Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799
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Item Unawareness, and its Effect on Beliefs, Learning, and Group Decision Making(2024) Tashiro, Masayuki; Pacuit, Eric; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three standalone papers centered around the concept of unawareness. The first paper, titled `Weak Explicit Beliefs', concerns the effect of unawareness to one's beliefs and extends the standard logic framework of awareness with a novel notion of beliefs under unawareness. The second paper, titled `Learning under Unawareness' concerns the effect of unawareness in one's learning process and extends the standard logic framework of awareness with two dynamic modal operators: learning and change of awareness. Lastly, the third paper, titled `Models of Group Deliberation with Asymmetric Awareness' concerns the effect of unawareness in group decision making situations, in which each agent in the group may be un/aware of different things, and explores a normative question whether it is always better to become more aware (of what the other agents in the group are aware of) via two formal models of group deliberation.Item Local Information in Discourse(2024) Kendrick, Jonathan Caleb; Williams, Alexander; Cariani, Fabrizio; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the interpretation of modals, expressions like “might,” “should,” and “must,” are constrained by their local context. For epistemic modals, local contexts bound the admissible domains of modal quantification. In Chapter 2, we use this fact to explain why epistemic “must” is weaker than the □ operator from epistemic modal logic. For root (i.e., non-deontic) modals, local contexts restrict the domain of quantification. In Chapter 3, we show this yields a solution to the Samaritan Paradox concerning why deontic modals do not inherit presuppositions under entailment. In Chapter 4, we propose a solution to the “if ?, ought ?” problem based on default logic. According to this solution, “ought”’s ordering source consists of default rules and the domain consists of the conclusion of the defaults triggered in the local context.Item The Defeasibility of Rights(2024) Gomez, Cody; Horty, John; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Consider the following puzzle. Presumably, you and I both have an equal right to life. But what happens if I try to kill you, and you kill me in self-defense? By most accounts, you did something morally permissible by killing me in this scenario. But, if killing me is permissible, then what happened to the initially granted right to life we both started out with? There is currently significant debate over how to explain this situation. Some have argued that my violent transgressions altogether forfeit my initial right. Due to my actions, I no longer have the right to life at all. Others have claimed that while I still generally have the right to life, this scenario satisfies criteria for a built-in exception to that standing right: I have the right in other cases, but not this one. Finally, others have suggested that I maintain my right to life in this scenario, but that it takes a lower priority in comparison to the right of the defendant, i.e., it is overridden. While the differences between these understandings of rights may appear subtle, they have drastically different implications. How we solve this puzzle affects how we adjudicate apparent conflicts of rights, how we make sense of what is owed when rights are intruded upon, and how rights function within our broader ethical and legal theories.In this dissertation, I develop a model of the last of these positions. To substantiate my view, I offer a precise model of the defeasibility of rights—situated in non-monotonic/default logic, a kind of non-classical logic—and highlight its strengths against competing views. Specifically, I show that this new schema not only salvages intuitions about infringement, but also prevents the unwieldy proliferation of rights. This is an especially desirable outcome, as it avoids blurring the line between rights and other important normative considerations. The first paper, Hohfeldian Conceptions of Rights and Rights Proliferation, argues that competing theories allow for wild proliferation of rights by adopting some form of the “correlativity doctrine,” wherein myriad duties and permissions are equivalent to rights, e.g., an act of charity no longer seems charitable if the recipient has “a right” to aid. The second paper, Rights as Defaults remedies this by rejecting the correlativity doctrine in favor of my Rights-as-Defaults Model. Using US free speech case law and work in default logic, I argue that fundamental rights are best understood as modifiable collections of defeasible generalizations. This model allows the right to free speech and its protections to accommodate new cases without building long lists of exceptions into the rights themselves while avoiding proliferation. Finally, the third paper, Revising the Right to do Wrong, applies this model to the question: do we have a moral right to do wrong? Do I have a moral right to offend a stranger even if I am required not to? I claim that there is no need for a standalone “right to do wrong” because understanding rights as defeasible means that any right can be overridden (or override competing considerations). I show how it is not paradoxical to say I have the right to offend you even though I, all-things-considered, should not, and even if we think interference would be justified.Item Moral Transformation in Theory, Practice, and Application(2024) Good, Michael David; Singppurwalla, Rachel; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This three-paper dissertation explores challenges to moral transformation and moral development. The first two papers explore puzzles that challenge whether moral transformation is possible in the way it is usually conceived. In the first paper, I address the issue of whether it is possible to rationally choose to morally transform. Recently, Laurie Paul has