In his book, The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers argues that his theory of consciousness can lend support to the Everett “no collapse” interpretation of quantum mechanics. We argue that Chalmers's argument fails, and that any Everett-style interpretation should be rejected.

If there is an essential difference as suggested in a preceding article, between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social studies on the other, in the sense that man has the power to change, and has repeatedly changed, existing social organizations, whereas he has no such power over natural phenomena, the meaning of social science must in this respect at least differ substantially from that of natural science. Elsewhere the present writer has designated society an “artificial creation,” much as the automobile or a steel mill is, i.e. made by the artifice of man. The artificial automobile or steel mill is of course fabricated in the light of the natural laws of physical science. Its construction would be impossible without a knowledge of these laws. There are also certain natural laws and tendencies in human nature and animal behavior which must serve as a foundation for any scientifically fabricated society, i.e. constructed on the basis of observation and verification of these tendencies on the one hand and a rigorous use of theory and analysis on the other. In short, despite any essential difference, as suggested, between natural and social science, the scientific method is apparently just as applicable in the one field as in the other. There is still much confusion on this score. But before pursuing further the significance of the distinction, artificial versus natural, it will be well to have before us more of what opposing schools of methodological thought in the social studies have to offer.

In a recent commendable article, Quentin Smith (1987) exposes fatal flaws in several recent attempts to demonstrate that it is logically impossible for the past to be infinite. However, his analysis of one of these flawed arguments—involving an interesting version of Russell's “Tristram Shandy paradox”—is off the mark, as I show in this paper.

The following comments represent what seem to me promising lines of approach to some of the broader issues in the philosophy of logic. They are offered, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, with the intent of stimulating rather than foreclosing discussion. And if the conclusions advanced are formulated loosely and with only a crude indication of the arguments which support them, I hope that thereby they will provoke all the more the free flow of discourse which it is the object of this Conference to promote.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, philosophy in America and England began to respond to the rumors of unrest and dissatisfaction which were under way at the close of the nineteenth century. Many contemporary thinkers, who have had occasion to look backward, have remarked on the dominance of idealism at the turn of the period. Montague says it was “rampant” and points to the organization of the St. Louis school by W. T. Harris, the purpose being a study of Hegelian thought. Lovejoy also remembers the total sweep of idealistic thought. “The metaphysics of the philosophical teachers whose influence was dominant in most of the American universities thirty-five years ago had one common and fundamental premise which was supposed to be established beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt; to question it was simply to betray one's want of a genuine initiation into philosophy. It was the proposition that, in Bradley's words, 'to be real, or even barely to exist, is to fall within sentience; sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real. There is no being or fact outside of that which is commonly called psychical existence.' As my first teacher in philosophy, George Holmes Howison, said, in summing up a memorable philosophical symposium in 1895: 'We are all agreed' in one 'great tenet;' which is 'the entire foundation of philosophy itself: the explanation of the world which maintains that the only thing absolutely real is mind; that all material and all temporal existences take their being from Consciousness that thinks and experiences; that out of consciousness they all issue, to the consciousness they are presented, and that presence to consciousness constitutes their entire reality.' With almost a whole generation of acute and powerful minds this passed for a virtual axiom.”

According to David Albert, there are certain situations where we can cause events that lie in our past. In response to a well-known objection that we never observe backward causation, he argues that there are good reasons why we can’t tell when it obtains. However, I identify another difficulty with Albert’s view: at face value, it has the unattractive consequence that backward causation is not just possible, but rife. In this article, I show how this implication can be blocked. I then use my analysis to defend Albert’s account from a second well-known objection, namely, that it allows us to control the past.

Teleosemantic theories aim to naturalize mental representation through the use of functions, typically based on past selection processes. However, the historical dependence of these theories has faced severe criticism, leading some philosophers to develop ahistorical alternatives. This article presents a new dilemma for all ahistorical teleosemantic theories, focusing in particular on the theories proposed by Timothy Schroeder and Bence Nanay. These theories require certain dispositions in the producers or consumers of mental representations, but the appeal to dispositions puts the proponents in an undesirable position: mental content is either overly dependent on current circumstances or ultimately dependent on historical factors.

Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA) according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, and so forth. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA.

I present new counterexamples to the asymmetry of grounding: we have prima facie reason to think that some conditional probabilities partially ground their inverse conditional probabilities, and vice versa. These new counterexamples may require that we reject the asymmetry of grounding or, alternatively, that we reject one or more of the assumptions (regarding, e.g., the correct interpretation of probability) that enable the counterexamples. Either way, by reflecting on these purported counterexamples to grounding asymmetry, we learn something important, either about the formal properties of grounding or about the nature of probability (or both).

I argue that Carl Hempel’s pioneering work on scientific explanation introduced an assumption that Hempel never motivated, namely, that explanation is an aim of science. Ever since, it has remained largely unquestioned in analytic philosophy of science. By expanding the historical scope of the debate on explanation to philosophers from the first half of the twentieth century, I show that the debate should include a critical reflection on Hempel’s assumption. This reflection includes two problems: how to motivate one’s position on the aims of scientific knowledge and how to decide which examples count as expressions of those aims.

This note scouts a broad but underexplored class of explanations found in contemporary computer science. These explanations, which I call limitative explanations, explain why certain problems cannot be solved computationally. Limitative explanations are philosophically rich, but have not received the attention they deserve. The primary goals of this note are to isolate limitative explanations and provide a preliminary account of what makes them explanatory. On the account I favor, limitative explanations are a kind of non-causal mathematical explanation which depend on highly idealized models of computation.

Merton envisioned his norms of science at a time when peer-reviewed journals controlled scientific communication. Technologies for sharing and finding content have since divorced the certification and amplification of science, generating systemic vulnerabilities. Certified amplification—a new Mertonian-styled norm—enjoins their recoupling and introduces a taxonomy of strategies adopted by institutions to close the certification-amplification gap, including the proportioning of the one to the other. Examples illustrating each taxonomic type collectively paint a picture of an ethos employing a rich range of certification and amplification techniques and emerging in a decentralized fashion across heterogeneous objects, communication modalities, and institutions.

Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience. We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth. You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformative option; you lack knowledge about what are the possible outcomes. We show how principles of rational choice can be extended to cases of anticipated awareness growth.

An axiom set is given which purports to formalize the notion of a “theory involving measurement.” The abstract objects satisfying these axioms are examined, and some candidates for measures of complexity are considered.

This framework allows us to discuss some forms of a degree of confirmation. Both “complexity” and “degree of confirmation” appear to be intimately bound up with geometrical aspects of these “theories” which derive from measurement considerations, suggesting that the concepts may be inapplicable to more “general theories.”

The view is taken throughout that the well known paradoxes indicate inadequacies of the linguistic apparatus and that the axiomatization here presented is an attempt to construct an adequate language for the relevant portion of the world. This position is not defended in the paper.