Recent publications by members of the department
We gain new insight by returning Quine’s first objection to quantified modal logic, due to Ruth Marcus. After noting that much of Quine’s objection does not actually apply, Greg Ray establishes that there was always an easy answer to Quine’s interpretive challenge of just the sort he called for and that he probably should have seen. This helps us pinpoint the underlying mistake Quine was making — a mistake still being made today.
Charles Goldhaber compares a 1689 ballad by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Let Us Pretend I am Happy,” with David Hume’s 1742 essay, “The Sceptic.” Goldhaber argues that each composition conveys competing messages: Their surface-level skepticism about the value of learning is countered by ironic optimism, leading finally to a more balanced position. Both composition’s use of a literary device called ‘layered irony’ helps them play philosophy’s traditional role as a kind of therapy.
As police departments have come to rely on algorithmic patrol management systems to assign patrols, community groups and academics have raised concerns about demographic bias in the data used to train these systems. Duncan Purves et al introduce a technique for eliminating demographically correlated features from a place-based algorithmic patrol management system. Application of this technique to the real-world algorithmic patrol management suggests that demographically correlated features can be removed from the system without reducing accuracy.
This chapter examines the ongoing debate over whether AI decision systems must be explainable to those affected by their outputs, addressing both proponents and skeptics of explainability requirements. John Basl and David Grant articulate an account that grounds explainability requirements in what they call “duties of consideration”—obligations decision makers have to reason appropriately about those subject to their decisions—and argue that this account helps address explainability skepticism and orient our thinking about how decision makers ought to integrate AI-based tools.
Necessary conditions on knowledge often come in the form of counterfactuals. Sensitivity and safety have received the lion’s share of attention. This paper explores and defends sturdiness, that p would be false were one not to believe it (~ Bp→ ~ p), as a plausible necessary condition on knowledge. The paper motivates a certain reading of the counterfactual and demonstrates how sturdiness handles difficult Gettier-style cases before responding to objections.
It has recently been suggested that the laws of nature alone could determine everything that happens in the entire history of the universe. Chris Dorst and Marc Lange disagree, arguing that in such a scenario, the so-called “laws” could not play various central roles characteristic of laws, and thus, they conclude, they are not laws at all. In short, if there are laws of nature, there must also be accidents (i.e. facts not determined by the laws alone).
Read more "Chris Dorst and Marc Lange, “The Necessity of Accidents.” Journal of Philosophy."
Recent discussions of inquiry have an individualistic flavor: they characterize the aims and norms of inquiry exclusively in terms of the epistemic states of the inquirer. Bob Beddor and Finnur Dellsén argue that this individualistic approach struggles to account for some central features of scientific inquiry. Attending to these features paves the way for an “inclusive” conception of inquiry, according to which many inquiries aim to confer epistemic benefits on others.
Duncan Purves argues that recidivism risk assessment algorithms engage in disparate treatment when they use race to determine risk scores. Despite this significant legal and ethical hurdle, deploying these algorithms can be justified when doing so is expected to benefit all protected groups.
Hume states that skeptical philosophy has desirable effects on our belief formation by first diminishing our pride. Charles Goldhaber gives a Humean reconstruction of the mechanisms involved: Skeptical philosophy diminishes pride by removing our tendency to view ourselves as better than others and this, in turn, removes a cause of pride-driven, belief reinforcement loops.
It has been argued that the criterion of right intention adds nothing in just war theory — that it is subsumed by other conditions on just war. Greg Ray gives an action-theoretic analysis of the criterion and uses it to examine arguments that have been offered for the strong negative claims above. He shows that none of these arguments succeed, bringing welcome clarity and understanding to our own ideas about the criterion.
Read more "Greg Ray. “A Return to Right Intention in the Just War.” Journal of Military Ethics."
Molly Gardner advances some considerations that undermine the overall justification for what she calls “beneficent interventions,” or interventions aimed at reducing the suffering of wild animals. She argues that the meaning in animals’ lives can offset their suffering, making their lives overall more worth living.
Binz et al. (2025) recently developed Centaur—a new large language model that is fine-tuned on a massive dataset of human behavioral data and which can be used to predict the responses of humans to behavioral experiments in psychology. In this commentary, Phillip H. Kieval and Cameron Buckner evaluate whether Centaur is merely imitating patterns in previously observed human behavior, or can play more ambitious roles in facilitating the discovery of a new explanatory theory of human behavior.
Jan Maximilian Robitzsch argues that the later Zeno of Sidon, in contrast to early Epicurean authors, was much more dismissive of women.
Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative appeals to the humanity in our persons as an unconditional end-in-itself that may never be used merely as a means. Jeanine Grenberg and Matthew Vinton argue for a teleological reading of “humanity” as the capacity for morality, broadly conceived as autonomous self-legislation of categorical moral demands, extending to both the choice of maxims and the setting of obligatory ends.
Ross Cameron’s book Chains of Being argues against some widely held theses about metaphysical grounding, including the popular foundationalist claim that anything grounded in something else is ultimately grounded in something fundamental. Gene Witmer provides an overview of the main arguments in the book and some doubts about the central argument against this foundationalist claim.
Chuck Goldhaber argues that Kant’s transcendental deduction offers an alternative to skeptical empiricism, rather than a refutation of it. According to Goldhaber, this alternative can appeal to skeptical empiricists in virtue of their dissatisfaction with their own position.
Jan Maximilian Robitzsch argues against the common consensus that not everyone can achieve happiness on the Epicurean view.
