Omobola Olufunto Badejo (Obafemi Awolowo University), "Digital Objects and the Social Metaphysics of AI"
This paper investigates the ontological status of digital objects and artificial intelligence through the lens of contemporary social metaphysics. Beyond the question of machine consciousness, this study asks, “What kind of being are digital objects and how do they function as ‘social structures’ that influence human realities? Drawing on Yuk Hui’s theory of digital objects, which defines them not as mere data, but as entities formed through the interplay of metadata and relational schemas, I argue that AI models are not just tools, but ontological agents that actively order human reality. By integrating Sally Haslanger’s framework of social structuralism, this paper argues that algorithms function as invisible paths in our social field, channeling human behavior and reinforcing material constraints. Ultimately, the paper concludes that because Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital objects possess causal power over physical and social worlds, they must be classified as metaphysically real social structures. Recognizing this is essential for an ameliorative project that seeks to engineer more just digital environments.
Brigitte Everett (University of Sydney), "Metaphysical Pluralism, Dialetheism, and the Attributes Problems"
In this talk, I defend a novel way to cash out dialetheist solutions to what I will call the “attributes problems” facing some versions of theism. The attributes problems are problems which arise when it is claimed that a being (e.g., God), who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent, exists. Separately, and jointly, these attributes lead to contradiction. The omnipotence problem, for example, appears to show that God both can and cannot perform certain actions (such as creating a stone too heavy to lift). Parallel difficulties arise for omniscience (e.g., whether God can know all truths, including certain de se truths) and for combinations of attributes (e.g., tensions between divine simplicity, temporality, and benevolence). These puzzles threaten the coherence of theism. Standard non-dialetheist responses to the problem either restrict the scope of divine attributes (e.g., by limiting omnipotence to what is logically possible) or deny that the problematic tasks are genuine. Another strategy is to offer piecemeal solutions tailored to particular attributes problems. These solutions, I argue, require an unpalatable restriction of God’s omniscience or result in theoretically disunified responses. If we are, as I think we should be, unwilling to weaken the attributes, we require a more systematic alternative. Instead, then, I favour dialethism as a solution to the problem. Dialetheism accepts that at least some contradictions can be true (A∧¬A). For example, God both can and cannot create a stone so heavy such that they cannot lift it. Dialetheism isn’t always thought of as an appealing view both in its own right or as a solution to the attributes problems, as it seems to go against our logical intuitions. In particular, it is sometimes thought to conflict with commitments to consistency and non-contradiction. However, I argue, cashed out well it can be used to martial a powerful solution to the attributes problems. I will I appeal to metaphysical pluralism to develop the dialetheist solution to the problems. Metaphysical pluralism is any view according to which there are (objectively) present tensed facts, and, yet, all times are on a par. In other words, it combines realism about tense with a neutrality thesis about temporal reality. I argue that metaphysical pluralism offers a unified solution to a wide range of attributes problems—omniscience, omnipotence, divine simplicity, and divine temporality—without imposing restrictions on God’s nature. The proposal thus provides both a principled formulation of dialetheism within the philosophy of religion. The theist of the sort described should accept metaphysical pluralism as a solution to the attributes problems.
Anna Giustina (University of Valencia), "Moods and the Structure of Consciousness"
This paper aims at proposing a new philosophical approach to the nature of mood experiences. The philosophical debate about moods has mostly revolved around their apparent undirectedness: unlike mental states such as perceptual experiences, thoughts, and emotions, moods do not seem to be directed at any specific object—they do not seem to be directed at anything at all. This feature of moods has attracted attention because it seems to constitute a threat for the most widespread philosophical approach to phenomenal consciousness, i.e., intentionalism. Intentionalists have attempted to squeeze moods into the representational engine, by construing them as conscious states with a peculiar representational structure. On the other hand, anti- intentionalists have vehemently pointed at the phenomenological and theoretical flaws of extant representationalist strategies, arguing that moods are non-intentional conscious states, and concluding that intentionalism must be false. I argue that both fronts are off-track: both rely on a misguided assumption. The issue, I suggest, is not whether moods are intentional or non- intentional conscious states, because moods are just not conscious states at all: they belong to a different category of conscious phenomena, namely, structural phenomenal features, to which the intentional/non-intentional distinction does not apply.
