Research

1. Work in Progress

Monograph-length work

   In Progress Fault-lines of Philosophy

   In Progress Human Reasoning in the Wild, under review

Article-length work

   In progress People Power, The Conversation

2. Monographs, published

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018).

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. 

Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2013. 

A venerable tradition in the metaphysics of science commends ontological reduction: the practice of analysis of theoretical entities into further and further proper parts, with the understanding that the original entity is nothing but the sum of these. This tradition implicitly subscribes to the principle that all the real action of the universe (also referred to as its "causation") happens at the smallest scales-at the scale of microphysics. A vast majority of metaphysicians and philosophers of science, covering a wide swath of the spectrum from reductionists to emergentists, defend this principle. It provides one pillar of the most prominent theory of science, to the effect that the sciences are organized in a hierarchy, according to the scales of measurement occupied by the phenomena they study. On this view, the fundamentality of a science is reckoned inversely to its position on that scale. This venerable tradition has been justly and vigorously countered-in physics, most notably: it is countered in quantum theory, in theories of radiation and superconduction, and most spectacularly in renormalization theories of the structure of matter. But these counters-and the profound revisions they prompt-lie just below the philosophical radar. This book illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences that are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, the book articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement. This vision, as the book shows, is warranted by philosophical treatment of cardinal issues in the philosophy of science: fundamentality, causation, scientific innovation, dependence and independence, and the proprieties of explanation. 

3. Articles and Interviews for A Broad Readership

People Power, The Conversation. In progress.

Thalos, M. (Speaker). Game Theory: Field Report [Video]. SAGE Business Foundations. [DOI Forthcoming]. 2023.

“A philosopher works from home,” Think. 2020.

 This is my impersonation of a philosopher working from home, which aims at making lively a few worthy philosophical questions. The old is new again, as each generation confronts its own challenges and demons, in its own context.

“Philosophy of Science,” in AccessScience, McGraw Hill. 2019.

 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?

“Resist and be free,” Aeon Magazine (based on A Social Theory of Freedom). 2019.

“Interview” with Richard Marshall, 3ammagazine, 2018.

“Mariam Thalos discusses freedom,” Elucidations, podcast with Matt Teichman. 2018.

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.

‘Philosophical Meditations on “Black lives matter,”’ Black Lives Matter 2. The Critique. 2016.

 What does “Black lives matter” say that “All lives matter” does not? In particular, why do we appreciate a kind of conflict between them? This essay is about the way that social identities work in human life. Appreciating the way that identity works will shed light on the way that “All lives matter” undermines the force of “Black lives matter.”

“Interview” with Caterina Marchionni, The Reasoner. 2014.

“The Wit of Knitting,” APA Newsletter on Feminism, 8/1. 2008.

4. Selected articles and books/chapters by topic

4.1. General philosophy of science

"The logic of measurement—a defense of foundationalist empiricism," Episteme, FirstView (2023): 1-26

Practitioners of science treat evidence as a searate 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.

“Philosophy of Science,” in AccessScience, McGraw Hill, 2019.

 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?

“Against border patrols,” in Science Unlimited? Challenges of Scientism, Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci, eds., University of Chicago Press, 2017, 283–301.

Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2013. 

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018). 

 In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of humanfreedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. 

“Who will advise us? An essay on the proper relationship of science and political institutions in democratic societies,” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 16 (2015) 67–95. 

 This essay argues that, in place of the present hit-and-miss system of specialist advisement (a system of scientific experts performing case-by-case studies at numerous regulatory agencies, the US Office of Technology Assessment, for example), we require a corps of professional public servants for the dissemination of credible, learned, relevant and useful information pertaining to the issues of the day. This is necessary because scientists as a group are poorly prepared for the task of advising (as contrasted with the quite different task of conducting research in their subject area), and, more importantly, because governments cannot ask scientists to provide that information without also incentivizing third parties (albeit unintentionally) to compromise the institution of science itself. This corps must also be poised to perform such aggregations of opinion (or arbitrations between conflicting opinions and interests) when requests are duly submitted by both governmental and citizen bodies. The product of this corps will be a dynamic, massively cross-referential, virtual document that I shall refer to as the Citizenpedia. This essay is devoted to justifying the government subsidy of such a document, as well as to evaluating the best role for scientists in a democracy. It will contrast the Citizenpedia proposal with practices that have been tried: (1) governmental agencies and (2) citizen panels. Most importantly, it is devoted to showing that a world in which the Citizenpedia advises governments is substantially different from one in which either citizens or “experts” do, just as it is substantially different from a world (our own) in which the media plays the largest role in educating the public on science policy matters.

“Two Conceptions of Fundamentality,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 41:2 (2011, Online First 2010), 151–177. 

 This article aims to show that fundamentality is construed differently in the two most prominent strategies of analysis we find in physical science and engineering today: (1) atomistic, reductive analysis and (2) Systems analysis. Correspondingly, atomism is the conception according to which the simplest (smallest) indivisible entity of a certain kind is most fundamental; while systemism, as will be articulated here, is the conception according to which the bonds that structure wholes are most fundamental, and scale and/or constituting entities are of no significance whatsoever for fundamentality. Accordingly, atomists maintain that the basic entities—the atoms—are fundamental, and together with the “external” interactions among them, are sufficient for illuminating all the features and behaviors of the wholes they constitute; whereas systemists proclaim that it is instead structuralqualities of systems, that flow from internal relations among their constituents and translate directly into behaviors, that are fundamental, and by themselves largely (if not entirely) sufficient for illuminating the features and behaviors of the wholes thereby structured. Systemism, as will be argued, is consistent with the nonexistence of a fundamental “level” of nondecomposable entities, just as it is consistent with the existence of such a level. Still, systemism is a conception of the fundamental in quite different, but still ontological terms. Systemism can serve the special sciences—the social sciences especially—better than the conception of fundamentality in terms of atoms. Systemism is, in fact, a conception of fundamentality that has rather different uses—and importantly, different resonances. This conception of fundamentality makes contact with questions pertaining to natural kinds and their situation in the metaphysics of the special sciences—their situation within an order of autonomous sciences. 

The controversy over fundamentality is evident in the social sciences too, albeit somewhat imperfectly, in the terms of debate between methodological individualists and functionalists/holists. This article will thus clarify the difference between systemism and holism.

“Systems,” Monist (issue on Philosophy of Engineering), 92:3 (2009), 452–78. 

“Molecule-for-Molecule Duplication,” Teorema (special issue on phenomenal consciousness and naturalism), 28:3 (2008), 103–114. 

 Is a molecule-for-molecule duplicate D of some entity always a perfect duplicate of it? And in particular: is D a being with consciousness if its original is? These questions summarize a certain diagnostic tool used by metaphysicians, and prominently used in service of a form of dualism that is supposed to support an autonomous science of consciousness. This essay argues that this diagnostic tool is inapt when the exercise is performed as a pure thought experiment, for the sake of eliciting data or judgment from intuition. The trouble is that intuition can render for a “duplicate” only what experience or other learning (perhaps via dogmatic methods) has instilled in the intuiter. But rather than disappoint the aspirations of an autonomous science, the argument of this essay will instead illuminate its better metaphysical supports.

“The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper,” in The Classics of Western Philosophy, J. Gracia, G. Reichberg & B. Schumacher, eds., Blackwell, 2003. 

 In his magnum opus, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published in German in 1934, English translation, 1959), Karl Popper make two fundamental philosophical moves. First, he relocates the center of gravity of the philosophical treatment of science around what he calls the problem of demarcation. This is the problem of distinguishing between science, on the one hand, and everything else on the other. (By contrast, his contemporaries of the Vienna Circle, whose positivism would prove the most influential brand of empiricism of the day, located the center of gravity around the problem of linguistic meaning, and use a criterion according to which a statement is meaningful to the extent that one can identify verification conditions for it.) Popper excludes from science such things as logic, metaphysics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marx’s theory of history.

