Philosophers’s Annual for 2023

Which articles made it into the latest Philosopher’s Annual?

This volume—the 43rd—covers the literature from 2023. 

The selections are:

• Mark Alznauer (Northwestern), “Untrue Concepts in Hegel’s Logic” from the Journal of the History of Philosophy
  In the following, I argue that Hegel took concepts—not propositions, judgments, or spatiotemporal objects—as the primary truth-bearer in his logic and attempt to offer a defensible interpretation of what it means for an individual concept (or “thought-determination”) to be assessed as true or untrue. Along the way, I consider the shortcomings of several alternative interpretations of truth in Hegelian logic, paying particular attention to the now-common contention that a commitment to something like Frege’s context principle prevents Hegel from assessing concepts independently of the role that they play in judgments.

• Bradford Cokelet (Kansas), “Competitive Virtue Ethics and Narrow Morality” from Philosophical Studies
  This paper introduces a new form of virtue ethics—patient-centered virtue ethics—and argues that it is better placed to compete with Contractualism, Kantianism, and Utilitarianism, than existing agent and target-focused forms of virtue ethics. The opening part of the paper draws on T.M. Scanlon’s methodological insights to clarify what a theory of narrow morality should aim to accomplish, and the remaining parts argue that while familiar agent and target-focused forms of virtue ethics fail to meet those criteria, patient-centered forms promise to do better. In addition, the paper rebuffs some prominent objections to virtue ethics that don’t adequately take into account the distinction between giving an account of the nature and importance of moral rightness and wrongness and giving an account of what makes acts right and wrong.

• Kevin Dorst (MIT), “Rational Polarization” from the Philosophical Review
  Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect.

• Melissa Fusco (Columbia), “Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist” from Noûs
  I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga’s paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT’s characteristic equation. My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga’s proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must employ subjunctive-suppositional (rather than evidential) transformations of a shared prior.

• Tyler Knowlton (Penn), Paul Pietroski (Rutgers), Alexander Williams (Maryland), Justin Halberda (JHU), and Jeffrey Lidz (Maryland), “Psycholinguistic Evidence for Restricted Quantification” from Natural Language Semantics
  Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of every is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like every frog is green meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condition (e.g., being green). One important difference concerns how the determiner treats its two grammatical arguments. On the relational view, the arguments are on a logical par as independent terms that specify the two relata. But on the restricted view, the arguments play distinct logical roles: specifying the limited domain versus supplying an additional condition on domain entities. We present psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that the restricted view better describes what speakers know when they know the meaning of a determiner. In particular, we find that when asked to evaluate sentences of the form every F is G, participants mentally group the Fs but not the Gs. Moreover, participants forego representing the group defined by the intersection of F and G. This tells against the idea that speakers understand every F is G as implying that the Fs bear relation (e.g., inclusion) to a second group.

• Berislav Marušić (Edinburgh) and Stephen J. White, “Disagreement and Alienation” from Philosophical Perspectives
  This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one’s own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make a difference to the epistemology. In particular, we argue that a norm of mutual answerability applies to us when we engage in shared inquiry with others, and precludes us from treating one another’s conflicting judgments as evidence relevant to the dispute. From this it follows that standard philosophical accounts of peer disagreement—e.g., the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View—presuppose that the disagreeing parties are in a sense alienated from one another. It’s doubtful that such forms of alienated disagreement should be treated as the central case.

• Joshua Mendelsohn (Loyola Chicago), “Aristotle’s Argument for the Necessity of What We Understand” from Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
  Aristotle holds that scientific understanding in a strict sense (epistēmē haplōs) is only of necessities, but his reasons for this position are not easy to discern. This paper expounds a highly elliptical argument Aristotle gives for this claim at Nicomachean Ethics 6. 3, 1139^b19–23. Analysis of this argument, which has not been well understood in the literature, shows that Aristotle’s view allows him to maintain that scientific understanding is at once a relative and a stable quality. His restriction of the objects of epistēmē haplōs thus permits scientific understanding to be at once dependent on an object and yet never such as to be lost on account of changes in the external world.

• Jacob M. Nebel (Princeton), “Ethics without Numbers” from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
  This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of well-being directly, without the use of restrictive invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value.

• Jeffrey Sanford Russell (USC), “On Two Arguments for Fanaticism” from Noûs
  Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? Fanaticism says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I evaluate the prospects for Fanaticism, in connection with two other kinds of general ethical principles. First, separability principles, which say that which option is best does not depend in strange ways on what might be going on in distant space and time—jumping off from a recent argument for Fanaticism from Beckstead and Thomas (2023). Second, reflection principles, about how gaining new information makes a difference to which options are best—jumping off from a recent argument for Fanaticism from Wilkinson (2022). It turns out that the situation is unstable: plausible general separability and reflection principles actually tell against Fanaticism, but restrictions of those same principles (with strengthened auxiliary assumptions) support Fanaticism. All of the consistent views that emerge are very strange.

• Vida Yao (UCLA), “Eros and Anxiety” from Synthese
  Recent philosophical interest in “transformative experiences” is largely motivated by L. A. Paul’s arguments that such experiences challenge our hopes to live up to an ideal she believes is upheld within western, wealthy cultures. If these experiences reveal information to us about the world and ourselves that is in principle unavailable to us before we undergo them, it seems that there is no hope for us to be “rational”, “authentic” and “autonomous” masters of our own lives. Supposing that Paul is right about this, how concerned should we be? Here, I challenge the ideal of rational “self-realization” that guides Paul’s project, and which must be granted in order to motivate the problem purportedly generated by experiences that drastically change what we want and what we know.

The editors of Philosopher’s Annual are Patrick Grim (Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan; Logic & Formal Semantics, Philosophy, Stony Brook), with Malte Hendrickx, Lindy Ortiz, and Alison Weinberger (University of Michigan).

The nominating editors for this round were: Jc Beall, Ned Block, Ben Bradley, Liam Kofi Bright, Lara Buchak, Tyler Burge, Victor Caston, David Chalmers, Andrew Chignell, Roger Crisp, Cian Dorr, Adam Elga, Iskra Fileva, Branden Fitelson, Graeme Forbes, Aaron Garrett, Michael Glanzberg, Alexander Guerrero, Alan Hajek, Ned Hall, Elizabeth Harman, Gary Hatfield, Benj Hellie, Christopher Hitchcock, Des Hogan, Simon Huttegger, Simon Keller, Tom Kelly, Niko Kolodny, Jennifer Lackey, Marc Lange, Brian Leiter, Ernie Lepore, Neil Levy, Martin Lin, John Marenbon, Colin McLarty, Jeff McMahan, Shaun Nichols, Paul Noordhof, Graham Oddie, Rohit Parikh, Derk Pereboom, Richard Pettigrew, Duncan Pritchard, Theron Pummer, Greg Restall, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Barry Schein, Laura Schroeter, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Roy Sorensen, Quayshawn Spencer, Katie Steele, Una Stojnik, Eric Swanson, Johan van Benthem, Mark van Roojen, Sergio Tenenbaum, Peter B. M. Vranas, Eric Watkins, Danielle Wenner, Gideon Yaffe, Jose Zalabardo, Kevin Zollman

Previous editions of Philosopher’s Annual can be found here.