms of semantics by appealing to the mapping relations between contents and vehicles—“syntax” is fully determined by semantic properties. In this paper, I point out that it is widely assumed in the cognitive sciences that syntax is not determined by semantics but is instead explanatorily autonomous. I will pose a dilemma for the syntactic account of analogue representational systems: either the vehicles of the analogue representations do not have constituent parts, or the constituent structure of the analogue representational vehicles is fully determined by the semantics. In the former case, there is no room for syntax. In the latter case, there is no explanatory role offered by “syntax” over and above semantics. I conclude that analogue systems should be explained solely in terms of representational vehicles and semantics.