Second, Popper propounds the doctrine of falsification, which handles the problem of demarcation, as well as answers David Hume’s shattering attack on science as the premier form of knowledge centuries before. The arguments he mounts for falsification would function also as an attack on any account of the scientific enterprise that, like positivism, adheres to the idea that science progresses logically from instances (given in observation or experience) to the high-order generalizations characteristic of mature scientific theory.

In this small space I shall undertake neither to illuminate the nuances of Popper’s position, nor to trace the (numerous) lines of criticism that have accumulated against it some seventy years later. I shall busy myself instead with tracing a trajectory of thought on the subject of scientific reasoning and its relation to individual decision-making, reflecting on Popper’s contribution and on how his legacy might be further enlarged.

“The reduction of causation,” in Probability is the Very Guide of Life: The Philosophical Uses of Probability, M. Thalos & H. Kyburg, Jr., eds., Open Court, 2003.

 It is a perennial philosophical enterprise to propose the reduction of causal facts to facts of some other kind. Just as it is also a perennial enterprise to proclaim that certain such proposed reductions are doomed to failure. Here I shall champion a certain family of reductionist proposals—namely, those that quantify the notion of causality—referring to them as quantitative reductions. The opposition to quantitative reductionism proclaims that an antireductionist analysis of causation is to be preferred, because such an analysis of causal matters can code for either more information, or for information of a radically nonquantitative sort also. The charge is that purely quantitative models have no means of handling this surplus. I will undertake to show that it is not so. 

“Explanation is a Genus: On the Varieties of Scientific Explanation,” Synthese, 130 (2002) 317–354. 

 I shall endeavor to show that every physical theory since Newton explains without drawing attention to causes–that, in other words, physical theories as physical theories aspire to explain under an ideal quite distinct from that of causal explanation. If I am right, then even if sometimes the explanations achieved by a physical theory are not in violation of the standard of causal explanation, this is purely an accident. For physical theories, as I will show, do not, as such, aim at accommodating the goals or aspirations of causal explanation. This will serve as the founding insight for a new theory of explanation, which will itself serve as the cornerstone of a new theory of scientific method.

“Degrees of Freedom: An Essay on Competitions between Micro and Macro in Mechanics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59 (1999), 1–39.

 This paper argues that the doctrines of determinism and supervenience, while logically independent, are importantly linked in physical mechanics—and quite interestingly so. For it is possible to formulate classical mechanics in such a way as to take advantage of the existence of mathematical devices that represent the advance of time—and which are such as to inspire confidence in the truth of determinism—in order to prevent violation of supervenience. It is also possible to formulate classical mechanics-and to do so in an observationally equivalent, and thus equally empirically respectable, way—such that violations of supervenience are (on the one hand) routine, and (on the other hand) necessary for achieving complete descriptions of the motions of mechanical systems—necessary, therefore, for achieving a deterministic mechanical theory. Two such formulations—only one of which preserves supervenience universally—will conceive of mechanical law in quite different ways. What's more, they will not admit of being extended to treat thermodynamical questions in the same way. Thus we will find that supervenience is a contingent matter, in the following rather surprising and philosophically interesting way: we cannot in mechanics separate our decisions to conceive of physical law in certain ways from our decisions to treat macroscopic quantities in certain ways.

“In Favor of Being Only Humean,” Philosophical Studies, 93 (1999), 265–98. 

 The twin conceptions of (1) natural law as causal structure and (2) explanation as passage from phenomenon to cause, are two sides of a certain philosophical coin, to which I shall offer an alternative – Humean – currency. The Humean alternative yokes together a version of the regularity conception of law and a conception of explanation as passage from one regularity, to another which has it as an instance but of which it is not itself an instance. I will show that the regularity conception of law is the basis of a distinguished branch of physical mechanics; thus the Humean conception of law, like its better-loved rival, enjoys the support of a venerated tradition in mechanical theory – in fact, that strand which culminates in quantum theory. I shall also offer an account of explanatory asymmetry, a natural companion to the Humean conception of explanation as passage from one regularity to another of greater scope, as an alternative to van Fraassen’s unsatisfactory account. My account of asymmetry is just as free of reliance on context as it is free of reliance on cause. I shall thus proclaim that explanatory asymmetry is at once a reality deserving of philosophical treatment – one not to be given over to the care of psychology or linguistics – and at the same time susceptible of an account worthy of Hume.

“Why we believe,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 30 (1999), 317–339. 

 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.

“Units of decision,” Philosophy of Science, 66 (1999), S324–S338. 

I shall introduce the units of decision problem in the theory of decision, which as I shall explain is a sibling to the units of selection problem in evolutionary theory. And I shall present an argument to the effect that, contrary to Bayesian wisdom on the subject, undertaking decision in group settings (in multi-individual units) violates no precepts of rationality.

“Degrees of Freedom in the Social World,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), 453–77. 

“A Modest Proposal for Interpreting Structural Explanation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 49 (1998), 279–295. 

 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.

4.2. Philosophy of science, with sub-specialties in:

4.2.1. Philosophy of physics, esp. history and philosophy of mechanics and quantum theory

Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2013. 

“Two Conceptions of Fundamentality,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 41:2 (2011, Online First 2010), 151–177. 

 This article aims to show that fundamentality is construed differently in the two most prominent strategies of analysis we find in physical science and engineering today: (1) atomistic, reductive analysis and (2) Systems analysis. Correspondingly, atomism is the conception according to which the simplest (smallest) indivisible entity of a certain kind is most fundamental; while systemism, as will be articulated here, is the conception according to which the bonds that structure wholes are most fundamental, and scale and/or constituting entities are of no significance whatsoever for fundamentality. Accordingly, atomists maintain that the basic entities—the atoms—are fundamental, and together with the “external” interactions among them, are sufficient for illuminating all the features and behaviors of the wholes they constitute; whereas systemists proclaim that it is instead structuralqualities of systems, that flow from internal relations among their constituents and translate directly into behaviors, that are fundamental, and by themselves largely (if not entirely) sufficient for illuminating the features and behaviors of the wholes thereby structured. Systemism, as will be argued, is consistent with the nonexistence of a fundamental “level” of nondecomposable entities, just as it is consistent with the existence of such a level. Still, systemism is a conception of the fundamental in quite different, but still ontological terms. Systemism can serve the special sciences—the social sciences especially—better than the conception of fundamentality in terms of atoms. Systemism is, in fact, a conception of fundamentality that has rather different uses—and importantly, different resonances. This conception of fundamentality makes contact with questions pertaining to natural kinds and their situation in the metaphysics of the special sciences—their situation within an order of autonomous sciences. 

The controversy over fundamentality is evident in the social sciences too, albeit somewhat imperfectly, in the terms of debate between methodological individualists and functionalists/holists. This article will thus clarify the difference between systemism and holism.

“Nonreductive Physics,” Synthese, 149 (2006), 133–178. 

 This paper documents a wide range of nonreductive scientific treatments of phenomena in the domain of physics. These treatments strongly resist characterization as explanations of macrobehavior exclusively in terms of behavior of microconstituents. For they are treatments in which macroquantities are cast in the role of genuine and irreducible degrees of freedom.

“Degrees of Freedom: An Essay on Competitions between Micro and Macro in Mechanics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59 (1999), 1–39. 

 This paper argues that the doctrines of determinism and supervenience, while logically independent, are importantly linked in physical mechanics—and quite interestingly so. For it is possible to formulate classical mechanics in such a way as to take advantage of the existence of mathematical devices that represent the advance of time—and which are such as to inspire confidence in the truth of determinism—in order to prevent violation of supervenience. It is also possible to formulate classical mechanics-and to do so in an observationally equivalent, and thus equally empirically respectable, way—such that violations of supervenience are (on the one hand) routine, and (on the other hand) necessary for achieving complete descriptions of the motions of mechanical systems—necessary, therefore, for achieving a deterministic mechanical theory. Two such formulations—only one of which preserves supervenience universally—will conceive of mechanical law in quite different ways. What's more, they will not admit of being extended to treat thermodynamical questions in the same way. Thus we will find that supervenience is a contingent matter, in the following rather surprising and philosophically interesting way: we cannot in mechanics separate our decisions to conceive of physical law in certain ways from our decisions to treat macroscopic quantities in certain ways.

