Popper Seminar

Abstract: Time reversal is a 20th century concept that led to major advances in the foundations of physics, as well as the philosophical analysis of the direction of time. But its meaning is far from obvious. In part this is because "reversing time" is not a transformation that anyone can operationally carry out. In this talk, I discuss the variety…

Abstract: I examine some of the methodologies employed in recent and contemporary work in the metaphysics of time, and argue that we cannot expect them to be fruitful in helping us discover the fundamental nature of time. The strategies I focus on are: the burden-of-proof strategy, the appeal to common sense intuitions, and the appeal to the nature of ordinary…

Abstract: Know how is distinguished from other epistemic states by its special role in basic intentional action. I argue that we can characterize a shared epistemic state, 'shared know how’, that plays an analogous role in basic intentional joint action. This leads to the question: how does shared know how relate to individual know how? Does the former reduce to the latter, or…

Abstract: When we engage in moral criticism, it matters to us what the other party did intentionally. We blame others for their wrong actions by saying that they "did it on purpose" or that they "knew exactly what they were doing". We say that we didn't mean to harm, didn't intend to offend, or didn't know which consequences our action…

Abstract: Economic sanctions have become a staple of foreign policy. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tends to focus on three questions, and tackles one kind of cases. It focuses on the question of whether just war theory provides a useful normative framework for assessing the morality of sanctions; whether sanctions are effective; and whether the harms which…

Abstract: It is uncontroversial that a person's death can be a terrible misfortune for other people. To lose someone you love can be an immensely painful and disruptive experience. But is there also a sense in which death can be bad for the person who dies? Most people intuitively think so. In the philosophical literature, the currently most favoured explanation of…

According to influential accounts of scientific method, e.g., critical rationalism, scientific knowledge grows by repeatedly testing our best hypotheses. But despite the popularity of hypothesis tests in scientific inference, especially in statistics, their philosophical foundations are shaky…

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Mounting failures of replication in the social and biological sciences give a practical spin to statistical foundations in the form of the question: How can we attain reliability when Big Data methods make illicit cherry-picking and significance seeking so easy? … #PopperSeminar

It is widely thought that some relation or treatment, distinctive of “the political” bears a special burden of justification. For instance, "the state" may “coerce" only to prevent "harm to others", or only if it has a “public” justification. If there is anything to this thought, I suggest, it has less to do with liberty and more to do with equality than is often acknowledged. #PopperSeminar

In response to those who argue for "property cluster" views of natural kinds, Cailin O'Connor will use evolutionary models of sim-maxgames to assess the claim that linguistic terms will appropriately track sets of objects that cluster in property spaces.

This talk investigates the general properties of general Bayesian learning, where "general Bayesian learning'' means inferring a probability measure from another that is regarded as (uncertain) evidence, and where the inference is conditionalizing the evidence using the conditional expectation determined by a reference probability measure representing the background subjective degrees of belief (prior) of a Bayesian Agent performing the inference.

Some researchers in philosophy of religion have charged that the sub-discipline exhibits a number of features of poor health, prominently including that "partisanship is so entrenched that most philosophers of religion, instead of being alarmed by it, just take it for granted". But while these studies indicate that there is a correlation between religious belief and judgments about natural theological arguments, they do not establish that causation runs from belief to judgment as has been claimed. In this paper I offer an alternative explanation, suggesting that thinking style is a plausible common cause.

Prioritarianism is often considered a preferable alternative to egalitarianism. However, seeing exactly what distinguishes these two views can be difficult. Prioritarianism says it is better to benefit the worse off (other things being equal). Egalitarianism says it is better to reduce inequality (other things being equal). But by benefiting the worse off we narrow the gap between them and the better off, thereby reducing inequality. The two views thus seem to go hand in hand. So what's the difference? Parfit illustrates this with an analogy. People at lower altitudes can breath more easily than those at higher altitudes, but the ease with which a person breathes depends only on her own altitude, not that of anyone else. Similarly, on prioritarianism, benefiting people at lower levels of well-being matters more than benefiting those at higher levels, but the extent to which benefiting a person matters depends only on her own well-being level, not that of anyone else. Egalitarianism disagrees: benefiting a person at a given level matters more when others are at a higher level; that is, when doing so has the effect of reducing inequality. One aim of this paper is to spell out the analogy more precisely. I argue that one natural way of doing this commits the prioritarian to a view about the betterness of uncertain prospects or lotteries, a view sometimes called 'ex post prioritarianism'. This view faces significant objections. It violates 'ex ante' versions of two plausible principles, the Pigou-Dalton Principle and the Pareto Principle. A second aim is to consider some responses to these objections.

In Constructing the World, David Chalmers aims to defend strong reductionist claims he calls “scrutability theses”. One such thesis says, roughly speaking, that every truth about the world could, in principle, be “read off” a complete list of the physical facts and the facts about conscious experience. However, his strategy for establishing such scrutability theses faces a fairly basic logical problem that has not previously been recognized: what I call the “problem of cross-family quantifications”. I argue that the problem is pervasive, and discuss potential ways to overcome it, including the assumption that the fundamental structure of the world lacks certain symmetries.

I argue that acyclicity of preference cannot be defended as a general requirement of instrumental rationality. The standard instrumentalist defence of the requirement to have acyclical preferences, namely the money pump argument, relies on a fatal equivocation about the standard of instrumental rationality. Instead, I show that on the most plausible view of the standard of instrumental rationality, acyclicity can be justified as a conditional requirement of instrumental rationality: It turns out to be a requirement of instrumental rationality for agents who have a desire to have choice dispositions that are stable over time and across different choice contexts. For the rest of us, instrumental rationality is more permissive.