School of Philosophy

Parents of children with disabilities often share their stories to attest to the positive impact parenting such a child has had on their lives. It is important to give due respect to such testimony, but what does due respect entail? Recently Chris Kaposy has argued in “Choosing Down Syndrome,” that respect requires us to not dismiss such narratives as the result of adaptive preferences. Dana argues that while this is important, it may not be enough.

The cement of the universe is not causation: it is explanatory dependence. Reality is a network of facts connected by a single, irreducible, mind-independent “because”. It is widely held that explanation is a sort, interest-sensitive practice that aims to provide information only about other things. To the contrary, one central task for science and philosophy is to provide information about the objective explanatory structure of the world.

Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from a variety of infelicities of language such as hallucinations, inconsistencies, continuity and coherence problems, etc. Some of these difficulties suggest that LMs have no idea what they are saying when they “speak”. And yet LMs often also behave in ways that suggest that they do know what they are about, while humans sometimes behave in ways resembling LMs in their bad moments. 

Quantitative measurement in the human sciences remains controversial. Are depression scales, intelligence tests, etc. valid measurement instruments? Do they deliver quantitative or merely ordinal information? Cristian discusses two approaches for understanding practices of quantitative measurement of theoretical attributes. One uses causal notions to characterise dispositional attributes and to understand how they relate to measurement indications. 

Work can enable people to get consumption items, develop capacities, socialise, contribute to society, give direction to their lives, gain knowledge, and foster their self-esteem and self-respect. This paper outlines a normative argument for policies supporting workers’ access to these goods and refines it by responding to the objection that the policies would involve wrongful paternalism. 

Matthew begins with the question ‘what is work?’ Many argue that ‘work’ is a hopelessly indeterminate term that cannot be adequately defined. Against this view, he defends a novel account of what work is. Building on this, he then develops accounts of three other types of human activity that can be contrasted with work: leisure, self-enrichment, and engaging in a relationship. With four main types of human activity defined, he then gives an account of how each activity can be a source of meaning in life.

In some ways, questions concerning individuality and evolutionary transitions in individuality appear to be uniquely biological. However, many of the underlying concerns regarding the enduring status of collectives and the emergence of higher-level individuals can also be found in other contexts — including broader biological settings (such as the emergence of coordinated behaviour in animal collectives) and non-biological ones (such as hierarchical structures in materials science).

In June 1913, Bertrand Russell abandoned writing a book (partly published in 1984 under the title Theory of Knowledge), apparently because of a “paralysing” objection made to him by the 24-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein, then a research student at Cambridge. 

Transformers are an extraordinarily powerful computational architecture, applicable across a range of domains. They are, notably, the computational foundation of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs’ facility with language have led many to draw analogies between LLMs and human cognitive processing. Colin argues that transformers are broad precisely because they have so little built-in representational structure. This naturally raises questions about the need for structured representations and what (if any) advantage they might have over mere representation of structure.

This paper argues that decision theory presupposes free will. Although decision theorists seldom acknowledge this, the way decision theory represents, explains, or rationalises choice behaviour acquires its intended interpretation only under the assumption that decision-makers are agents capable of making free choices between alternative possibilities.