“The Trouble with Superselection Accounts of Measurement,” Philosophy of Science, 65 (1998), 518–544.

 A superselection rule advanced in the course of a quantum-mechanical treatment of some phenomenon is an assertion to the effect that the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is to be restricted in the application at hand. Superselection accounts of measurement all have in common a decision to represent the indicator states of detectors by eigenspaces of superselection operators named in a superselection rule, on the grounds that the states in question are states of a so-called classical quantity and therefore not subject to quantum interference effects. By this strategy superselectionists of measurement expect to dispense with use of projection postulates in treatments of measurement. I shall argue that superselection accounts of measurement are self-contradictory, and that treatments of infinite systems, if they can avoid the contradiction, are not true superselection accounts.

“The Lens of Chemistry,” Science & Education, 22:7 (2013) 1707–22. 

 Chemistry possesses a distinctive theoretical lens—a distinctive set of theoretical concerns regarding the dynamics and transformations of a perplexing variety of organic and nonorganic substances—to which it must be faithful. Even if it is true that chemical facts bear a special (reductive) relationship to physical facts, nonetheless it will always still be true that the theoretical lenses of the two disciplines are distinct. This has consequences for how chemists pursue their research, as well as how chemistry should be taught.

4.2.2. Philosophy of social science

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018). 

 In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. 

"Powers that reside in communication," SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy (forth)

"Public Sentiment and Its Powers," Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12:6 (2023): 1-20.  

This essay aims at rethinking two important conceptions for use in social and political science: (1) Public sentiment, to be used interchangeably, as is the common practice, with public opinion, and; (2) People power—a term currently being used by a number of researcher-activists, prominent among them Erica Chenoweth and colleagues (2011, 2021, 2021) to refer to the force of nonviolent (“civil”) resistance against state authority. 

 “Diagnostic preliminaries to applying a decision theory,” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2014), 168–196. 

 Decision theory cannot be a purely formal theory, free of all metaphysical assumptions and ascertainments. It must instead rely upon the end user for the wisdom it takes to prime the decision formalism – with principles and assumptions about the metaphysics of the application context – so that the formalism in its turn can generate good advice. Appreciating this idea is fundamental to understanding the true rivalry between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) in specific cases. I shall argue that no decision theory can deliver a verdict unless assumptions are made about the degrees of freedomin the context of decision, that EDT and CDT disagree fundamentally about how to diagnose the degrees of freedom in any given situation, and that from this fundamental disagreement flow their surface disagreements in iconic cases.

“Solidarity: A motivational conception”, Philosophical Papers, 41:1 (2012), 57–95. 

This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity.

“Self-constructions: An existentialist approach to self and social identity,” in Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Sharon Crasnow & Anita Superson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 451–92.

 Social relations are the core of a human self. Affiliations shape our social world, and ultimately alliances are the large players on the stage of human history. In the process of forging social links, human beings are sometimes lucky enough to enjoy the exercise of genuine existential freedom. These axioms are at the heart of the feminist account of self and social identity presented in this essay. 

“Two Conceptions of Fundamentality,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 41:2 (2011, Online First 2010), 151–177. 

 This article aims to show that fundamentality is construed differently in the two most prominent strategies of analysis we find in physical science and engineering today: (1) atomistic, reductive analysis and (2) Systems analysis. Correspondingly, atomism is the conception according to which the simplest (smallest) indivisible entity of a certain kind is most fundamental; while systemism, as will be articulated here, is the conception according to which the bonds that structure wholes are most fundamental, and scale and/or constituting entities are of no significance whatsoever for fundamentality. Accordingly, atomists maintain that the basic entities—the atoms—are fundamental, and together with the “external” interactions among them, are sufficient for illuminating all the features and behaviors of the wholes they constitute; whereas systemists proclaim that it is instead structuralqualities of systems, that flow from internal relations among their constituents and translate directly into behaviors, that are fundamental, and by themselves largely (if not entirely) sufficient for illuminating the features and behaviors of the wholes thereby structured. Systemism, as will be argued, is consistent with the nonexistence of a fundamental “level” of nondecomposable entities, just as it is consistent with the existence of such a level. Still, systemism is a conception of the fundamental in quite different, but still ontological terms. Systemism can serve the special sciences—the social sciences especially—better than the conception of fundamentality in terms of atoms. Systemism is, in fact, a conception of fundamentality that has rather different uses—and importantly, different resonances. This conception of fundamentality makes contact with questions pertaining to natural kinds and their situation in the metaphysics of the special sciences—their situation within an order of autonomous sciences. 

The controversy over fundamentality is evident in the social sciences too, albeit somewhat imperfectly, in the terms of debate between methodological individualists and functionalists/holists. This article will thus clarify the difference between systemism and holism.

(with Chrisoula Andreou) “Of Human Bonding,” Public Reason 1:2 (2009), 46–73; open access athttp://publicreason.ro/cuprins/3. 

 We seek to illuminate the prevalence of cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals via an analysis of agency that recognizes the possibility of bonding and challenges the common view that agency is invariably an individual-level affair. Via bonding, a single individual’s behavior patterns or programs are altered so as to facilitate the formation, on at least some occasions, of a larger entity to whom is attributable the coordination of the component entities. Some of these larger entities will qualify as agents in their own right, even when the comprising entities also qualify as agents. In light of the many possibilities that humans actually enjoy for entering into numerous bonding schemes, and the extent to which they avail themselves of these possibilities, there is no basis for the assumption that cooperative behavior must ultimately emerge as either altruistic or self-interested; it can instead be the product of collective agency.

“Imitative Reasoning,” Social Epistemology, 23:3–4 (2009), 381–405. 

 On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on by way of practical reasoning on the ground involves a certain simple inference schema—to be called “imitative reasoning”—that involves mobilization of what has been alternately referred to as archetypes, scripts, stereotypes and schemas including most importantly self-schemas or self-concepts. Imitative reasoning, as the paper will argue, is especially hostile to deliberations that involve the sorts of tradeoffs that applications of utility theory routinely advise. It is therefore no expression or realization, however imperfect, of the notion of maximization. What is more, this framework routinely evokes as authoritative the norms of privilege, however removed from or irrelevant to the matter at hand, which might be as simple as where to go for dinner. For it is the basis of—among other things—class and race consciousness. Furthermore, it is highly subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous; such as, for example, by those who market consumer goods, especially to children. For this form of reasoning is employed so as to protect or enhance self-concepts: imitative reasoning is a form of motivated reasoning. Laying it out in schema form will shed light on the sort of reasoning processes that transpire in many cases of cognitive dissonance reduction.

“Two Conceptions of Collectivity,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008), 83–104.

 This paper distinguishes two conceptions of collectivity, each of which tracks the targets of classification according to their aetiology. Collectivities falling under the first conception are founded on (more-or-less) explicit negotiations amongst the members who are known to one another personally. Collectivities falling under the second (philosophically neglected) conception are founded – at least initially – purely upon a shared conception of “we”, very often in the absence of prior acquaintance and personal interaction. Th e paper argues that neglect of collectivities of the second kind renders certain social phenomena (for example, sense of place and certain kinds of conflicted loyalty) inexplicable or invisible. And the paper also stresses that a conception referring to the second kind of collectivity will put us in position to revitalize a variety of important questions, including: Which conception of collectivity best serves the needs of a theory of justice? Th e paper will contrast the distinction between these two conceptions with the classical Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction, as well as with the more recent attempts to articulate differences between groups according to membership-structuring norms.

“The Sources of Behavior: Toward a Naturalistic, Control Account of Agency,” in Distributed Cognition and the Will, Don Ross & David Spurrett, eds., Harvard: MIT Press, 2007, 123–67. 

“Searle’s Foole: How a Constructionist Account of Society Cannot Substitute for a Causal One,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62 (1), 2003, 105–122 (issue appearing simultaneously in book form). 

