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This paper explores the prospects of different forms of moralerror theory. It is argued that only a suitably localerror theory would make good sense of the fact that it is possible to give and receive genuinely good moral advice.

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The idea that there can be cases of faultless disagreement, cases of disagreement in which neither party is making a mistake, is frequently discussed in connection with relativist views in philosophy of language. My goal is to argue that we can make sense of faultless disagreement without being committed to any form of relativism if we recognise that disagreement sometimes involves attitudes other than belief, such as desires or preferences. Furthermore, this way of making sense of faultless disagreement allows us (...) to avoid some of the problems that have been raised in connection with relativist accounts of faultless disagreement. (shrink)

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Ordinary moral thought often commits what social psychologists call 'the fundamental attributionerror '. This is theerror of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent's distinctive character traits. In fact, there is no evidence that people have character traits in the relevant sense. Since attribution of character traits leads to much evil, we should try to educate ourselves and others to stop doing it.

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The replication crisis has caused researchers to distinguish between exact replications, which duplicate all aspects of a study that could potentially affect the results, and direct replications, which duplicate only those aspects of the study that are thought to be theoretically essential to reproduce the original effect. The replication crisis has also prompted researchers to think more carefully about the possibility of making Type I errors when rejecting null hypotheses. In this context, the present article considers the utility of two (...) types of Type Ierror probability: the Neyman–Pearson long run Type Ierror rate and the Fisherian sample-specific Type Ierror probability. It is argued that the Neyman–Pearson Type Ierror rate is inapplicable in social science because it refers to a long run of exact replications, and social science deals with irreversible units that make exact replications impossible. Instead, the Fisherian sample-specific Type Ierror probability is recommended as a more meaningful way to conceptualize false positive results in social science because it can be applied to each sample-specific decision about rejecting the same substantive null hypothesis in a series of direct replications. It is concluded that the replication crisis may be partly due to researchers’ unrealistic expectations about replicability based on their consideration of the Neyman–Pearson Type Ierror rate across a long run of exact replications. (shrink)

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Quality assurance in large terminologies is a difficult issue. We present two algorithms that can help terminology developers and users to identify potential mistakes. We demon­strate the methodology by outlining the different types of mistakes that are found when the algorithms are applied to SNOMED-CT. On the basis of the results, we argue that both formal logical and linguistic tools should be used in the development and quality-assurance process of large terminologies.

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I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity toerror through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems (...) I raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

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I here defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game—specifically, a ‘Suitsian’ game that meets the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one from Thomas Hurka (2006) and another from within The Grasshopper (...) itself. In the process, I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book. (shrink)

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In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, predictionerror, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of predictionerror may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or (...) novelty of a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioralerror, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

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This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free willerror theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from (...) the conceptual impossibility thesis that many of our actions are in fact free. Hence it follows that free willerror theory - the view that no judgement of the form ‘action A was performed freely’ - is false. I will show taking seriously the conceptual impossibility thesis helps makes good sense of some seemingly inconsistent results in recent experimental philosophy work on determinism and our concept of free will. Further, I will present some reasons why we should expect to find similar results for every other factor we might have thought was important for free will. (shrink)

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The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune toerror through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity toerror through misidentification. The lessons are: First, the so-called (...) Simple Account of which-object immunity toerror through misidentification to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind oferror just in case its grounds do not feature any identification component fails. Secondly, wh-immunity can be explained by a Reference-Fixing Account to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind oferror just in case its grounds are constituted by the facts whereby the reference of the concept of the object which the judgement concerns is fixed. Thirdly, a suitable revision of the Simple Account explains the de re immunity of those arithmetic judgements which are not wh-immune. These three lessons point towards the general conclusion that there is no unifying explanation of de re and wh-immunity. (shrink)

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In his paper, Jakob Hohwy outlines a theory of the brain as an organ for prediction-error minimization, which he claims has the potential to profoundly alter our understanding of mind and cognition. One manner in which our understanding of the mind is altered, according to PEM, stems from the neurocentric conception of the mind that falls out of the framework, which portrays the mind as “inferentially-secluded” from its environment. This in turn leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied (...) cognition. Focusing on this aspect of Hohwy’s argument, we first outline the key components of the PEM framework such as the “evidentiary boundary,” before looking at why this leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. We will argue that although Hohwy may be correct to reject specific theses of embodied cognition, others are in fact implied by the PEM framework and may contribute to its development. We present the metaphor of the “body as a laboratory” in order to highlight wha... (shrink)