argued that it is impossible to rationally choose to have what she calls a transformative experience. I argue that moral transformation is a species of transformative experience and also, against Paul, that it is possible to rationally choose to morally transform. In the second paper, I address a challenge to the process of moral development. According to Aristotle and others, one becomes virtuous by acting as the virtuous person acts. But how is this possible if one is not already virtuous? I argue that it is, but one must first practice habituating the practical attitudes (i.e. the beliefs and desire) of the virtuous person. In this way the self-controlled person and the weak-willed (or akratic) person can grow in virtue. Additionally, I provide practical exercises—types of spiritual disciplines and moral drills—to help learners shape their practical attitudes. In the final paper, I explore an instance where moral development is disrupted. More specifically I show how moral injury interrupts and causes dysfunction within one’s character, making further transformation towards virtue impossible. I then identify strategies and tactics to inoculate people, especially soldiers, from moral injury—what I call developing the virtue of moral resilience—thereby safeguarding their path to moral development.Item Essays on the Epistemology of Polycentriicty and Democracy(2023) Manor, Aylon; Kogelmann, Brian; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the epistemic properties of two institutional types, polycentricity and democracy, and explores how these ideals can be translated into concrete plans for institutional design. The dissertation consists of four papers, with the first two papers investigating the epistemic case for polycentricity and its relation to moral arguments, while the remaining two papers investigate the epistemic properties of democracy. The first paper argues that the epistemic case and moral case for polycentricity point toward different polycentric arrangements, while the second paper highlights two dimensions through which polycentric arrangements can generate epistemic value. The third paper proposes a two-stage political process using a Wikipedia-inspired platform to filter for quality information and allow all citizens to participate, while the fourth paper argues for the normative significance of "epistemic equality" in voting methods and explores its implications for alternative methods.Item A Theory of Leadership and Its Applications(2023) Schwab, Leisa Elizabeth; Horty, John F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)No system of laws and political institutions is without gaps, and leaders are required—often in the face of uncertainty and under a heavy burden of risk—to fill them. This project adopts a view of individual leadership that finds its roots in the ancient world with Plato, but which speaks to modern problems like the role of appointed administrative officials in a complex democracy and the problems of autonomous weapons. It is composed of a series of papers exploring this gap-filling leadership activity in a modern democratic state from both normative and descriptive perspectives. The first paper, “Making Ourselves Accountable: An Ethics for the Administrative State” addresses the discretionary decision making by un-elected officials through which many of our society’s important leadership decisions are made. It argues for the necessity of these leaders and recommends criteria to guide their decision making in conformity with contemporary democratic ideals. The second paper, “Seeking Standards for Leadership Reasoning in the Executive Branch by Analogy to Representation and Judicial Reasoning,” looks deeper into the work of such leaders to better understand the place of their role in shaping the law alongside legislative representation and judicial discretion. The third paper, “A Different Kind of Responsibility Gap: Trust and the Burden of Risk as a Limit on Military Automation” considers the problem of autonomous weapons in the context of this theory of the individual leader as a necessary component within the legal and institutional system. Inspired by ancient notions of the activity of governing as an activity fundamentally about leaders before it is about laws, it argues that even fallible human leaders who fall short of the ideal remain necessary no matter how sophisticated or accurate an automated system we may devise.Item Memory, Time, and Temporal Experience(2023) Pan, Shen; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forth a series of empirically-grounded theoretical proposals about memory and temporal awareness. After an introductory chapter setting up the stage, Chapter 2 concerns episodic memory. According to the standard view, episodic memory is both distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. I argue that the standard view conflates two closely connected yet distinct senses of `episodic memory'. More specifically, I argue that even if the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic recollective experience are metarepresentational, that does not require that the episodic memory system have a metarepresentational structure. After arguing for a first-order account of the memory system, I show how the system-experience distinction helps to render the task of demonstrating episodic memory in non-human animals empirically tractable. Chapter 3 concerns altered temporal phenomenology in life-threatening danger. I argue that the phenomenon colloquially known as `time slowing down' turns out to consist of three distinct elements --- subjective time expansion, slowing down of perceptual motion, and timelessness. Drawing on empirical findings from a range of related fields, I explore how each element departs from ordinary, `normal' temporal experience. Collectively, these individual accounts in turn further our understanding of passage phenomenology and temporal consciousness in general. Chapter 4 investigates the cognitive underpinnings of our intuitive belief that time passes. On my account, while this belief is less metaphysically weighty than sometimes assumed, it is still of significant theoretical interest not only because it is linked to a rich phenomenology, but also because time's dynamic character is a psychologically compelling phenomenon. Both of these features, I argue, are best accounted for by taking seriously the idea that we have something akin to an intuitive theory in the domain of time, with the belief that time passes serving as an inference-guiding principle shaping our `manifest image' of time.Item SUBJECTIVITY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE: A DEFENSE OF THE REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS(2023) Masciari, Christopher; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation provides a defense of reductive representationalism about consciousness. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 provides a representationalist account of olfaction. In the literature, Burge’s (2010) account of representation is widely endorsed. According to his account, perceptual representation represents “objectually”, that is, it represents features of the world, as objective. This depends on perceptual constancies. Many authors attempt to defend representationalism about olfaction by showing that there are olfactory constancies. I argue that there are none. Instead, I show that representationalism regarding olfaction is correct by showing that olfaction represents minimally. I then argue that representations in Burge’s sense are constructed when minimal olfactory content is embedded in object-files that contain other non- olfactory properties that meet Burge’s criteria for representation. In chapter 3, I defend a particular reductive representationalist account of consciousness—the global workspacetheory—against an alternative which suggests that consciousness is richer than the global workspace theory claims. I argue that experience is richer than is standardly suggested by proponents of the global workspace theory, but less rich than the alternative theory suggests. I argue that there are additional resources available to defenders of the global workspace theory in accommodating intuitions of richness that have yet to be fully appreciated by participants in the debate. In chapter 4, I defend reductive representationalism against a new objection presented by Adam Pautz (20172020). He recently suggested that there are several constraints on experience, known as “The Laws of Appearance,” that put pressure on the representationalist thesis about conscious experience because they suggest that experience is constrained in ways that representations are not. Since the representationalist claims that experience just is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way, the representationalist owes us an explanation, or else representationalism is false. I argue that the laws are not genuine laws, but that we have the intuition that they are because of the limits of imagination. As a consequence, I show that representationalism is not threatened.Item CONSTRUCTING OUR MORAL WORLD: AGENCY, TELEOLOGY, AND KORSGAARD(2023) Fyfe, Andrew Thomas; Kerstein, Samuel; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Kantian ethicists maintain that morality applies to all agents irrespective of an agent’s particular circumstances, interests, or concerns. That is, morality applies to an agent categorically rather than hypothetically. Kantian ethics attempts to prove this categoricity by deriving morality from the constitutive conditions of action. If such an argument could be made to work, then morality would follow from the constitutive preconditions or “logic” of agency and thereby apply categorically to all agents regardless of unique eccentricities concerning an agent’s particular circumstances or interests. As a result, an argument for Kantian ethics typically adheres to the following formula: (1) providing a theory of agency that (2) entails that all agents are committed to a Kantian ethical outlook. My focus in this dissertation is one of these arguments for Kantian ethics. Specifically, the argument of Christine Korsgaard. I cannot fully defend her argument here in its entirety, but with this dissertation I hope to provide the background work developing the necessary theory of agency in order for Korsgaard’s argument for Kantian ethics to succeed. Specifically, I aim to put forward, develop, and defend the sort of non-standard, teleological theory of agency upon which Korsgaard’s argument for Kantian ethics crucially depends. Moreover, with this dissertation I aim to attack the more widely accepted Davidsonian, causalist theory of agency which Korsgaard’s Aristotelian-Wittegenstienian-Anscombian teleological theory of agency opposes and I argue we should adopt instead.Item Repositioning Cognitive Kinds(2022) Roige Mas, Aida; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forward a series of theoretical proposals aimed to advance our understanding of cognitive kinds. The first chapter introduces the general debates that provide the philosophical underpinnings for the topics addressed in each of the following chapters. Chapter two compares and distinguishes between modules of the mind and mechanisms-as-causings, arguing that they should not be conflated in cognitive science. Additionally, it provides a novel “toolbox” model of accounts of mechanisms, and discusses what makes any such account adequate. Chapter three addresses the question of whether there is a role within the new mechanistic philosophy of science for representations. It advances a proposal on how to carve working entity types, so that they may include representational explanans. Chapter four offers an account of mental disorders, one that captures the regulative ideal behind psychiatry’s inclusion of certain conditions as psychopathologies. Mental disorders are alterations in the production of some mental outputs (e.g. behaviors, beliefs, emotions, desires), such that their degree of reasons-responsiveness is extremely diminished with respect to what we would folk-psychologically expect it to be.