 In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle promises a causal account of how social facts are constructed by human acts of intention, but specifically disavows a special theoretical space in that account for human motivation. This paper argues that such a story as Searle tells cannot serve as a causal account of society. A causal account must illuminate motivations, because doing so illuminates the aims and interests lacking which we cannot explain why these social practices come to be and not potential others. Thus Searle’s would-be account of society has a problem analogous to that of Hobbes, which Hobbes’s own Foole poses, and that Hobbes never answers to anyone’s satisfaction.

“Units of decision,” Philosophy of Science, 66 (1999), S324–S338. 

 I shall introduce the units of decision problem in the theory of decision, which as I shall explain is a sibling to the units of selection problem in evolutionary theory. And I shall present an argument to the effect that, contrary to Bayesian wisdom on the subject, undertaking decision in group settings (in multi-individual units) violates no precepts of rationality.

“Degrees of Freedom in the Social World,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), 453–77. 

“The Economy of Belief, or, Explaining Cooperation Among the Prudent,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 35 (1998), 349–64. 

4.2.3. Philosophy of economics, with bearing on policy, esp. issues of risk

“Expectational v. Instrumental Reasoning: What statistics contributes to practical reasoning,” Diametros, 53 (2017), 125–49 [winner of first Diametros International Essay Prize Competition]. 

Utility theories—both Expected Utility (EU) and non-Expected Utility (non-EU) theories—offer numericalized representations of classical principles meant for the regulation of choice under conditions of risk—a type of formal representation that reduces the representation of risk to a single number. I shall refer to these as risk-numericalizing theories of decision. I shall argue that risk-numericalizing theories (referring both to the representations and to the underlying axioms that render numericalization possible) are not satisfactory answers to the question: “How do I take the (best) means to my ends?” In other words, they are inadequate or incomplete as instrumental theories. They are inadequate because they are poor answers to the question of what it is for an option to be instrumental towards an end. To say it another way, they do not offer a sufficiently rich account of what it is for something to be a means (an instrument) toward an end.

“Who will advise us? An essay on the proper relationship of science and political institutions in democratic societies,” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 16 (2015) 67–95. 

This essay argues that, in place of the present hit-and-miss system of specialist advisement (a system of scientific experts performing case-by-case studies at numerous regulatory agencies, the US Office of Technology Assessment, for example), we require a corps of professional public servants for the dissemination of credible, learned, relevant and useful information pertaining to the issues of the day. This is necessary because scientists as a group are poorly prepared for the task of advising (as contrasted with the quite different task of conducting research in their subject area), and, more importantly, because governments cannot ask scientists to provide that information without also incentivizing third parties (albeit unintentionally) to compromise the institution of science itself. This corps must also be poised to perform such aggregations of opinion (or arbitrations between conflicting opinions and interests) when requests are duly submitted by both governmental and citizen bodies. The product of this corps will be a dynamic, massively cross-referential, virtual document that I shall refer to as the Citizenpedia. This essay is devoted to justifying the government subsidy of such a document, as well as to evaluating the best role for scientists in a democracy. It will contrast the Citizenpedia proposal with practices that have been tried: (1) governmental agencies and (2) citizen panels. Most importantly, it is devoted to showing that a world in which the Citizenpedia advises governments is substantially different from one in which either citizens or “experts” do, just as it is substantially different from a world (our own) in which the media plays the largest role in educating the public on science policy matters.

(with Oliver Richardson) “Capitalization in the St. Petersburg Game,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 13 (2013) 292–313. 

 In spite of its infinite expectation value, the St. Petersburg game is not only a gamble without supply in the real world, but also one without demand at apparently very reasonable asking prices. We offer a rationalizing explanation of why the St. Petersburg bargain is unattractive on both sides (to both house and player) in the mid-range of prices (finite but upwards of about $4). Our analysis – featuring (1) the already-established fact that the average of finite ensembles of the St. Petersburg game grows with ensemble size but is unbounded, and (2) our own simulation data showing that the debt-to-entry fee ratio rises exponentially – explains why both house and player are quite rational in abstaining from the St. Petersburg game. The house will be unavoidably (and intentionally) exposed to very large ensembles (with very high averages, and so very costly to them), while contrariwise even the well-heeled player is not sufficiently capitalized (as our simulation data reveals) to be able to capture the potential gains from large-ensemble play. (Smaller ensembles, meanwhile, enjoy low means, as others have shown, and so are not worth paying more than $4 to play, even if a merchant were to offer them at such low prices per trial.) Both sides are consequently rational in abstaining from entry into the St. Petersburg market in the mid-range of asking prices. We utilize the concept of capitalization vis-à-vis a gamble to make this case. Classical analyses of this question have paid insufficient attention to the question of the propriety of using expected values to assess the St. Petersburg gamble. And extant analyses have not noted the average-maximum-debt-before-breaking-even figures, and so are incomplete.

“Precaution has its reasons,” in Topics in Contemporary Philosophy 9: The Environment, Philosophy, Science and Ethics. W. Kabasenche, M. O’Rourke & M. Slater, eds., MIT Press, 2012, 171–184. 

“Solidarity: A motivational conception”, Philosophical Papers, 41:1 (2012), 57–95. 

 This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity.

“There is no core to precaution,” Review Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (2009) 41–49. 

 This paper challenges Gardiner’s (2006) contention that his Core Precautionary Principle (CPP) “tracks our [precautionary] intuitions about some core cases, including the paradigmatic environmental ones”. And instead sketches a handful of precautionary practices in navigational systems that (collectively) do better at tracking these “intuitions”. There is no way of measuring these diverse practices as to relative weakness or strength against each other. And ultimately it makes little sense to talk about precautionary principles on any strength scale—as Gardiner (2006) aspires to do (and in such a way as locates CPP firmly in the middle). Indeed, it makes little sense to proclaim that precaution can be captured in any one decision rule or formula because, as will be illustrated here, precaution is many nonoverlapping things, each of which is appropriate in different stages of the navigation process, from confrontation of a dilemma to ultimate resolution of it.

4.3. Existentialism and phenomenology, with emphasis on questions of freedom

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018). 

 In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. 

"Existentialism and Existential Theology," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, eds. Wiley-Blackwell, 2021, 1-4.

“Human beings/Human freedom,” in Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy, Graham Oppy et al. eds, Macmillan Reference USA/Gale, 2019, 429–448. 

“Existentialism,” in A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Graham Oppy, ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2019, 123–137. 

“Dirty hands: The phenomenology of acting as an authorized agent,” Monist 101 (2018) 2, 170–186. 

 Traditional articulations of the conception of dirty hands, as the doing of wrong in order to do right, invite construals of the issues raised thereby as mired in conceptual confusions and inconsistencies, and moreover as generating unproductive discussions of the scope of the proposed notion itself. The status of the concept of dirty hands is thus precarious, in spite of its provenance in the work of political thinkers such as Machiavelli. This essay articulates one nonparadoxical conception of dirty hands, as the uncomfortable phenomenology of agents authorized to act on behalf of others, when they are called upon to do things that, while morally correct (or at least putatively so), are also personally or morally distasteful. The key point is that the dirt of action remains on these agents’ hands, even if moral responsibility for the relevant actions (when the agents are indeed legitimately authorized to perform them) should be conceived as falling on the persons in whose name they take the said action. This articulation opens up for investigation questions about the phenomenology of authorized agency, as well as the moral labor involved in leadership and in other contexts of authorized distasteful action. These are questions of social ontology. Here there is important philosophical work that remains to be done.

“Attitude: How we learn to inhabit the future,” in The Theory and Practice of Ontology: Essays in Honor of Barry Smith, Leo Zaibert, ed., Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016, 203–221.

“The Grammar of Experience,” Philosophy 89 (2014), 223–250 (joint winner of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Essay Prize for 2013). 

