ORCID Profile
0000-0003-3029-1788
Current Organisation
University of Tasmania
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.1111/META.12603
Abstract: This paper defends the usefulness of the concept of philosophical progress and the common assumption that philosophy and science aim to make the same, or a comparable, kind of progress. It does so by responding to Yafeng Shan's (2022) arguments that the wealth of research on scientific progress is not applicable or useful to philosophy, and that philosophy doesn't need a concept of progress at all. It is ultimately argued that while Shan's arguments are not successful, they reveal the way forward in developing accounts of philosophical progress.
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Date: 2023
Abstract: In recent years, several philosophers have argued that their discipline makes no progress (or not enough in comparison to the “hard sciences”). A key argument for this pessimistic position appeals to the purported fact that philosophers widely and systematically disagree on most major philosophical issues. In this paper, we take a step back from the debate about progress in philosophy specifically and consider the general question: How (if at all) would disagreement within a discipline undermine that discipline’s progress? We reject two arguments from disagreement to a lack of progress, and spell out two accounts of progress on which progress is compatible with disagreements that persist or increase over time. However, we also argue that disagreement can undermine our ability to tell which developments are progressive (and to what degree). So, while disagreement can indeed be a threat to progress, the precise nature of the threat has not been appreciated.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-09-2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-11-2018
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 29-06-2021
DOI: 10.1111/NOUS.12383
Abstract: Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big philosophical questions. However, these views are difficult to compare and evaluate, because they rest on very different assumptions about the conditions under which philosophy would make progress. This paper looks to the comparatively mature debate about scientific progress for inspiration on how to formulate four distinct accounts of philosophical progress, in terms of truthlikeness, problem‐solving, knowledge, and understanding. Equally importantly, the paper outlines a common framework for how to understand and evaluate these accounts. We distill a series of lessons from this exercise, to help pave the way for a more fruitful discussion about philosophical progress in the future.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 21-12-2016
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-07-2022
DOI: 10.1111/PHPR.12819
Abstract: Philosophers vigorously debate the rationality of hedonic bias toward the future : a systematic preference for pleasurable experiences to be future and painful experiences to be past. The debate over future bias is distinctive in philosophy because arguments made on both sides concern descriptive and empirically tractable claims about patterns of preferences and the psychological mechanisms that could explain these patterns. Most notably, philosophers predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs : people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. They also predict that future‐bias is restricted to first‐person preferences, and that people’s third‐person preferences are time‐neutral. These claims feature in arguments both for and against the rational permissibility of future bias. Thus, we aimed to test whether these claims are descriptively accurate. Among our discoveries, we found that the predicted asymmetry between first‐ and third‐person conditions is absent, and so cannot support arguments against the rationality of future‐bias. We also uncovered an asymmetry between positive and negative events that might ground a new argument in favour of time‐neutralism.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 16-01-2021
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2023
DOI: 10.1007/S11229-023-04045-1
Abstract: Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias another is future-bias. Philosophical theorising about these biases often proceeds on two assumptions. First, that the two biases are independent : that they are explained by different factors (the independence assumption). Second, that there is a normative asymmetry between the two biases: one is rationally impermissible (near-bias) and the other rationally permissible (future-bias). The former assumption at least partly feeds into the latter: if the two biases were not explained by different factors, then it would be less plausible that their normative statuses differ. This paper investigates the independence assumption and finds it unwarranted. In light of this, we argue, there is reason to question the normative asymmetry assumption.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-11-2013
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Date: 2020
Abstract: It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that most people unambiguously have a phenomenology as of time passing, and that this is a datum that philosophical theories must accommodate. Moreover, it has been assumed that the greater the extent to which people have said phenomenology, the more likely they are to endorse a dynamical theory of time. This paper is the first to empirically test these assumptions. Surprisingly, our results do not support either assumption. One experiment instead found the reverse correlation: people were more likely to report having passage phenomenology if they endorsed a non-dynamical theory of time. Given that people do not have an unambiguous phenomenology as of time passing, we conclude that this is suggestive evidence in favor of veridical non-dynamism—the view that our phenomenology is veridical, and that it does not unambiguously represent that time passes. Instead, our phenomenology veridically has some quite different content.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-01-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 28-09-2021