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Are those judgments that we make on the basis of our memories immune toerror through misidentification? In this paper, I discuss a phenomenon which seems to suggest that they are not; the phenomenon of observer memory. I argue that observer memories fail to show that memory judgments are not IEM. However, the discussion of observer memories will reveal an interesting fact about the perspectivity of memory; a fact that puts us on the right path towards explaining why memory (...) judgments are indeed IEM. The main tenet in the account of IEM to be proposed is that this aspect of memory is grounded, on the one hand, on the intentionality of perception and, on the other hand, on the relation between the intentionality of perception and that of memory. (shrink)

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Jonas Olson writes that "a plausible moralerror theory must be anerror theory about all irreducible normativity". I agree. But unlike Olson, I think we cannot believe thiserror theory. I first argue that Olson should say that reasons for belief are irreducibly normative. I then argue that if reasons for belief are irreducibly normative, we cannot believe anerror theory about all irreducible normativity. I then explain why I think Olson's objections to this argument (...) fail. I end by showing that Olson cannot defend his view as a partly revisionary alternative to anerror theory about all irreducible normativity. (shrink)

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John Campbell (1999) has recently maintained that the phenomenon of thought insertion as it is manifested in schizophrenic patients should be described as a case in which the subject is introspectively aware of a certain thought and yet she is wrong in identifying whose thought it is. Hence, according to Campbell, the phenomenon of thought insertion might be taken as a counterexample to the view that introspection-based mental selfascriptions are logically immune toerror through misidentification (IEM, hereafter). Thus, if (...) Campbell is right, it would not be true that when the subject makes a mental self-ascription on the basis of introspective awareness of a given mental state, there is no possible world in which she could be wrong as to whether it is really she who has that mental state. Notice the interesting interdisciplinary implications of Campbell’s project: on the one hand, a fairly precise notion elaborated in philosophy such as IEM (and the related notion oferror through misidentification, EM hereafter) is used to describe a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia.1 On the other hand, such a phenomenon, described in the way proposed, is taken to be a possible counterexample to a sort of “philosophical dogma” such as IEM of introspection-based non-inferential mental self-ascriptions. In the first section of the paper I will point out the characteristic features of EM and explain logical immunity toerror through misidentification of introspection-based mental self-ascriptions; in the second section I will consider the case of thought insertion in more detail and show why, after all, it is not a counterexample to the view that introspectionbased mental self-ascriptions are logically IEM. Finally, I will offer a re-description of the phenomenon of thought insertion. (shrink)

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A genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 in order to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, which was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. But (...) this approach was not formulated to address anti-black racism. The limitations of this strategy were quickly exposed by black thinkers such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. It could not be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation: the problem had been misdiagnosed from the outset. (shrink)

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Coming from Hubert Dreyfus’ recent book ‘‘Retrieving Realism”, the paper presents embodied pre-conceptual perception and representational cognition as two contrasting perspectives on accessing the world. It further characterises the ‘different forms of knowledge emerging from these perspectives and how they dynamically relate to each other. Taking up the Peircean theory of signs and abductive reasoning as methods of discovery, computers are analysed as semiotic machines that formally model and objectify explicit knowledge about social practices and that can be embedded in (...) the sign processes of thereby restructured practices. This practice theoretical perspective allows for both, understanding the limits of AI and pointing to options for productively combining the performance of ‘‘cognitive artifacts” with the tacit skills of knowledge workers. (shrink)

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Aristotle sometimes claims that the perception of special perceptibles by their proper sense is unerring. This claim is striking, since it might seem that we quite often misperceive things like colours, sounds and smells. Aristotle also claims that the perception of common perceptibles is more prone toerror than the perception of special perceptibles. This is puzzling in its own right, and also places constraints on the interpretation of. I argue that reading Alexander of Aphrodisias on perceptualerror (...) can help to make good sense of both of Aristotle’s claims. (shrink)