Margarida Hermida (University of Salzburg), "The Freedom to Try to Do What You Want: Randomness, Organismal Agency, and Free Will"
The world is likely to be indeterministic. As a consequence, agents can never definitely settle anything, because there is always a chance that a random event can interfere with their actions. Yet organisms are able to exploit random processes in order to increase the probability of bringing about certain preferred outcomes. This happens at various scales, from subcellular nanomachines to complex nervous systems. I suggest that free will consists in the capacity of cognitively sophisticated biological agents to bias their own behaviours in ways that better align them with their reflectively endorsed preferences. Thus we are neither fully determined by causes outside of our control, nor entirely at the mercy of randomness; rather, we are among the causes of our own behaviour. In an indeterministic universe, we have the freedom to try to do what we want.
Elton Junior Martins Marques (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte), "Determinism Without the Laws of Nature"
Determinism, according to our interpretation, is a theory about the way the world is organised. One way of explaining this configuration is by using the concept of natural laws. For example, under the specific law that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the only expected physical result for a context involving water and sufficient heat (at standard pressure) is boiling (cf. Mumford, 2004, p. 31). In a deterministic world, all the ‘space-time slices’ are arranged in such a way that there is a single unique physical outcome. This is the basic idea of determinism, which many definitions try to capture (cf. Butterfield, 1989, pp. 10–11). Determinism concerns a specific configuration of a given world’s content, which is describable by relations that may or may not be subsumed by natural laws. One reason for avoiding ‘natural law’ vocabulary is to make determinism compatible with accounts that choose either to avoid referring to natural laws or simply to reject this concept (e.g. anti-realists such as Giere [1999], Mumford [2004], and Bas van Fraassen [1989]). However, the thesis we defend does not require eliminativism regarding the laws of nature: our thesis could be better presented as endorsing ‘determinism regardless of the existence of laws’. Clearly, if we reject—or weaken—the importance of natural laws for determinism, then the thesis we defend also holds that determinism can be defined ‘regardless of law-of-nature parlance’. The aim of this paper is to provide a picture of determinism in line with a world that resembles a jigsaw puzzle (inspired by Lewis but in contrast with him). In this world, the laws of nature (if any exist) assume solely the role of boundary edges compatible with a single arrangement, preventing any other possible configurations of the world.
Pedro Merlussi (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), "An Argument for Fatalism"
Do we have free will? Many influential challenges to free will—and, by extension, moral responsibility—arise from its apparent conflict with background assumptions, such as whether determinism or indeterminism holds, whether truths about our future actions exist, or whether an omniscient God already knows them. In this paper, we present a direct argument against the existence of free will that does not rely on these assumptions. Beyond basic logical principles, it requires only the claim that every truth could have failed to be up to us. We begin by formulating the argument and then situate it within the broader literature on incompatibilism, focusing on the central propositional operator it employs. Finally, we examine the logical principles underlying the argument and the strategies available for resisting it.
Min Ohn (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Neither Equal nor Unequal: Democritus' Cone and Smooth Infinitesimals"
In De communibus notitiis (Comm. not.) 1079E–F, Plutarch attributes a puzzle to Democritus: suppose that a cone is cut parallel to its base. Are the areas of the two surfaces, namely, the upper surface of the bottom part of the cone (the conic frustum) and the lower surface of the upper part of the cone (the conic segment), equal or unequal? The dilemma is that we can make neither response—if they are unequal, we make the sides of the cone irregular, having nicks, whereas if we say they are equal, we will no longer have a conic figure but a cylinder. Chrysippus answers, “the surfaces are neither equal nor unequal, but the bodies are unequal in that the surfaces are neither equal nor unequal.” There have been considerable scholarly debates as to the interpretation of this puzzling answer. In this paper, I present a novel interpretation of Chrysippus’ reply within the context of Stoic commitment to infinite divisibility. According to this view, Chrysippus is rejecting the notion of constant magnitude of surfaces of body and solving the puzzle with an infinitesimal approach, where infinitesimals are understood as nilpotent infinitesimals within the framework of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis (SIA). Notably, SIA is formulated in intuitionistic logic where the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) does not hold, and infinitesimals within this framework are understood to be non-zero entities that square to zero, being neither equal nor unequal to zero. I argue that although Chrysippus had no access to a sophisticated mathematical formulation of infinitesimal calculus, he anticipated the notion of nilpotent infinitesimals.
Ricardo Santos (LanCog, University of Lisbon), "Future Contingents: Gaps or Gluts?"
