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Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy
Scopus
ISSN 2330-4014 · Michigan Publishing · 332 articles in the index
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Journal Article
What is Animal Communication?
It is a common intuition that nonhuman animals (hereafter, ‘animals’) communicate among themselves and even with us humans. But what is animal communication? Our intuition suggests that we can apply the same concept of communication to both animals and humans. But is there a theoretical account of…
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Journal Article
The Unexpected Value of the Future
Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity's future is…
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Journal Article
Transformers, Contextualism, and Polysemy
The transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017), is at the heart of the remarkable recent progress in the development of language models, including widely-used chatbots such as Chat-GPT and Claude. In this paper, I argue that we can extract from the way the transformer…
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Journal Article
The Metaphysics of Creation in the Daodejing
This paper offers an original interpretation of the Daodejing 道德經 as containing a distinctive account of creation. In my reading, the Daodejing envisions the creation of the cosmos by Dao (1) as a movement from the absence of phenomenal forms to phenomenal forms and (2) as a movement from…
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Journal Article
Rules, Rights, and Hedges
One is sometimes, but only sometimes, justified in pursuing a suboptimal course of action due to a concern that, in attempting the ideal course, one might fail to follow through and so make the situation even worse. This paper explains why such hedging is sometimes justified and sometimes not. The…
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Journal Article
The Case of ‘Autistic’: Pejorative Uses and Reclamation
In addition to its descriptive uses, ‘autistic’—originally a medical label—is also used pejoratively (against ingroups and outgroups), and has recently been proudly reclaimed, especially in connection with neurodiversity movements. This phenomenon raises interesting questions for the philosophical…
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Journal Article
Rationalism Self-Restrained: Kant, Autonomy, and the Bounds of Sense
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason famously purports to preclude rational cognition of objects beyond possible experience (“rational ignorance”). On the prevailing approach (popularized by Strawson’s Bounds of Sense), the conditions on immediate, experiential cognition explain why rational cognition…
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Journal Article
Of Soulmates and Old Spouses: How to be a Romantic Kantian about the Ethics of Love
This paper introduces and defends the foundations of a comprehensive Kantian view of the ethics of love, and shows how this relates to the ethics of respect. The view is Kantian insofar as it maintains that everyone shares a feature that makes them lovable. But it maintains that, due to the…
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Journal Article
Logical Metainferentialism
Logical inferentialism is the view that the meaning of logical constants is implicitly defined by the operational rules that govern their behaviour in proofs—particularly in sequent calculus proofs, according to an increasingly dominant tendency. A tenable articulation of this view presupposes a…
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Journal Article
Having Things in View
Relationalism about perception (aka naïve realism) construes the phenomenal character of conscious perception as at least partially constituted by the perceived items. According to the “austere” forms of this view, perceiving does not consist in representing the perceived items as being a certain…
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Journal Article
Gender Unrealism
While intimately familiar, gender eludes theorizing. We argue that well-known challenges to gender’s analysis originate in a subtle ambiguity: questions about gender sometimes express questions about gender categories themselves (e.g., womanhood, manhood, and so on), while at other times expressing…
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Journal Article
A Little Bit of Cancer?
Should we say a little bit of cancer? Many argue that we should avoid the phrase and instead relabel early cancers as a strategy to prevent overtreatment. Against this, I argue that we should not shy away from saying a little bit of cancer, and, moreover, that shying away misses a key opportunity…
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Journal Article
Conflicting Intuitions
Research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments shows a striking pattern. Often, there are powerful intuitions on one side and also powerful intuitions on the exact opposite side. A question now arises about how to understand this pattern. One possible view would be that it is…
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Journal Article
Administrative Violence
Accounts of structural violence characterize the institutional and bureaucratic production of systematic population-level harms as violence while also construing these harms as inadvertent and unintentional. We argue that such conceptions are poorly suited to capture the relationship between…
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Journal Article
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that—all else equal—we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people…
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Journal Article
A Kantian Account of Aesthetically Sublime Rage
Building on Kant’s text, I develop and defend an account of a specific kind of anger, which Kant calls “aesthetically sublime rage.” Unlike other kinds of anger, aesthetically sublime rage does not play a motivational function for the subject throughout the time she is feeling it. Because of this…
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Journal Article
Paths to Diversity: A Simulation of Conformity in Environments with Different Geometries
The geometry of the environment can affect numerous psychological, social, and ecological processes. But its roles in social learning and the dynamics of descriptive norms remain unclear. Here we use agent-based modeling to explore how environments with different geometric shapes can influence…
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Journal Article
Correction Notice for "Against the Precisificational Approach to Fictional Inconsistencies" by Inchul Yum (Ergo, 2022, Vol. 9)
At the time of publication, Inchul Yum's "Against the Precisificational Approach to Fictional Inconsistencies" (Ergo, 2022, Vol. 9, DOI 10.3998/ergo.3591) contained a typographical error that rendered an argument unclear. In section 1, on p. 1767, the statement "(E2) If α and β are fictional…
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Journal Article
Transformative Embodied Cognition
How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied…
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Journal Article
On Mentioning Belief-Formation Methods in Sensitivity Subjunctives
According to the sensitivity account of knowledge, S knows that p only if S’s belief in p is sensitive in the sense that S would not believe that p if p were false. The sensitivity condition is usually relativized to belief-formation methods to avoid putative counterexamples. A remaining issue for…