 What do we learn when we focus analysis – not so much on the content of experience – as on its universal features and functioning? Descartes believed that such focus (when exercised by someone employing his first-personal method of inquiry) held the key to the fundamental metaphysics of our universe – that it could reveal fundamental truths about the nature of substance, or at any rate could reveal some fundamental metaphysical categories and their contrasts. He believed such focus could lead to a certain doctrine of dualism. Philosophers now widely hold that Descartes’ method was profoundly wrongheaded, in no way a candidate method for illuminating the material universe that is our own. In fact, however, Descartes’ method is considerably more serviceable. While unable to do what Descartes thought it could do, nonetheless it is ideal for examining a taxon that this essay will refer to as grammar or structure in the most general sense. Grammar is a contrary of content or materiality, though not the only one since materiality enjoys multiple contraries. Thus Descartes’ method can lead us to a certain dualism, but not the one that Descartes imagined.

“Towards a theory of freedom,” Theoria, 134 (2013) 1–25. 

 Human freedom resides primarily in exercise of that capacity that humans employ more abundantly than any other species on earth: the capacity for judgement. And in particular: that special judgement in relation to Self that we call aspiration. Freedom is not the absence of a field of (other) powers; instead, freedom shows up only against the reticulations of power impinging from without. For freedom worthy of the name must be construed as an exercise of power within an already-present field of power. Thus, liberty and causal necessity are not obverses.

“Self-constructions: An existentialist approach to self and social identity,” in Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Sharon Crasnow & Anita Superson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 451–92.

 Social relations are the core of a human self. Affiliations shape our social world, and ultimately alliances are the large players on the stage of human history. In the process of forging social links, human beings are sometimes lucky enough to enjoy the exercise of genuine existential freedom. These axioms are at the heart of the feminist account of self and social identity presented in this essay. 

“Two Conceptions of Collectivity,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008), 83–104. 

 This paper distinguishes two conceptions of collectivity, each of which tracks the targets of classification according to their aetiology. Collectivities falling under the first conception are founded on (more-or-less) explicit negotiations amongst the members who are known to one another personally. Collectivities falling under the second (philosophically neglected) conception are founded – at least initially – purely upon a shared conception of “we”, very often in the absence of prior acquaintance and personal interaction. Th e paper argues that neglect of collectivities of the second kind renders certain social phenomena (for example, sense of place and certain kinds of conflicted loyalty) inexplicable or invisible. And the paper also stresses that a conception referring to the second kind of collectivity will put us in position to revitalize a variety of important questions, including: Which conception of collectivity best serves the needs of a theory of justice? Th e paper will contrast the distinction between these two conceptions with the classical Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction, as well as with the more recent attempts to articulate differences between groups according to membership-structuring norms.

4.4. Metaphysics, esp. causation, ontology and emergence

Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2013. 

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018). 

 In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. 

“The Lens of Chemistry,” Science & Education, 22:7 (2013) 1707–22. 

 Chemistry possesses a distinctive theoretical lens—a distinctive set of theoretical concerns regarding the dynamics and transformations of a perplexing variety of organic and nonorganic substances—to which it must be faithful. Even if it is true that chemical facts bear a special (reductive) relationship to physical facts, nonetheless it will always still be true that the theoretical lenses of the two disciplines are distinct. This has consequences for how chemists pursue their research, as well as how chemistry should be taught.

“Towards a theory of freedom,” Theoria, 134 (2013) 1–25. 

 Human freedom resides primarily in exercise of that capacity that humans employ more abundantly than any other species on earth: the capacity for judgement. And in particular: that special judgement in relation to Self that we call aspiration. Freedom is not the absence of a field of (other) powers; instead, freedom shows up only against the reticulations of power impinging from without. For freedom worthy of the name must be construed as an exercise of power within an already-present field of power. Thus, liberty and causal necessity are not obverses.

“Self-constructions: An existentialist approach to self and social identity,” in Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Sharon Crasnow & Anita Superson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 451–92.

 Social relations are the core of a human self. Affiliations shape our social world, and ultimately alliances are the large players on the stage of human history. In the process of forging social links, human beings are sometimes lucky enough to enjoy the exercise of genuine existential freedom. These axioms are at the heart of the feminist account of self and social identity presented in this essay. 

“Two Conceptions of Fundamentality,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 41:2 (2011, Online First 2010), 151–177. 

 This article aims to show that fundamentality is construed differently in the two most prominent strategies of analysis we find in physical science and engineering today: (1) atomistic, reductive analysis and (2) Systems analysis. Correspondingly, atomism is the conception according to which the simplest (smallest) indivisible entity of a certain kind is most fundamental; while systemism, as will be articulated here, is the conception according to which the bonds that structure wholes are most fundamental, and scale and/or constituting entities are of no significance whatsoever for fundamentality. Accordingly, atomists maintain that the basic entities—the atoms—are fundamental, and together with the “external” interactions among them, are sufficient for illuminating all the features and behaviors of the wholes they constitute; whereas systemists proclaim that it is instead structuralqualities of systems, that flow from internal relations among their constituents and translate directly into behaviors, that are fundamental, and by themselves largely (if not entirely) sufficient for illuminating the features and behaviors of the wholes thereby structured. Systemism, as will be argued, is consistent with the nonexistence of a fundamental “level” of nondecomposable entities, just as it is consistent with the existence of such a level. Still, systemism is a conception of the fundamental in quite different, but still ontological terms. Systemism can serve the special sciences—the social sciences especially—better than the conception of fundamentality in terms of atoms. Systemism is, in fact, a conception of fundamentality that has rather different uses—and importantly, different resonances. This conception of fundamentality makes contact with questions pertaining to natural kinds and their situation in the metaphysics of the special sciences—their situation within an order of autonomous sciences. 

The controversy over fundamentality is evident in the social sciences too, albeit somewhat imperfectly, in the terms of debate between methodological individualists and functionalists/holists. This article will thus clarify the difference between systemism and holism.

“Molecule-for-Molecule Duplication,” Teorema (special issue on phenomenal consciousness and naturalism), 28:3 (2008), 103–114. 

 Is a molecule-for-molecule duplicate D of some entity always a perfect duplicate of it? And in particular: is D a being with consciousness if its original is? These questions summarize a certain diagnostic tool used by metaphysicians, and prominently used in service of a form of dualism that is supposed to support an autonomous science of consciousness. This essay argues that this diagnostic tool is inapt when the exercise is performed as a pure thought experiment, for the sake of eliciting data or judgment from intuition. The trouble is that intuition can render for a “duplicate” only what experience or other learning (perhaps via dogmatic methods) has instilled in the intuiter. But rather than disappoint the aspirations of an autonomous science, the argument of this essay will instead illuminate its better metaphysical supports.

“Nonreductive Physics,” Synthese, 149 (2006), 133–178. 

 This paper documents a wide range of nonreductive scientific treatments of phenomena in the domain of physics. These treatments strongly resist characterization as explanations of macrobehavior exclusively in terms of behavior of microconstituents. For they are treatments in which macroquantities are cast in the role of genuine and irreducible degrees of freedom.

“The reduction of causation,” in Probability is the Very Guide of Life: The Philosophical Uses of Probability, M. Thalos & H. Kyburg, Jr., eds., Open Court, 2003. 

 It is a perennial philosophical enterprise to propose the reduction of causal facts to facts of some other kind. Just as it is also a perennial enterprise to proclaim that certain such proposed reductions are doomed to failure. Here I shall champion a certain family of reductionist proposals—namely, those that quantify the notion of causality—referring to them as quantitative reductions. The opposition to quantitative reductionism proclaims that an antireductionist analysis of causation is to be preferred, because such an analysis of causal matters can code for either more information, or for information of a radically nonquantitative sort also. The charge is that purely quantitative models have no means of handling this surplus. I will undertake to show that it is not so. 

“Searle’s Foole: How a Constructionist Account of Society Cannot Substitute for a Causal One,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62 (1), 2003, 105–122 (issue appearing simultaneously in book form). 

