Deep neural networks are said to be opaque, impeding the development of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence, but where this opacity stems from is less clear. What are the sufficient properties for neural network opacity? Here, I discuss five common properties of deep neural networks and two different kinds of opacity. Which of these properties are sufficient for what type of opacity? I show how each kind of opacity stems from only one of these five properties, and then discuss to what extent the two kinds of opacity can be mitigated by explainability methods.

I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic worry without justifying giving up the belief. I argue that in gray cases, the subject finds a commendatory epistemic practical reason to engage in an activity intended to assuage that epistemic worry.

In this paper, I consider the objection that unilateral secession by a national group (e.g., the Scots) from a legitimate, nonusurping state would wrong minority nationalities within the seceding territory. I show first that most proponents of this objection assume that the ground of the right to national self-determination is the protection of the group’s culture. I show that there are alternative justifications available. I then set out a version of this objection that does not rely on this claim; on this objection, a national minority that seceded and created its own state would commit an expressive wrong against minorities within the territory over which it claimed jurisdiction. I show that this objection is undermotivated: only under a specific set of circumstances would the minorities of the secessionist region be subject to an expressive wrong. Finally, I show that the correct way to think about the claims of minorities in secessionist regions is in terms of a claim to secure access to equal civic status such that they are not at risk of becoming justifiably alienated from their new state. If a secessionist group cannot provide this guarantee to the minority residents of their territory, then their seceding would commit wrongful harm, and the presumption in favour of collective autonomy is defeated. I call this defeater the ‘Alienation Defeater.’

With this in hand, we are now in a position to explain why nations are normatively special. Responding to the objections broached by Allen Buchanan and others, I show that even if other kinds of groups, such as religious groups, have the features in virtue of which nations have a claim to self-determination, this does not entail that those groups also have the right to secede. This is because an account of self-determination needs a list of ‘defeaters’—features in virtue of which a group’s claim to self-determination is defeated. I argue that religious groups are the strongest candidate for having a claim to collective autonomy in virtue of sharing many features with nations. I then argue that religious groups will run afoul of the Alienation Defeater; religious identity is too narrow to be the basis of the dominant collective identity of a state. This does not apply to nationality. This, I explain, is because of qualitative differences between religious groups, qua religious groups, and nations.

Bas van Fraassen has argued that explanatory reasoning does not provide confirmation for explanatory hypotheses because explanatory reasoning increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We compare this argument with a skeptical argument that one should never add any beliefs because adding beliefs increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We discuss the similarities between these two arguments and identify several problems with van Fraassen’s argument.

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as “the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan” as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes has the relevant epistemic status. I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, we can use epistemic permissivism to generate so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge.

Comics are one of the paradigmatic forms of hybrid media, and coming up with a satisfactory definition for it has been difficult. Cowling, S. & Wesley D. C. (2022) take a functional approach and offer an Intentional Picture-Reading View which defines comics as something that is “aptly intended to be picture-read.” I show that the view is extensionally inadequate as is because formally ambitious prose and concrete poetry, too, are aptly intended to be picture-read. The way forward, I argue, is to look at more medium-specific non-depictive images (such as speech balloons and panels) to set comics apart from other hybrid media.

Perceptualism is a prominent theory analyzing emotions as perceptual experiences of value. A long-standing challenge to perceptualism says that emotions cannot be perceptual because they are subject to normative assessments in terms of reasons and rationality, while perceptual experiences are not. I defend perceptualism from this charge. My argument begins by distinguishing two forms of normative assessment: fundamental and non-fundamental. Perceptualism is compatible with the latter (i.e., non-fundamental reasons and rationality); even sensory experiences are so assessable. I next argue that emotions are only non-fundamentally assessable. Following this argument, I outline a perceptualist-friendly theory of emotions as non-fundamentally normatively assessable.

Recently, there have been attempts at offering new justifications of the Rawlsian idea of public reason. Blain Neufeld has suggested that the ideal of political autonomy justifies public reason, while R.J. Leland and Han van Wietmarschen have sought to justify the idea by appealing to the value of political community. In this paper, I show that both proposals are vulnerable to a common problem. In realistic circumstances, they will often turn into reasons to oppose, rather than support, public reason. However, this counterintuitive result can be avoided if we conceive of autonomy and community differently.

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) says every fact has an explanation. But van Inwagen argues the PSR is false—otherwise all facts are necessary facts. Consider the conjunction of all contingent facts, which we can call the Big Contingent Conjunction. If every fact has an explanation, then presumably the Big Contingent Conjunction had better have an explanation too. But what fact could explain its truth—is the Big Contingent Conjunction explained by a necessary fact or a contingent one? Trouble ensues either way. If the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a necessary fact, then it is hard to see why it should be contingent. (After all, if something follows from what is necessary, it too would seem to be necessary.) On the other hand, if the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a contingent fact, then the explanation appears circular since the explanans itself is among the facts it explains in the Big Contingent Conjunction. This paper explores an assumption of this argument rarely subjected to scrutiny—namely, the distribution principle, which asserts that if a fact explains a conjunction, then it explains each of its conjuncts. Though superficially plausible, close consideration of this principle reveals some reasons to reject it, potentially saving the PSR from van Inwagen’s challenge.