Raphaël Millière and Cameron Buckner argue that interventionist methods of causal explanation from philosophy of science offer a promising avenue for understanding how deep neural networks process information. They review key new interventionist methods and illustrate their application through practical case studies of recent artificial intelligence systems.
A prominent and intuitive idea about the nature of laws of nature is that they produce the future. In this paper, Chris Dorst considers whether that idea can be made to fit with the physics of relativity, and reaches a negative verdict.
Read more "Chris Dorst, “Productive Laws in Relativistic Spacetimes.” Philosophers’ Imprint."
“I promise to walk your dog, but I don’t know whether I will.” Bob Beddor explores why these “Moorean” promises sound absurd, and what this tells us about the norms on promising.
Arina Pismenny critiques cultural myths about romantic love, such as the “soulmate” narrative, and encourages a more realistic, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of love’s complexities.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “How to think differently about love.” Psyche."
Arina Pismenny argues that romantic jealousy is rational or fitting when it responds to a real threat to the lover’s privileged status with the beloved. In polyamorous relationships, differing norms raise the thresholds for what counts as a “threat” or “rival” compared to monogamous contexts.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “When is Jealousy Appropriate?” Dialectica."
John Biro and Harvey Siegel critique the pragma-dialectical account of argumentation, arguing that its reliance on speech act theory fails to address the core tension between reasonableness and convincingness in argumentative discourse. By showing that these qualities vary independently, the authors suggest that the framework cannot resolve its central theoretical challenge.
Jack Madock critiques prominent theories of the impermissibility of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) by demonstrating contradictions when applied to ideal warfare scenarios, where AWS achieve the best possible outcomes. He also examines the future role of AI in warfare and its ethical challenges.
Rusong Huang defends an inferentialist account of proper names within Robert Brandom’s framework, addressing objections from Russellian and Millian perspectives: that inferentialism collapses into a description theory and that proper names lack conceptual content as meaningless tags.
Read more "Rusong Huang, “An Inferentialist Account of Proper Names.” Studia Semiotyczne."
James Simpson addresses the challenge concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) pose to fallibilism, given their apparent infelicity. By examining and refining two prominent responses—Patrick Rysiew’s pragmatic strategy and Jason Stanley’s semantic strategy—he argues that fallibilists can resolve the issue: either the pragmatic strategy succeeds, or, if it fails, the semantic strategy succeeds, showing that CKAs are not a grave problem for fallibilism.
According to the dogmatism puzzle, if a person knows something, then they are entitled to disregard any evidence against it. Various forms of the puzzle have been raised, but here James Simpson argues that all of them rest on a false assumption, namely that if a person knows something, they also know that any evidence against it is misleading.
Read more "James Simpson, “The Dogmatism Puzzle Undone.” Analytic Philosophy."
The criterion of right intention in just war theory has sometimes been thought to be an unnecessary requirement or that it cannot be spelled out in any satisfactory way. Using an action-theoretic analysis of the criterion, Greg Ray argues that such negative conclusions are unwarranted.
Read more "Greg Ray, “A Return to Right Intention in the Just War.” Journal of Military Ethics."
Hunter Gentry and Cameron Buckner argue that we should replace the distinction between episodic and semantic memory with a more dynamic conception of the life cycle of memories that allows one to gradually shade into the other.
Arina Pismenny and her co-authors develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. They describe seven classes of emotional injustice, and explain why it is useful to distinguish them and also to subsume them under a single concept.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, Gen Eickers, and Jesse Prinz, “Emotional Injustice.” Ergo."
Shadi Heidarifar argues that there is a bidirectional relationship between gender-based social norms and gender-segregated education policies that excludes girls from knowledge production within the Iranian school system.
Chris Dorst argues that Pragmatic Humeanism undercuts the motivation for treating a low-entropy initial boundary condition of the universe (the “Past Hypothesis”) as a law of nature.
Read more "Chris Dorst, “Does the Best System Need the Past Hypothesis?” Philosophy of Science."
Arina Pismenny uses the example of pansexuality to argue that our sexual orientation categories ought to be revised for both epistemic and normative reasons.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “Pansexuality: A Closer Look at Sexual Orientation.” Philosophies."
James Simpson argues that dreaming worlds are not nearby possible worlds, suggesting that such possibilities cannot be used as legitimate grounds for skepticism.
Chris Dorst and Kevin Dorst argue that the fine-tuning of fundamental constants provides subtle reasons to support the hypothesis that the universe was designed, at least for agents like us who are not ideally rational.
John Biro argues that we should include composite objects in our ontology on the basis of their necessity in certain causal explanations. He goes on to argue that composition is not identity.
Read more "John Biro, “Two notes on Composition.” Metaphysica."
Amber Ross argues that the epistemic relation between layperson and expert can serve as a blueprint for evaluating under what conditions it would be ethical to accept opacity in AI decision making.
Arina Pismenny and Berit Brogaard’s edited volume explores the moral dimensions of love through the lenses of political philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
Duncan Purves argues that there are two overlooked normative factors that are essential to a full assessment of the moral permissibility of predictive policing: fairness in the social distribution of the benefits and burdens of policing as well as the distinctive role of consent in determining fair distribution.
Jeremy Davis, Duncan Purves, Juan Gilbert, and Schuyler Sturm’s recent paper synthesizes scholarship from several academic disciplines to identify and analyze five major ethical challenges facing data-driven policing.