#metaphilosophy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #metaphilosophy, aggregated by home.social.
-
Glad to see #pragmatism advancing arguments and evidence about #intuition and #reflection. I've applied it to
- #CogSci and #metaphilosophy broadly: https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534
- #AI and #PhilMind: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.22987A new paper extends it to #Sociology: https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.70053
-
This is the second in a deeper look at 10 of my philosophical positions; this one is on Mediated Encounter Realism within the category of metaphysics for ontology. A full article is available on my Substack, with supporting information on a recent post on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FL5pWqjRYGdqFXW86tr6R?si=-oBa3Ae-RemgBmY8CBFGaw
#philosophy #podcast #metaphilosophy #anti-foundationalism #diagnostics #dis-integrationism #quietism #blog #substack
-
This is the first of a deeper look into 10 of my philosophical positions, this on diagnostic anti-foundationalism within the category of philosophical method for metaphilosophy. A full article is available on my Substack, with supporting information on a recent post on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bLZobkSqpvkoLbzFqQRIJ?si=JSes21xoRVeB17sy7AkLJw
#philosophy #podcast #metaphilosophy #anti-foundationalism #diagnostics #dis-integrationism #quietism #blog #substack
-
I share my core philosophical positions on Substack.
https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/a-provisional-map-of-my-philosophical?r=pvxh5
See map and hashtags for content guidance.
#philosophy #metaphilosophy #ontology #objectivity #selfhood #ontologicalgrammar #language #languageinsufficiency #minds #ai #artificialintelligence #ethics #agency #substack #blog #podcast #video #subjectivity #institutions #law #map #history #politics #governance
-
Oh wow, another philosopher valiantly defending the sacred "intuitions" 🙄, because who doesn't love a good game of mental gymnastics? 🤹♂️ But fear not, this article promises to delve into the riveting world of #metaphilosophy, for when you're just *dying* to ponder the unknowable with the help of vague gut feelings! 😂
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-philosophical-intuitions #philosophy #mentalgymnastics #intuition #humor #HackerNews #ngated -
We’ve never lived on granite foundations. What we call “objectivity” in social and moral life is scaffolding: provisional, rhetorical, maintained through care, reciprocity, and revolt.
In my new essay, I map an operating model for reasoning without granite illusions — and argue for an ethic of repair.
Read the full post:
👉 https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/24/stop-pretending-we-live-in-marble-halls/#Philosophy #Ethics #MetaEthics #PhilosophyOfScience #Epistemology #MetaPhilosophy #SocialEpistemology #CriticalTheory #Subjectivism #Relativism
-
Pills often feature in thought experiments to eliminate the difficulty of one of the response options. Example: It's hard to [X] in reality, but suppose you could [X] by taking a pill. Would you take the pill?
I got curious about whether people find it so easy to take pills. Apparently not.
In this meta-analysis, #medication non-adeherence was more than 40%: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-044987
-
More successful predictions of my #BoundedReflectivism & #EpistemicIdentity article from 2022?
From about 2017 or 2018, I reviewed evidence suggesting that reflective thinking often helps, but may even hinder our judgment depending on factors like whether we are reasoning based on shared identities and epistemic standards (https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534).
Years later Robb Willer et al. solicited ideas for debiasing political judgments. After years of testing 25 different interventions, their results are published in #Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh4764
They found that biased evaluations of politicized facts were impacted by both
- REFLECTION (on potential misperceptions of undemocratic actions) and
- shared IDENTITY cues (which could help *or* hinder!)#decisionScience #politics #psychology #philosophy #epistemology #metaphilosophy #JDM #debiasing #chatBot
-
🚨 Free book alert! (ePub and PDF!)
*Applying Reflective Equilibrium* shows each step of #reflectiveEquilibrium (RE), so anyone can use it.
This reveals the limits of reflective equilibrium, but also its real benefits.
Where to find it: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04333-8
#CriticalThinking #Logic #Ethics #Bioethics #Politics #Science #Medicine #Epistemology #Metaphilosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PrecautionaryPrinciple #Philosophy #OpenAccess
-
New book: Experimental Philosophy for Beginners
The book includes chapters on various experimental designs and analyses of various kinds of data (from numeric scores to text analysis): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58049-9
Seems like a great foundation for a course on the topic or for self-learners to get their feet wet.
#xPhi #philosophy #psychology #quantiativeMethods #decisionScience #philosophyOfScience #Metaphilosophy #higherEd
-
How should #higherEd govern #freeSpeech?
A new (and free) paper in Philosophical Quarterly argues that the parties to this debate haven't sufficiently based their proposals on (a) the goals of #education or (b) scientific tests of their assumed mechanisms: https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqae095
#edu #policy #ethics #politics #logic #science #philosophyOfScience #metaphilosophy
-
Are there social class differences in moral decision-making?
When dissociating anti-social from deontological and utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, social class predicted differences in the latter two response patterns among thousands of German speakers — the class differences in utilitarian thinking were partially mediated by reflection and empathic concern.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1391214
#ethics #psychology #MoralPsychology #xPhi #philosophy #Demography #Metaphilosophy
-
I find that this assumption of the intelligibility of nature, especially to a specific species of ape, is also very common, or even more common, in philosophy, where intuitions are often seen as a sort of evidence. Same for the tendency to simplify issues so as to fit specific standards of how a philosophy talk/paper must look like.
Link to the book (OA): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548045/the-brain-abstracted/
-
By Mary Midgley
https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/rings-books/
> ... an account of human knowledge which women’s whole experience falsifies is inadequate and partial and capricious. Philosophers have generally talked for instance as though it were obvious that one consciousness went to one body, as though each person were a closed system which could only signal to another by external behaviour, and that behaviour had to be interpreted from previous experience.
[1/2]
-
What are philosophical thought experiments for?