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle promises a causal account of how social facts are constructed by human acts of intention, but specifically disavows a special theoretical space in that account for human motivation. This paper argues that such a story as Searle tells cannot serve as a causal account of society. A causal account must illuminate motivations, because doing so illuminates the aims and interests lacking which we cannot explain why these social practices come to be and not potential others. Thus Searle’s would-be account of society has a problem analogous to that of Hobbes, which Hobbes’s own Foole poses, and that Hobbes never answers to anyone’s satisfaction.

“The Reduction of Causal Processes,” Synthese, 131 (2002), 99–128.

 The principle that causes always render their effects more likely is fundamental to the enterprise of reducing facts of causation to facts about (objective) chances. This reductionist enterprise faces famous difficulties in accommodating common-sense intuitions about causal processes, if it insists on cashing out causal processes in terms of streams of events in which every event that belongs to the stream is a cause of the adjoining event downstream of it. I shall propose modifications to this way of cashing out causal processes, still well within the reductionist faith. These modifications will allow the reductionist to handle processes successfully, on the assumption that the reductionist proposal is itself otherwise satisfactory. I shall then argue that the reductionist enterprise lies squarely behind the Theory of Relativity, and so has all the confirmatory weight of Relativity behind it. However this is not all good news for reductionists. For throughout I shall simply assume that the reductionist proposal, to the effect that causes are just chance-raisers, is correct. And I shall sidestep problems with that proposal as such. And so I shall show that, if in the end we find the reductionist proposal unsatisfactory, it cannot be on grounds of its treatment of causal processes as such. Thus, while I shall argue that causal processes pose no extra trouble for reductionists, I shall be making a case that all the action between reductionists and their opponents should be focused upon the proposal to reduce the two-term causal relation itself to relations amongst probabilities. 

“Knowledge in an Age of Individual Economy: A Prolegomenon to Epistemology,” Journal of Philosophical Research, 24(1999), 169–191. 

 This essay identifies foundational questions, all metaphysical in character, which must be answered before the enterprise of epistemology proper can begin to prosper, and in the process draws attention to fundamental conflicts between the demands of epistemology and the demands of prudence. It concludes that knowledge is not, as such, a directive of prudence, and thus that the enterprise of knowledge does not fall under the category of what is practically required.

“Degrees of Freedom: An Essay on Competitions between Micro and Macro in Mechanics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59 (1999), 1–39. 

 This paper argues that the doctrines of determinism and supervenience, while logically independent, are importantly linked in physical mechanics—and quite interestingly so. For it is possible to formulate classical mechanics in such a way as to take advantage of the existence of mathematical devices that represent the advance of time—and which are such as to inspire confidence in the truth of determinism—in order to prevent violation of supervenience. It is also possible to formulate classical mechanics-and to do so in an observationally equivalent, and thus equally empirically respectable, way—such that violations of supervenience are (on the one hand) routine, and (on the other hand) necessary for achieving complete descriptions of the motions of mechanical systems—necessary, therefore, for achieving a deterministic mechanical theory. Two such formulations—only one of which preserves supervenience universally—will conceive of mechanical law in quite different ways. What's more, they will not admit of being extended to treat thermodynamical questions in the same way. Thus we will find that supervenience is a contingent matter, in the following rather surprising and philosophically interesting way: we cannot in mechanics separate our decisions to conceive of physical law in certain ways from our decisions to treat macroscopic quantities in certain ways.

“Two Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology,” Dialectica, 53 (1999), 111–138.

 This essay is not concerned exclusively with procedure. In addition to developing and promoting an alternative methodology, I will also be utilizing it to defend, systematically, an unfashionable proposition nowadays. This is the proposition that the question of how a particular judgment, on a particular occasion, is to be justified, is independent of the question of how that judgment comes to be formed by the individual who forms it. This thesis, which I shall call j-independence, is deplored in certain (self-styled as ‘naturalized’) schools of epistemology. Its denial is one of the two dogmas of this essay’s title. The other dogma is the metaphysical one on which it rests, which I shall call personalism. 

“Human beings/Human freedom,” in Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy, Graham Oppy et al. eds., Macmillan Reference USA/Gale, 2019, 429–448.

4.5. Decision and game theory, and their applications to regulation and political philosophy

“Expectational v. Instrumental Reasoning: What statistics contributes to practical reasoning,” Diametros, 53 (2017), 125–49 [winner of first Diametros International Essay Prize Competition]. 

 Utility theories—both Expected Utility (EU) and non-Expected Utility (non-EU) theories—offer numericalized representations of classical principles meant for the regulation of choice under conditions of risk—a type of formal representation that reduces the representation of risk to a single number. I shall refer to these as risk-numericalizing theories of decision. I shall argue that risk-numericalizing theories (referring both to the representations and to the underlying axioms that render numericalization possible) are not satisfactory answers to the question: “How do I take the (best) means to my ends?” In other words, they are inadequate or incomplete as instrumental theories. They are inadequate because they are poor answers to the question of what it is for an option to be instrumental towards an end. To say it another way, they do not offer a sufficiently rich account of what it is for something to be a means (an instrument) toward an end.

“Diagnostic preliminaries to applying a decision theory,” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2014), 168–196. 

 Decision theory cannot be a purely formal theory, free of all metaphysical assumptions and ascertainments. It must instead rely upon the end user for the wisdom it takes to prime the decision formalism – with principles and assumptions about the metaphysics of the application context – so that the formalism in its turn can generate good advice. Appreciating this idea is fundamental to understanding the true rivalry between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) in specific cases. I shall argue that no decision theory can deliver a verdict unless assumptions are made about the degrees of freedomin the context of decision, that EDT and CDT disagree fundamentally about how to diagnose the degrees of freedom in any given situation, and that from this fundamental disagreement flow their surface disagreements in iconic cases.

(with Oliver Richardson) “Capitalization in the St. Petersburg Game,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 13 (2013) 292–313. 

 In spite of its infinite expectation value, the St. Petersburg game is not only a gamble without supply in the real world, but also one without demand at apparently very reasonable asking prices. We offer a rationalizing explanation of why the St. Petersburg bargain is unattractive on both sides (to both house and player) in the mid-range of prices (finite but upwards of about $4). Our analysis – featuring (1) the already-established fact that the average of finite ensembles of the St. Petersburg game grows with ensemble size but is unbounded, and (2) our own simulation data showing that the debt-to-entry fee ratio rises exponentially – explains why both house and player are quite rational in abstaining from the St. Petersburg game. The house will be unavoidably (and intentionally) exposed to very large ensembles (with very high averages, and so very costly to them), while contrariwise even the well-heeled player is not sufficiently capitalized (as our simulation data reveals) to be able to capture the potential gains from large-ensemble play. (Smaller ensembles, meanwhile, enjoy low means, as others have shown, and so are not worth paying more than $4 to play, even if a merchant were to offer them at such low prices per trial.) Both sides are consequently rational in abstaining from entry into the St. Petersburg market in the mid-range of asking prices. We utilize the concept of capitalization vis-à-vis a gamble to make this case. Classical analyses of this question have paid insufficient attention to the question of the propriety of using expected values to assess the St. Petersburg gamble. And extant analyses have not noted the average-maximum-debt-before-breaking-even figures, and so are incomplete.

“Solidarity: A motivational conception”, Philosophical Papers, 41:1 (2012) 57–95. 

 This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity.

“Precaution has its reasons,” in Topics in Contemporary Philosophy 9: The Environment, Philosophy, Science and Ethics. W. Kabasenche, M. O’Rourke & M. Slater, eds., MIT Press, 2012, 171–184. 

“There is no core to precaution,” Review Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (2009) 41–49. 

 This paper challenges Gardiner’s (2016) contention that his Core Precautionary Principle (CPP) “tracks our [precautionary] intuitions about some core cases, including the paradigmatic environmental ones”. And instead sketches a handful of precautionary practices in navigational systems that (collectively) do better at tracking these “intuitions”. There is no way of measuring these diverse practices as to relative weakness or strength against each other. And ultimately it makes little sense to talk about precautionary principles on any strength scale—as Gardiner (2006) aspires to do (and in such a way as locates CPP firmly in the middle). Indeed, it makes little sense to proclaim that precaution can be captured in any one decision rule or formula because, as will be illustrated here, precaution is many nonoverlapping things, each of which is appropriate in different stages of the navigation process, from confrontation of a dilemma to ultimate resolution of it.