This paper offers a comparative assessment of two non-classical semantic approaches to the problem of future contingents: supervaluationism, understood as a paracomplete framework, and subvaluationism, understood as a paraconsistent one. Both approaches reject classical bivalence in order to account for the openness of the future, but they do so in different and, in some respects, dual ways—one by allowing truth-value gaps, the other by allowing truth-value gluts. The paper argues that, once properly formulated within branching-time models and carefully interpreted with respect to temporal perspective, the two approaches display a deep structural parallelism. This parallelism becomes especially salient when considering objections based on retrospective assessments and their replies.
The first part of the paper presents the standard supervaluationist theory of future contingents, following the tradition initiated by Thomason. This framework combines a temporal language with modal-temporal operators, branching-time models that represent multiple possible futures compatible with a given past and present, and a supervaluationist semantic technique for handling indeterminacy. Within this setting, future-contingent propositions—such as statements about what will happen tomorrow— are typically true on some histories and false on others, and therefore lack a classical truth value at the present time. The theory rejects bivalence while preserving the law of excluded middle, at the cost of abandoning truth-functionality for the logical connectives. The guiding intuition is that nothing in the present determines which of the possible futures will become actual.
The paper then turns to the main objection traditionally raised against supervaluationism by Ockhamists, namely the objection from retrospective assessments. According to this objection, the supervaluationist definition of truth conflates truth with necessity, since a proposition is counted as true only if it holds across all possible futures. This allegedly conflicts with ordinary linguistic practice, especially in cases where we retrospectively judge a past future-directed utterance to have been true, even though the outcome was genuinely open at the time of utterance. The paper reconstructs this objection in detail and argues that it relies on a failure to distinguish properly between different temporal perspectives and, crucially, between different propositions evaluated at different times.
The supervaluationist reply defended here emphasizes that semantic evaluation is always relative to a time of assessment. When a future-directed sentence is evaluated at a time when the future is still open, it may indeed be neither true nor false. However, when we make a retrospective assessment after the relevant outcome has occurred, the sentence to be evaluated is not the original future-directed proposition but a different, temporally complex proposition about what was going to happen. Once this distinction is made explicit, the objection loses its force. The supervaluationist framework is shown to be fully capable of accounting for the intuition that certain gappy sentences can correctly be said to have been true, retrospectively, without implying that they were already true at the earlier time. In this sense, the supervaluationist apparatus is designed precisely to allow for the retrospective attribution of truth to sentences that were previously indeterminate.
In the second main part of the paper, attention shifts to a paraconsistent approach to future contingents, inspired by Beall’s suggestion that truth-value gluts could play the same explanatory role as gaps. The paper argues that, contrary to Beall’s original linear-time formulation, a branching-time semantics is better suited to capturing the relevant notion of openness and the process by which the future becomes settled. Within such a framework, subvaluationism is introduced as a minimal modification of the supervaluationist semantics, affecting only the second level of semantic evaluation. On this view, a proposition is subtrue at a time if it is true on at least one history passing through that time, and subfalse if it is false on at least one such history. Future contingents at an open time are therefore typically both subtrue and subfalse, yielding truth-value gluts.
The paper then develops a parallel objection from retrospective assessments directed against subvaluationism. According to this objection, if a future-contingent proposition was glutty at an earlier time but the relevant outcome later occurs, it seems incorrect to say that the earlier utterance was also false. Retrospective judgments appear to exclude falsity, not merely to include truth. It is argued that this objection mirrors the supervaluationist case and can be answered in an analogous way. Once again, the key lies in distinguishing the proposition evaluated at the earlier time from the proposition evaluated retrospectively. From the later perspective, certain past-directed claims—such as the claim that it was going to be false that a given outcome would occur—are unambiguously false on every relevant history. Thus, the subvaluationist framework can accommodate the intuition that glutty sentences can retrospectively turn out not to have been false.
The final part of the paper explores a broader metaphysical implication shared by both approaches, namely their connection with the idea of a mutable future, most prominently associated with Geach. The paper argues that both the closing of truth-value gaps and the resolution of truth-value gluts involve a radical kind of change that goes beyond ordinary change within the world. In resolving an indeterminacy, reality is retrospectively reconfigured: certain truths are added or removed in a way that does not permit the simultaneous recovery of both the pre-resolution and post-resolution perspectives. Attempts to combine these perspectives—by insisting that the future was both indeterminate and already determinately such-and-such—are shown to be misguided.
The paper concludes that, far from undermining either approach, the symmetry between supervaluationism and subvaluationism strengthens the case for both. Each provides a coherent and principled account of future contingents, retrospective assessment, and the transition from an open future to a settled present, while illuminating a distinctive and often underappreciated conception of change.