Two (real) experiments on over 1000 employed "a pre-training—training—post-training design".
Results indicated that experiments served as "a tool to elicit inconsistencies in one's representations".
https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13401
#cogSci #psychology #philosophy #epistemology #metaphilosophy #edu #teaching #logic #decisionScience #JDM
-
Interesting remarks by Strevens in response to Kitcher's book on the aims and methods of philosophy
> philosophy’s most influential counterexamples are intended ... to play the same role as anomalies in Kuhnian science: to serve as the brave little facts that bring down great theories and make progress possible. If philosophical thought-experimenters conduct themselves ... as empirical scientists... it might be no bad thing for the enterprise of philosophy
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-024-00720-w
#metaphilosophy -
Machery's distinction--in a recent book review--between swallows and moles in philosophy is great in capturing a significant difference within the profession:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn0629
Roughly, swallows are philosophers keen on considering and developing ideas regardless of their connection to what we know about the actual world. Moles, in contrast, see philosophy as part of the scientific project of improving our knowledge of the world as it is.
-
Peter Ludlow's blog post critiquing Philip Kitcher's book "𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩'𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙮? seemed about as romantic, anecdotal, and speculative as Timothy Williamson's (albeit less concise), but it *did* admit that "today ...the most interesting philosophy is being done outside of academic philosophy."
https://peterludlow.medium.com/thales-kitcher-and-mauvaise-foi-b762a56ee427
-
#TimothyWilliamson posted an accepted critique of fellow #philosopher #PhilipKitcher's book 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩'𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙮? (#Oxford #University Press)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BTPlCPQ5FmAGCARgbT0yC6MVU_iqirbx/view
"According to ...Kitcher,... much of contemporary #analyticPhilosophy ...offers ... nothing useful. [...] He wants #philosophy to change [...] But most of his recommendations would make philosophy worse: more anxious to imitate the neighbours and impress the general public...."
-
Can imaginary disagreement promote reflective equilibrium? Perhaps!
Error rates in people's forecasts were reduced when they answered from the perspective of "a friend whose views and opinions are very DIFFERENT from yours."
Moreover, averaging people's own forecasts and their imaginary dissenting peer's forecasts reduced error more than averaging two forecasts of people that didn't imagine a dissenting peer!
-
"structured reflection can effectively increase behaviors to reduce public health risks"?
Reading statements "providing structure" and recommending up to 2 (sometimes opposing) desiderata increased "intentions to reduce business capacity (experiment 1)[,...] avoid large social gatherings (experiments 2 and 3)[, and] donat[ions] to provide vaccines to refugees". (N = 12,995)
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac218
#publicHealth #cogSci #decisionSci #xPhi #Epistemology #metaphilosophy #edu
-
Call for papers: #Metaphilosophy in History
Guest editors: Catherine Dromelet and Willem Lemmens (both University of Antwerp)
What is #philosophy? How does a philosopher proceed and what goals do they pursue? How do they distinguish between good and bad philosophy? Being interested in such questions is sometimes labeled as metaphilosophy. Recent publications on metaphilosophy are essential references when it comes to these questions. The prevailing tendency in these and related contributions is to address methodological and systematic problems relevant in contemporary discourses, while the historical context of metaphilosophical issues is typically ignored (with few exceptions showing, for instance, historical affinities within the Marxist tradition). The present issue aims to address this hiatus. The meaning of the word ‘philosophy’ has undergone profound transformations over time. What we consider ‘modern science’, for instance, emerged in early modern times within the bounds of what was then considered ‘philosophy’. Similarly, ‘experimental philosophy’ had a specific meaning in the early modern period: it came close to what we would call ‘empirical science’, but today the latter means largely an empirical survey of conceptual intuitions, while the former has now a very different meaning for several contemporary philosophers. These are just conspicuous illustrations of how the meaning of the word ‘philosophy’ has been changing over time. The special issue ‘Metaphilosophy in History’ aims at surveying the most significant changes in the self-conception of philosophy and at introducing historical insights and considerations into contemporary discourses on metaphilosophy. It provides an opportunity to focus on specific authors and schools of thought, to highlight distinctive aspects and phases in the evolution of the self-understanding of philosophy. So, while much of metaphilosophical work so far has been concerned with systematic issues, our aim is (1) to provide a historical perspective on metaphilosophical enterprises through a reconstruction of the self-conception of philosophy up to the very recent past, and (2) to infuse contemporary problems of metaphilosophy with historical consciousness and sensitivity.
For this special issue of History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis we are looking for articles (up to 10.000 words) that seek to provide a new, diversified outlook on historically informed metaphilosophy, based on in-depth original research. The questions that we are interested in include: Did metaphilosophy play any important role in the past philosophers' agenda? If they held metaphilosophical views, did their philosophical practice follow them? Was there more agreement on the metaphilosophical level than in the argumentative practice, or vice versa? Papers should focus on specific historical figures, presenting their case as illustrative of a more general tendency or movement. This is less pressing in the case of very central figures like #Aristotle, #Hegel, #Wittgenstein, etc., but it is desirable in the case of less influential authors.
Submission deadline:
The articles will appear in HPLA 27.1 (2024)Articles should be submitted by September 30, 2023, via Editorial Manager (see https://brill.com/view/journals/hpla/hpla-overview.xml?contents=artsub)
Please direct any questions to the guest editors at
catherine (dot) dromelet (at) uantwerpen (dot) be
willem (dot) lemmens (at) uantwerpen (dot) beIf you are unsure whether your contribution might fit, send an abstract (500-1000 words) before April 15, 2023 to the guest editors and we will get back to you by May 31, 2023.
-
@kameryn This paper is quite interesting for philosophers too, delving into some dark nooks of method. #philosophy #metaphilosophy