DOI: 10.1111/PHC3.12779
Abstract: Appeals to the ‘common sense’, or ‘naïve’, or ‘folk’ concept of time, and the purported phenomenology as of time passing, play a substantial role in philosophical theorising about time. When making these appeals, philosophers have been content to draw upon their own assumptions about how non‐philosophers think about time. This paper reviews a series of recent experiments bringing these assumptions into question. The results suggest that the way non‐philosophers think about time is far less metaphysically demanding than philosophers have assumed.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-01-2022
DOI: 10.1111/PHIB.12258
Abstract: This article introduces a non‐cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth‐apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to , and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-06-2022
DOI: 10.1111/PHC3.12859
Abstract: All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time‐neutralists contend, rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future‐biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future‐bias.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 18-02-2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 24-02-2022
DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198862901.003.0006
Abstract: Many philosophers have assumed that our preferences regarding hedonic events exhibit a bias towards the future : we prefer positive experiences to be in our future and negative experiences to be in our past. Recent experimental work by Greene et al. (2020) confirmed this assumption. The authors of this chapter aimed to replicate that study using an alternative methodology that more accurately allows us to distinguish time neutrality from future bias. Instead of finding more time neutrality than Greene et al., however, they found vastly more past bias . Their explanation for this surprising finding helps to reveal the rationale behind both future and past-biased preferences, and undermines the generalisability of one of the most influential motivations for the rationality of hedonic future bias: Parfit’s My Past or Future Operations .
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-08-2022
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 27-09-2017
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Date: 10-2022
Abstract: Future-biased in iduals systematically prefer pleasures to be in the future (positive future-bias) and pains to be in the past (negative future-bias). Empirical research shows that negative future-bias is robust: people prefer more past pain to less future pain. Is positive future-bias robust or fragile? Do people only prefer pleasures to be located in the future, compared to the past, when those pleasures are of equal value (fragile positive future-bias), or do they continue to prefer that pleasures be located in the future even when past pleasures outweigh future ones (robust positive future-bias)? Some arguments against the rationality of future-bias require positive future-bias to be robust, while others require it to be fragile. We empirically investigate and show that positive future-bias is robust.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-03-2019
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 17-02-2022
DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198857303.001.0001
Abstract: The philosophical notion of metaphysical explanation has received a lot of attention over the last decade. Despite tantalising claims about how metaphysical explanations are part of everyday life, the everyday notion has not been explored. The task taken up in Everyday Metaphysical Explanation is to develop an account of the everyday notion of metaphysical explanation: the notion that we all use in ordinary contexts when we ask for, and receive, explanations of a certain sort. The book presents the striking results of the first empirical investigation of folk judgements regarding what metaphysically explains what. On the basis of these results, together with evidence of our ordinary practices surrounding the notion, three unique accounts of the phenomenon are built. These accounts are, unashamedly, very different from recent accounts of what the book calls philosophical metaphysical explanation . First, all three are ones on which everyday metaphysical explanations are context-sensitive. Whether they hold for a subject at a context depends in part on psychological features of the subject at that context. Second, none of the three accounts appeals to the recently popularised notion of grounding. Primarily, the book seeks to generate further interest in, and investigation of, the phenomenon of everyday metaphysical explanation.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 13-08-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2019
DOI: 10.1111/META.12352
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 22-07-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-03-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-08-2017
DOI: 10.1111/PHIB.12105
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 14-12-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-08-2019
DOI: 10.1111/PHIB.12165
Start Date: 12-2023
End Date: 12-2026
Amount: $428,416.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
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