“What is a feminist to do with rational choice?” in Blackwell Companion to Rationalism, Alan Nelson, ed., 2005, 450–468. 

“Why we believe,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 30 (1999), 317–339. 

 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.

“Units of decision,” Philosophy of Science, 66 (1999), S324–S338. 

 I shall introduce the units of decision problem in the theory of decision, which as I shall explain is a sibling to the units of selection problem in evolutionary theory. And I shall present an argument to the effect that, contrary to Bayesian wisdom on the subject, undertaking decision in group settings (in multi-individual units) violates no precepts of rationality.

“Degrees of Freedom in the Social World,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), 453–77. 

“Self-interest, autonomy and the presuppositions of decision theory,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 34 (1997) 287–297.

(with H. Kyburg, Jr. & F. Bacchus) “Against conditionalization,” Synthese 85 (1990) 475–506. 

4.6. Philosophy of action, self, practical reason and motivation

A Social Theory of Freedom. Routledge, 2016 (subject of an APA Eastern Division symposium in 2018). 

 In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one.

“Dirty hands: The phenomenology of acting as an authorized agent,” Monist 101 (2018) 2, 170–186. 

 Traditional articulations of the conception of dirty hands, as the doing of wrong in order to do right, invite construals of the issues raised thereby as mired in conceptual confusions and inconsistencies, and moreover as generating unproductive discussions of the scope of the proposed notion itself. The status of the concept of dirty hands is thus precarious, in spite of its provenance in the work of political thinkers such as Machiavelli. This essay articulates one nonparadoxical conception of dirty hands, as the uncomfortable phenomenology of agents authorized to act on behalf of others, when they are called upon to do things that, while morally correct (or at least putatively so), are also personally or morally distasteful. The key point is that the dirt of action remains on these agents’ hands, even if moral responsibility for the relevant actions (when the agents are indeed legitimately authorized to perform them) should be conceived as falling on the persons in whose name they take the said action. This articulation opens up for investigation questions about the phenomenology of authorized agency, as well as the moral labor involved in leadership and in other contexts of authorized distasteful action. These are questions of social ontology. Here there is important philosophical work that remains to be done.

“Mariam Thalos discusses freedom,” Elucidations, podcast with Matt Teichman. 2018.

 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.

“Attitude: How we learn to inhabit the future,” in The Theory and Practice of Ontology: Essays in Honor of Barry Smith, Leo Zaibert, ed., Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016, 203–221. 

“Solidarity: A motivational conception”, Philosophical Papers, 41:1 (2012) 57–95. 

 This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity.

“Self-constructions: An existentialist approach to self and social identity,” in Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Sharon Crasnow & Anita Superson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 451–92.

 Social relations are the core of a human self. Affiliations shape our social world, and ultimately alliances are the large players on the stage of human history. In the process of forging social links, human beings are sometimes lucky enough to enjoy the exercise of genuine existential freedom. These axioms are at the heart of the feminist account of self and social identity presented in this essay. 

(with Chrisoula Andreou) “Of Human Bonding,” Public Reason 1:2 (2009), 46–73; open access athttp://publicreason.ro/cuprins/3. 

 We seek to illuminate the prevalence of cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals via an analysis of agency that recognizes the possibility of bonding and challenges the common view that agency is invariably an individual-level affair. Via bonding, a single individual’s behavior patterns or programs are altered so as to facilitate the formation, on at least some occasions, of a larger entity to whom is attributable the coordination of the component entities. Some of these larger entities will qualify as agents in their own right, even when the comprising entities also qualify as agents. In light of the many possibilities that humans actually enjoy for entering into numerous bonding schemes, and the extent to which they avail themselves of these possibilities, there is no basis for the assumption that cooperative behavior must ultimately emerge as either altruistic or self-interested; it can instead be the product of collective agency.

“Imitative Reasoning,” Social Epistemology, 23:3–4 (2009), 381–405.

 On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on by way of practical reasoning on the ground involves a certain simple inference schema—to be called “imitative reasoning”—that involves mobilization of what has been alternately referred to as archetypes, scripts, stereotypes and schemas including most importantly self-schemas or self-concepts. Imitative reasoning, as the paper will argue, is especially hostile to deliberations that involve the sorts of tradeoffs that applications of utility theory routinely advise. It is therefore no expression or realization, however imperfect, of the notion of maximization. What is more, this framework routinely evokes as authoritative the norms of privilege, however removed from or irrelevant to the matter at hand, which might be as simple as where to go for dinner. For it is the basis of—among other things—class and race consciousness. Furthermore, it is highly subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous; such as, for example, by those who market consumer goods, especially to children. For this form of reasoning is employed so as to protect or enhance self-concepts: imitative reasoning is a form of motivated reasoning. Laying it out in schema form will shed light on the sort of reasoning processes that transpire in many cases of cognitive dissonance reduction.

(with Chrisoula Andreou) “Sense and sensibility,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (2007) 71–80. 

“Navigation: An Engineer’s Perspective,” in Probability and inference: Essays in Honor of Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., Gregory Wheeler and William Harper, eds., London: College Publications, 2007, 211–133. 

 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 Sources of Behavior: Toward a Naturalistic, Control Account of Agency,” in Distributed Cognition and the Will, Don Ross & David Spurrett, eds., Harvard: MIT Press, 2007, 123–67. 

4.7. Logical paradox, Philosophy of Reasoning

“Expectational v. Instrumental Reasoning: What statistics contributes to practical reasoning,” Diametros, 53 (2017), 125–49 [winner of first Diametros International Essay Prize Competition]. 

 Utility theories—both Expected Utility (EU) and non-Expected Utility (non-EU) theories—offer numericalized representations of classical principles meant for the regulation of choice under conditions of risk—a type of formal representation that reduces the representation of risk to a single number. I shall refer to these as risk-numericalizing theories of decision. I shall argue that risk-numericalizing theories (referring both to the representations and to the underlying axioms that render numericalization possible) are not satisfactory answers to the question: “How do I take the (best) means to my ends?” In other words, they are inadequate or incomplete as instrumental theories. They are inadequate because they are poor answers to the question of what it is for an option to be instrumental towards an end. To say it another way, they do not offer a sufficiently rich account of what it is for something to be a means (an instrument) toward an end.

“Solidarity: A motivational conception”, Philosophical Papers, 41:1 (2012) 57–95. 

 This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity.

“There is no core to precaution,” Review Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (2009) 41–49. 

 This paper challenges Gardiner’s (2016) contention that his Core Precautionary Principle (CPP) “tracks our [precautionary] intuitions about some core cases, including the paradigmatic environmental ones”. And instead sketches a handful of precautionary practices in navigational systems that (collectively) do better at tracking these “intuitions”. There is no way of measuring these diverse practices as to relative weakness or strength against each other. And ultimately it makes little sense to talk about precautionary principles on any strength scale—as Gardiner (2006) aspires to do (and in such a way as locates CPP firmly in the middle). Indeed, it makes little sense to proclaim that precaution can be captured in any one decision rule or formula because, as will be illustrated here, precaution is many nonoverlapping things, each of which is appropriate in different stages of the navigation process, from confrontation of a dilemma to ultimate resolution of it.

“On Planning: Toward a Natural History of Goal Attainment,” Philosophical Papers, 37 (2008), 289–317.

 The goal of the essay is to articulate some beginnings for an empirical approach to the study of agency, in the firm conviction that agency is subject to scientific scrutiny, and is not to be abandoned to high-brow aprioristic philosophy. Drawing on insights from decision analysis, game theory, general dynamics, physics and engineering, this essay will examine the diversity of planning phenomena, and in that way take some steps towards assembling rudiments for the budding science, in the process innovating (parts of) a technical vocabulary. The key is focus upon the organization of effort in time. This paper categorizes forms of organization of effort in time, and yields an analysis of both individual agency and coalitions of agents as forms of effort organized in time. Finally, it articulates precise questions pertaining to the natural (evolutionary) history of forms of agency (once upon a time referred to as ‘Will’) that we now find on the ground.