Diogo Santos (LanCog, University of Lisbon), "A Further Look at the Mirror: A Reassessment of the Historical Condition"
As James Dean was driving his Porsche Spyder westbound on U.S. Route 466 (so called at the time) near Cholame, California, a 1950 Ford Tudor, driven by Donald Turnupseed, was travelling east. Turnupseed made a left turn onto Highway 41 headed north, toward Fresno ahead of the oncoming Porsche. Dean, unable to stop in time, slammed into the passenger side of the Ford, resulting in Dean’s car bouncing across the pavement onto the side of the highway. As a result of the accident James Dean died. He was 24.
Some deaths could have occurred later. Dean’s death is such a case. Arguably, dying this young prevented Dean from experiencing even greater pleasures in his life: taking part in more car races, being adulated by movie fans, making new friends, lovers… Thus, it is quite plausible that dying at 24 deprived Dean from having on-balance valuable experiences. Had he died later he would have had more pleasurable experiences, and in so far as and to the extent that his early death deprived him of those experiences, dying when he did was bad for him. The previous example and description illustrate how deprivationist support the claim that death can be bad (for the person who dies). More precisely:
Deprivationism. Death is bad if it deprives a person of net pleasure the person would otherwise have experienced.
Following the discussion between Brueckner & Fischer (1986, 2013) and Yi (2012, 2016) and motivated by Brueckner and Fischer’s reasoning behind proposing their restriction on the reading of ‘would’ (to distinguish between assessing “a more valuable life one would have, had one made a different decision at some point” and the value of one’s birth or death), Miguel and Santos (2020) have proposed their own restriction on top of the typical reading of ‘would’ in the deprivationist thesis:
Historical Condition. Birth/death deprives a person of value E only if the historically closest counterfactual situation where her life has the additional value E is such that the person is born earlier/dies later.
The Historical Condition works as a necessary condition for a late birth or early death deprivation. They describe it as a two-step process. First, one isolates the historically closest counterfactual situations—the ones where “the actual causal history is held fixed as much as possible, except for the events that imply the person’s existence”. Then, one assesses whether the counterfactual situation where the person obtains the additional value and is born earlier or dies later is the historically closest one. Only in these cases early deaths (or late births) deprive.
Recently Yi (2022) has marshalled two arguments against the condition:
(I) It’s unduly restrictive. So unduly restrictive that even Miguel & Santos’ preferred example of a deprivation due to a late birth doesn’t satisfy the condition.
(II) It’s theoretically untenable. It provides the wrong analysis of what it is to be deprived due to a late birth or an early death, since it implies a problematic principle.
In this paper I argue that, given that a restriction is to be expected, the case that Yi presents doesn’t compellingly show that it’s unduly. Once one goes through each example, Yi’s case isn’t as clear cut as he thinks. Moreover, keep in mind that, for Yi, deprivationists shouldn’t endorse any restriction on top of the typical reading of ‘would’, which implies that Yi isn’t really concerned in capturing the distinction that motivates restrictions like the Historical Condition in the first place; which is dialectically odd. On the one hand, he’s not contesting that such a distinction isn’t a desideratum of any deprivationist account and, on the other hand, he isn’t presenting any alternative that accounts for it.
Yi’s second objection relies on two important misconceptions: (a) the restriction that Miguel and Santos (2020) are proposing isn’t an analysis—a complete one at least—of being deprived due to a late birth or early death and (b) that it implies the problematic S is deprived of E only if (B) if E had occurred, then S would have been born earlier. Yi finds (B) problematic because the counterfactual situation where E occurs is preceded by S’s counterfactual birth and, hence, it’s guilty of it being a “backtracking counterfactual” and because the condition proposed by Miguel and Santos (2020) is based on the following problematic analysis of being deprived due to a late birth (BAD) If q hadn’t obtained, then p would have occurred.
The backtracking objection (as stated by Yi) is rather baffling because part of the usual deprivationist story implies (A) if S had died later, then E would have occurred. By the same token—the counterfactual event of S’s death occurs is preceded by E obtaining in the counterfactual closest situation—deprivationists deploy a “backtracking counterfactual” analysis as well. Besides backtracking counterfactuals are purportedly problematic when they are used for an analysis of causal dependence, but in now way is Miguel and Santos’ condition stating that S would have been born earlier is causally dependent on E occurring.