It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality.

According to certain views about human ontology, the way we seem is very different from the way we are. The appearances are a threat to such views. Here I take up and defuse the threat to one such view.

Pure immaterialism says that each of us is wholly immaterial. The appearances suggest otherwise. I argue that despite the fact that we might sometimes appear to be at least partly material, and that we can be perceptually justified in believing something solely on the basis of having a perceptual experience as of its being the case, none of us is ever perceptually justified in believing that we are even partly material (or that we’re not). Bottom line: we might be able to know whether we’re material, but we can’t know just by looking.

This article argues that Hume is committed to the cognitive phenomenology of believing. For Hume, beliefs have some distinctively cognitive phenomenology, which is different in kind from sensory phenomenology. I call this interpretation the “cognitive phenomenal interpretation” (“CPI”) of Hume. CPI is coherent with, and supported by, the textual evidence from A Treatise of Human Nature as well as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In both texts, Hume talks about the distinctive “manner” of believing, and CPI provides us with the best explanation of Hume’s remarks on this distinctive “manner.”

The absolutist status Mill assigns to his liberty principle (LP) is incompatible with standard utilitarian maximizing reasoning. But LP is compatible with his non-standard utilitarianism, whose extraordinary structure is clarified using a “consequentializing” lens. This involves enlarging outcomes to include not only the downstream consequences of self-regarding actions but also the actions themselves and the agent’s liberty of choosing them using his own agent-relative evaluation criteria. Self-regarding liberty is protected by indefeasible moral right and, according to the higher pleasures doctrine, the moral sentiment of justice has a pleasant quality that is infinitely superior in value as pleasure to any conflicting kinds of pleasure. Infinitesimal value attaches to any pleasures enjoyed by those who wrongfully interfere to compel competent but foolish or reckless agents to take self-regarding actions with the most expedient consequences. Absolute weight is thereby consistently given to LP over all competing considerations in the course of maximizing general happiness in point of quantity and quality.

Depicting transgender persons in comics without falling into visual caricature and thereby perpetuating harmful stereotypes can be a delicate task. In this discussion, I draw upon the notion of picture-reading to argue that, despite this fact, comics as a medium is particularly well-suited—both formally and in terms of production-relevant factors—toward capturing and communicating the complexities of transgender experience.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume claims that causes must temporally precede their effects. However, his main argument for this claim has long puzzled commentators. Indeed, most commentators have dismissed this argument as confused, but beyond this dismissal, the argument has provoked relatively little critical attention. My aim in this paper is to rectify this situation. In what follows, I (i) clarify the argument’s interpretive challenges, (ii) critique two existing interpretations of it, and (iii) offer my own improved interpretation. More generally, I hope to throw new light on this puzzling aspect of Hume’s philosophy.

According to moderatism, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by developing a new form of alethic pluralism. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of “skeptical switch scenarios” while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism.

Menges (2022) seeks to identify the kind of blame that should be at issue in debates between skeptics and anti-skeptics about responsibility. Menges argues that such blame is constituted by responses that the target has a claim against, and by the blamer’s thought that they have forfeited this claim due to their bad action and state while engaged in that action. I identify a class of blame responses that Menges mistakenly excludes and offer an alternative, more general, account in which the distinctive feature of controversial blame isn’t claim forfeiture, but the defeat of reasons grounded in the target’s interests.

Moral naturalists are often said to have trouble making sense of inter-communal moral disagreements. The culprit is typically thought to be the naturalist’s metasemantics and its implications for the sameness of meaning across communities. The most familiar incarnation of this metasemantic challenge is the Moral Twin Earth argument. We address the challenge from the perspective of analytic naturalism and argue that making sense of inter-communal moral disagreement creates no special issues for this view.

Comics can be ordered in a range of ways, most overtly by issue number for works within a series, and by page number for pages within works. The internal elements of a comic can also be ordered by formal details found within pages. We identify four kinds of formal details specific to comics pages or two-page spreads: how their elements are arranged, how they are viewed, what events they represent, and when information about those events is presented.

Joyce Havstad has argued in this journal that the argument from inductive risk is deductively valid and sound. As far as we know, this is the best reconstruction of the argument in the literature. Unfortunately, it suffers from a small flaw that renders the argument invalid. We identify this flaw, show that it is superficial, and show that a small amendment to the argument rescues the claim of its validity.