Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

The past few years have seen several novel information-theoretic measures of causal emergence developed within the scientific community. In this paper I will introduce one such measure, called ‘effective information’, and describe how it is used to argue for causal emergence. In brief, the idea is that certain kinds of complex system are structured such that an intervention characterised at the macro-level will be more informative than one characterised at the micro-level, and that this constitutes a form of causal emergence. Having introduced this proposal, I will then assess the extent to which it is genuinely ‘causal’ and/or ‘emergent’, and argue that it supports only an epistemic form of causal emergence that is not as exciting as it first seems.

The principle of plenitude says that every material object coincides with abundantly many further objects that differ in their modal profiles. A necessarily unmanifested disposition is a disposition that necessarily does not manifest. This paper argues that if the principle of plenitude holds, then there are some necessarily unmanifested dispositions. These necessarily unmanifested dispositions will be argued to evade some objections against the cases of necessarily unmanifested dispositions put forward by Carrie Jenkins and Daniel Nolan.

There clearly seems to be something problematic with certain forms of epistemic dependence. However, it has proved surprisingly difficult to articulate what this problem is exactly. My aim in this paper is to make clear when it is problematic to rely on others or on artefacts and technologies that are external to us for the acquisition and maintenance of our beliefs, and why. In order to do so, I focus on the neuromedia thought experiment. After having rejected different ways in which one might want to capture the intuition in question, I argue that this device deprives us of understanding and therefore of the most valuable epistemic good. I then address the question of whether the moral of the story is that we should not develop, be equipped with, or use devices such as the neuromedia.

By mimicking the standard definition for a formal language, we define what it is for a natural language to be compact. We set out a valid English argument none of whose finite subarguments is valid. We consider one by one objections to the argument's logical validity and then dismiss them. The conclusion is that English—and any other language with the capacity to express the argument—is not compact. This rules out a large class of logics as the correct foundational one, for example any sound and complete logic, and in particular first-order logic. The correct foundational logic is not compact.

This paper targets a nearly universal assumption in the philosophical literature: that prepunishment is unproblematic for consequentialists. Prepunishment threats do not deter, as deterrence is traditionally conceived. In fact, a pure prepunishment legal system would tend to increase the criminal disposition of the grudgingly compliant. This is a serious problem since, from many perspectives, but especially from a consequentialist one, a primary purpose of punishment is deterrence. I analyze the decision theory behind pre- and postpunishments, which helps clarify both what deterrence is and how it operates in consequentialist justifications of punishment. I end by sketching a road map for the future of prepunishment as artificial intelligence and other technological advances generate increasing possibilities for its use.

The conventional wisdom in ethics is that pure moral laws are at least metaphysically necessary. By contrast, Moral Contingentism holds that pure moral laws are metaphysically contingent, and at most normatively necessary. This paper raises a normative objection to Moral Contingentism: it is worse equipped than Moral Necessitarianism to account for the normative standing or authority of the pure moral laws to govern the lives of the agents to whom they apply. Since morality is widely taken to have such a standing, failing to account for it would be a significant problem. The objection also shows that the debate about the modal status of moral principles isn't a debate solely within modal metaphysics, but has implications for topics in moral philosophy.

Generic sentences are sometimes characterized as normative or descriptive. Descriptive generics make generalized claims about things: dogs bark, birds fly, doughnuts have holes. Normative generics do something more complicated; they seem to communicate how things should be: boys don't cry, children are seen and not heard, friends don't let friends drive drunk. The latter set of sentences express something like the speaker's endorsement that the predicated terms match up with the kind terms. Sarah-Jane Leslie posits a semantic view of normative generics on which the subject term is polysemous between a normative and a descriptive reading. I argue that this cannot be right, and show how a Gricean implicature view can accommodate everyday normative generics in a way that Leslie's polysemous view cannot. An upshot of my argument is skepticism about drawing semantic conclusions from dual character concepts.

Prettyman argues that global attention to an identity crowded display entails attention to the individual items, and that in virtue of seeing the entire display, a global object, one sees the crowded items. This is a novel objection to Block's use of identity crowding as a counterexample to the necessity of attention for conscious object seeing. However, attending the whole display does not entail attending each individual (pace Prettyman). Thus, any defense of the conclusion that attention is necessary for seeing objects depends on the claim that each individual crowded item is not seen. I argue that Prettyman also fails to show that individual identity crowded items are seen, and that consequently, her argument, as it stands, does not alter the debate.