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SummaryThis paper is an account of Kepler's explicit awareness of the problem of experimentalerror. As a study of the Astronomia nova shows, Kepler exploited his awareness of the occurrences of experimental errors to guide him to the right conclusion. Errors were thus employed, so to speak, perhaps for the first time, to bring about a major physical discovery: Kepler's laws of planetary motion. ‘Know then’, to use Kepler's own words, ‘that errors show us the way to truth.’ With (...) a survey of Kepler's revolutionary contribution to optics, the paper demonstrates that Kepler's awareness of the problem of experimentalerror extended beyond discrepancies between calculations and observations to types oferror which pertain to observations and instruments. It emerges that Kepler's belief in the unity of knowledge and physical realism, facilitated—indeed created—the right philosophical posture for comprehending the problem oferror in an entirely novel way. (shrink)

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Retractions solicited by authors following the discovery of an unintentionalerror—what we henceforth call a “self-retraction”—are a new phenomenon of growing importance, about which very little is known. Here we present results of a small qualitative study aimed at gaining preliminary insights about circumstances, motivations and beliefs that accompanied the experience of a self-retraction. We identified retraction notes that unambiguously reported an honesterror and that had been published between the years 2010 and 2015. We limited our sample (...) to retractions with at least one co-author based in the Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany or a Scandinavian country, and we invited these authors to a semi-structured interview. Fourteen authors accepted our invitation. Contrary to our initial assumptions, most of our interviewees had not originally intended to retract their paper. They had contacted the journal to request a correction and the decision to retract had been made by journal editors. All interviewees reported that having to retract their own publication made them concerned for their scientific reputation and career, often causing considerable stress and anxiety. Interviewees also encountered difficulties in communicating with the journal and recalled other procedural issues that had unnecessarily slowed down the process of self-retraction. Intriguingly, however, all interviewees reported how, contrary to their own expectations, the self-retraction had brought no damage to their reputation and in some cases had actually improved it. We also examined the ethical motivations that interviewees ascribed, retrospectively, to their actions and found that such motivations included a combination of moral and prudential considerations. These preliminary results suggest that scientists would welcome innovations to facilitate the process of self-retraction. (shrink)

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This paper is a discussion of Michael Thau's interesting critique in Chapter 2 of Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, of the common view that beliefs are internal states.

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Forthcoming in D.H. Pritchard & V. Hendricks, New Waves in Epistemology,.

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This paper considers whether theism is compatible with moralerror theory. This issue is neglected, perhaps because it is widely assumed that these views are incompatible. I argue that this is mistaken. In so doing, I articulate the best argument for thinking that theism and moralerror theory are incompatible. According to it, these views are incompatible because theism entails that God is morally good, and moralerror theory entails that God is not. I reject this argument. (...) Since it is the best argument for thinking that theism and moralerror theory are incompatible, I conclude that these views are compatible: one can coherently accept both views. (shrink)

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The paper distinguishes three strategies by means of which empirical discoveries about the nature of morality can be used to undermine moral judgements. On the first strategy, moral judgements are shown to be unjustified in virtue of being shown to rest on ignorance or false belief. On the second strategy, moral judgements are shown to be false by being shown to entail claims inconsistent with the relevant empirical discoveries. On the third strategy, moral judgements are shown to be false in (...) virtue of being shown to be unjustified; truth having been defined epistemologically in terms of justification. By interpreting three recenterror theoretical arguments in light of these strategies, the paper evaluates the epistemological and metaphysical relevance of empirical discoveries about morality as a naturally evolved phenomenon. (shrink)

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Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions abouterror in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moralerror, rather than an account of judgments about moralerror. In this paper I (...) argue that the challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moralerror. (shrink)

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Locke claims that we have sensitive knowledge of the external world, in virtue of the fact that simple ideas are real, true, and adequate. However, despite his dismissive remarks about Cartesian external-world skepticism, Locke gives us little to go on as to how knowledge of the external world survives the fact of perceptualerror, or even how perceptualerror is possible. I argue that Locke has an in-principle problem explaining perceptualerror.