Moreover, the Historical Condition doesn’t imply (B). It doesn’t imply (B) because the ‘would’ in (B) isn’t a mere ‘would’ but ‘would*’—depicting the historically closest counterfactual. Thus, the condition implies nothing with a regular ‘would’. Notwithstanding, when we rephrase (B) as (B*) if E had occurred, then S would* have been born earlier (without further qualification), then it’s clear that (B*) is false under Miguel and Santos’ proposed analysis. It could be the case that had E occurred and S wouldn’t* have been born earlier yet S be deprived due to a late birth, as long as the historically closest counterfactual situation where E obtains is a counterfactual situation where S is born earlier. The historically closest counterfactual need not be one where S is born earlier, which is what the consequent of (B*) states. So the right analysis following from the condition is something like (C) if S had been born earlier, E would* obtain’, but this just based on the unproblematic (GOOD) if q hadn’t occurred, then p would* have obtained; hence, to say that S never enjoyed E because of her late birth is (partly) to say that if she had been born earlier, she would* have enjoyed it.
Francisca Silva (University of St. Andrews), "Sets as a subclass of extensional rigid embodiments"
Set theory is one of the greatest success stories in the history of mathematics. In spite of its rocky start and suspicions related to its bloated ontology, later known as a 'paradise for mathematicians', set theory has become the bedrock at the foundation of mathematics. Nonetheless, one could argue that qualms in regards to its ontological commitments have largely been swept under the carpet rather than addressed in a cleanly manner. In particular: the empty set continues to be faced with suspicion, and has led philosophers concerned with the ontology of set theory (Lewis, 1991) to propose irredeemably disjunctive and arbitrary definitions of set; and it is still unclear what makes up the difference between a given entity (set or urelement) and its singleton. On the one hand, sets seem to have properties that are not had by the mere plurality of their members - for instance, a set of concreta will often be regarded as abstract even if its members are all concrete. On the other hand, sets are extensional entities: sets with the same subsets and/or the same members are identical, so what one should add to 'nothing' (in the case of the empty set) and to the sole member of a singleton must be so as to not make superfluous differences between the plurality of members and the sets: it should be, in some sense, innocuous. I propose that we can achieve this result by combining insights from classical extensional mereology and the Finean theory of rigid embodiments and stating that the set having the x's as members is just the rigid embodiment having the x's as material parts, and the property "is one of the x's" as a formal part.
Erica Shumener (Syracuse University), "The Problem of Surplus"
We can tolerate some kinds of abundance but not others. I argue that many metaphysical theories are in danger of being intolerably abundant. They posit “too much” of certain quantities at a given location. The problem of positing too large a quantity, which I call the problem of surplus, arises in fragmented ways across different philosophical discussions, from material constitution to the metaphysics of action. I argue that there is no existing general solution to the problem of surplus, and I appeal to the notion of logical parthood to provide a unified solution to the problem. I then formulate novel constraints concerning logical parthood that are useful to a wide variety of metaphysicians.
David Yates (LanCog, University of Lisbon), "Hylomorphic Functionalism"
Functionalists hold that mental states are multiply realizable second-order properties defined in terms of their causal roles—mental property M is the property of having some other property that occupies M’s defining causal role R. Given that mental properties are defined in terms of causal roles that are filled by their realizers, why then isn’t it the realizers that do all the causal work? This is the familiar causal exclusion problem for functionalism. Mental properties seem causally redundant, at best overdetermining the effects of their physical realizers. The cost of multiple realizability, it seems, is causal redundancy. Functionalism has its origins in the work of Aristotle, who held that natural kinds were defined by their causal roles. Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian doctrine that substances are composites of both matter and form and that the form of a substance plays a crucial role in determining the identities of that substance’s proper parts. These two doctrines are closely related: it is only within the whole, for instance the body, that a part such as a hand or a heart can play its defining causal role, so the body plays a fundamental role in the individuation of the organs that compose it. A severed hand is a hand in name only because in that condition, it is unable to fulfil the function that defines a hand. Given the close connection between Aristotle’s functionalism and his hylomorphism, it is perhaps surprising that modern functionalists about the mind have not considered the possibility of a hylomorphic version of their theory. In this paper I defend a version of hylomorphism based on Shoemaker’s distinction between conditional powers and powers simpliciter, and use it to develop a novel solution to the causal exclusion problem. According to this theory, while conditional powers are intrinsic, powers simpliciter are often partially grounded by extrinsic structure. The individuation of mental states, I argue, involves the transformation of conditional powers into powers simpliciter by means of the places of such states in a psychological structure. On this view, mental states have their powers simpliciter qua mental, and not qua physical.