(with Chrisoula Andreou) “Sense and sensibility,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (2007) 71–80. 

“From Paradox to Judgment: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Expression,” Australasian Journal of Logic 3 (2005), 76–107. 

 The Liar sentence is a singularly important piece of philosophical evidence. It is an instrument for investigating the metaphysics of expressing truths and falsehoods. And an instrument too for investigating the varieties of conflict that can give rise to paradox. It shall serve as perhaps the most important clue to the shape of human judgment, as well as to the nature of the dependence of judgment upon language use.

“Paradox and its Undoing: A Speech Act Manifesto,” in Logical Consequence: Rival Approaches, John Woods and Bryson Brown, eds., Paris: Hermes Science Publications, 2001, 297–308. 

“Conflict and Coordination in the Aftermath of Oracular Statements,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (1997), 212–226. 

4.8. Feminism

“Towards a theory of freedom,” Theoria, 134 (2013) 1–25. 

 Human freedom resides primarily in exercise of that capacity that humans employ more abundantly than any other species on earth: the capacity for judgement. And in particular: that special judgement in relation to Self that we call aspiration. Freedom is not the absence of a field of (other) powers; instead, freedom shows up only against the reticulations of power impinging from without. For freedom worthy of the name must be construed as an exercise of power within an already-present field of power. Thus, liberty and causal necessity are not obverses.

“Self-constructions: An existentialist approach to self and social identity,” in Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Sharon Crasnow & Anita Superson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 451–92.

 Social relations are the core of a human self. Affiliations shape our social world, and ultimately alliances are the large players on the stage of human history. In the process of forging social links, human beings are sometimes lucky enough to enjoy the exercise of genuine existential freedom. These axioms are at the heart of the feminist account of self and social identity presented in this essay. 

“What is a feminist to do with rational choice?” in Blackwell Companion to Rationalism, Alan Nelson, ed., 2005, 450–468. 

“From Human Nature to Moral Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 28 (2003), 85–128. 

“The Common Need for Classical Epistemological Foundations: Against a Feminist Alternative,” Monist, 77 (1994), 531–553. 

4.9. Truth, normativity

Review of Why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? by Ian Hacking (Oxford, 2013), Philosophical Quarterly 67(269): 857-860. 

“The Grammar of Experience,” Philosophy 89 (2014), 223–250 (joint winner of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Essay Prize for 2013). 

 What do we learn when we focus analysis – not so much on the content of experience – as on its universal features and functioning? Descartes believed that such focus (when exercised by someone employing his first-personal method of inquiry) held the key to the fundamental metaphysics of our universe – that it could reveal fundamental truths about the nature of substance, or at any rate could reveal some fundamental metaphysical categories and their contrasts. He believed such focus could lead to a certain doctrine of dualism. Philosophers now widely hold that Descartes’ method was profoundly wrongheaded, in no way a candidate method for illuminating the material universe that is our own. In fact, however, Descartes’ method is considerably more serviceable. While unable to do what Descartes thought it could do, nonetheless it is ideal for examining a taxon that this essay will refer to as grammar or structure in the most general sense. Grammar is a contrary of content or materiality, though not the only one since materiality enjoys multiple contraries. Thus Descartes’ method can lead us to a certain dualism, but not the one that Descartes imagined.

“Truth deserves to be believed,” Philosophy 88: 344 (2013), 179–96 (winner of the inaugural Royal Institute of Philosophy Essay Prize). 

 Science seems generally to aim at truth. And governmental support of science is often premised on the instrumental value of truth in service of advancing our practical objectives, both as individuals and as communities, large and small. While there is some political expediency to this view, it is not correct. The value of truth is nowise that it helps us achieve our aims. In fact, just the contrary: truth deserves to be believed only on the condition that its claim upon us is orthogonal to any utility it might have in the service of (any and all) practical ends.

“The Wit of Knitting,” APA Newsletter on Feminism, 8/1. 2008.

“Distinction, Judgment and Discipline,” Categories, Michael Gorman and Jonathan Sanford, eds., Catholic University of America Press, 2004, 185–203. 

4.10. Reviews & Miscellany

Field report video interview for Game Theory. Sage Business Foundations, 2023.

Robert W Batterman’s A Middle Way: A Non-fundamental Approach to Many-Body Physics. BJPS Review of Books, 2023.

Brooks et al.’s Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences. BJPS Review of Books, 2022. 

“A philosopher works from home,” Think. 2020.

This is my impersonation of a philosopher working from home, which aims at making lively a few worthy philosophical questions. The old is new again, as each generation confronts its own challenges and demons, in its own context.

“Existentialism,” in A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Graham Oppy, ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2019, 123–137. 

Philosophy in the age of science: Review of Wittgenstein and Scientism, J. Beale and I. J. Kidd, eds (Routledge, 2017), Metascience, 2018. 

Review of Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Systematicity: The Nature of Science (OUP), Mind, 124 (2015) 351–7. 

Review of Why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? by Ian Hacking (Oxford, 2013), Philosophical Quarterly 67:269 (2017): 857-860.

Ian Hacking is a gripping writer with an ear for wickedly good turns of phrase. The joyous playfulness of his language can arouse interest on any topic whatsoever. He is also a skilled philosophical conversationalist, who can put long-dead philosophers into dialog with those still living, because he has his finger deftly positioned on the pulse of our discipline. His most recent book is on a topic that has bedeviled a good many philosophers in history, Hacking no less than anyone else. It concerns the place of mathematical reasoning and other mathematical activity in the economy of human thought, and in the natural world generally. On display in this book, page after page, is that bedevilment. 

‘Philosophical Meditations on “Black lives matter,”’ Black Lives Matter 2. The Critique. 2016.

 What does “Black lives matter” say that “All lives matter” does not? In particular, why do we appreciate a kind of conflict between them? This essay is about the way that social identities work in human life. Appreciating the way that identity works will shed light on the way that “All lives matter” undermines the force of “Black lives matter.”

“Interview” with Caterina Marchionni, The Reasoner. 2014.

“What Hume should have said to Descartes,” in David Hume: A Tercentenary Tribute, Stanley Tweyman, ed., Caravan Books: Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2013, 21–44. 

 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.

Review of The Self-Organizing Social Mind, by John Bolender. Quarterly Review of Biology, 87/2 (2012), 158.

“Why I am not a Friend,” in Facebook and Philosophy, D. E. Wittkower, ed., Open Court, 2010, 75–88. 

“The Wit of Knitting,” APA Newsletter on Feminism, 8/1. 2008.

“Navigation: An Engineer’s Perspective,” in Probability and inference: Essays in Honor of Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., Gregory Wheeler and William Harper, eds., London: College Publications, 2007, 211–233. 

 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.

(with Henry Kyburg, Jr) “Introduction,” in Probability is the Very Guide of Life: The Philosophical Uses of Probability, M. Thalos & H. Kyburg, Jr., eds., Open Court, 2003. 

 In this introduction we shall array a family of fundamental questions pertaining to probability, especially as it has been judged to bear upon the guidance of life. Applications and uses of probability theory need either to address some or all of these questions, or to tell us why they don’t. The essays assembled in this volume bring integrative perspectives on this family of questions. We asked the authors to describe in their own voices the intellectual histories of their contributions, so as to shed further light upon the philosophical interest of their projects, and their particular integrative approaches, within the broader context we have sketched. The authors’ comments precede the essays. 

A Trembling Handbook. Review of Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues and Applications, Charles Crawford & Dennis L. Krebs, eds  (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998). Human Nature Review 2 (2002), 512-514.

Review of Rationality, Allocation and Reproduction by Vivian Walsh (Oxford University Press). Ethics 109 (1998), 222-223.

Review of The Disorder of Things by John Dupré (Harvard University Press). Philosophy of Science, 62 (1995), 351-353.