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I argue that the Bayesian Way of reconstructing Duhem's problem fails to advance a solution to the problem of which of a group of hypotheses ought to be rejected or "blamed" when experiment disagrees with prediction. But scientists do regularly tackle and often enough solve Duhemian problems. When they do, they employ a logic and methodology which may be callederror statistics. I discuss the key properties of this approach which enable it to split off the task of testing (...) auxiliary hypotheses from that of appraising a primary hypothesis. By discriminating patterns oferror, this approach can at least block, if not also severely test, attempted explanations of an anomaly. I illustrate how this approach directs progress with Duhemian problems and explains how scientists actually grapple with them. (shrink)

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Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity toerror through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first-personal awareness, (...) in the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced. (shrink)

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In this paper, I argue that in order to explain our own moral reliability, we must provide a theory oferror for those who disagree with us. Any story that seeks to vindicate our own reliability must also explain how so many others have gone wrong, otherwise it is not actually a vindicatory story. Thus, we cannot claim to have vindicated our own moral reliability unless we can explain the unreliability of those who hold contrary beliefs. This, I show, (...) requires us to engage directly with cultural history, a topic which has been unfortunately obscured by the meta-ethicist’s near-exclusive focus on evolutionary challenges to moral belief. (shrink)

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Jonas Olson defends a moralerror theory in (2014). I will first argue that Olson is not justified in believing theerror theory as opposed to moral nonnaturalism in his own opinion. I will then argue that Olson is not justified in believing theerror theory as opposed to moral contextualism either (although the latter is not a matter of his own opinion).

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In this paper, I describe the main lines of modernerror theory, a systemic theory which regards errors not as the results of someone’s negligence, but as parts of a complex system. Bearing in mind that errors must be considered as such by an observer or attributor, I expose Wittgenstein’s conception of the attributor responsible for discerning if a strange event constitutes anerror or an anomaly. Subsequently, I illustrate this conception of the attributor by describing some traits (...) of the role played by many attributors in business organizations, specifically in the production line of a car manufacturer’s plant, when carrying out the rootcause analysis of problems that arise in the plant. Finally, I reveal a paradox whereby if the attributor denies the possibility that anomalies may happen without being able to explain their source within the system that he or she takes as reference, then the very idea of system no longer makes sense. (shrink)

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Recanati’s (2007, 2009) argues for a Lewisian subjectless view of the content of “implicit” de se thought, on the basis that we can thus better explain the phenomenon of immunity toerror through misidentification. The paper argues that this is not the case, and suggests that such a view is in tension with Recanati’s mental files approach to de re thought in general and the SELF concept in particular.

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Farbod Akhlaghi (2021) argues that noncognitivists and naturalists cannot explain the epistemic possibility of wholesale moralerror. This would show that noncognitivism and naturalism are false. I argue that noncognitivists and naturalists have no trouble explaining the epistemic possibility of wholesale moralerror and that the requirement to explain this possibility is plausible only on one particular conception of epistemic possibility.

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We report an empirical study of elementary algebra errors, conducted in three separate schools. The errors are diagnosed using mal‐rules, as proposed by Sleeman (1984, 1,985). Our analysis uncovers the following properties of algebra mal‐rules: The frequency of mal‐rules is severely skewed, there are many infrequent mal‐rules and few frequent ones; mal‐rules are very unstable, students typically use mal‐rules very irregularly; different mal‐rules have explanatory power in different schools (many of our most powerful mal‐rules are previously unreported); mal‐rule diagnosis Is (...) more successful with more skilled students; students' confidence ratings do not partition the total set of mal‐rules, every mal‐rule we find is associated with high confidence ratings by at least one student. The Implications of our data for cognitive theories oferror generation are discussed. Contrary to commonplace assumptions, we argue that It is impossible to make a clear distinction between slips and mistakes; most errors depend on properties of the knowledge base and the cognitive architecture. Errors In a procedural skill cannot be assumed to be purely syntactic In orgin. (shrink)

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Darwinian evolutionary theory has two key terms, variations and biological selection, which finally lead to survival of the fittest variant. With the rise of molecular genetics, variations were explained as results oferror replications out of the genetic master templates. For more than half a century, it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from randomerror-based events. But theerror replication narrative has problems explaining the sudden emergence of new species, new phenotypic traits, (...) and genome innovations as a sudden single event. Meanwhile, it is recognized that errors cannot explain the evolution of genetic information, genetic novelty, and complexity. Now, empirical evidence establishes the crucial role of non-random genetic content editors, such as viruses, diversity generating retroelements, and other RNA networks, to produce new genetic information, complex regulatory control, inheritance vectors, genetic identity, immunity, new sequence space, evolution of complex organisms, and evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

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