harveylederman.bsky.social
Professor of philosophy UTAustin. Philosophical logic, formal epistemology, philosophy of language, Wang Yangming.
www.harveylederman.com
158 posts
1,638 followers
366 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
crazy
comment in response to
post
Fantastic, thanks Christian! I've been hoping to see a version of the liberalism lecture especially, so I'll keep checking back :)
comment in response to
post
Will there be recordings?
comment in response to
post
You can just tag me Brett
comment in response to
post
Ah nice! We thought a bit about possible extensions to views that deny that objects can make the world better (incl my actual view), but in a short response there was only so much we could do!
comment in response to
post
Yes this sort of object which is irreplaceable because of personal attachment or experience raises somewhat different issues!
comment in response to
post
This is a new area for me, and I was lucky to work with Robbie and Adam as guides and mentors. The paper was the product of a number of fortuitous conversations (see the acknowledgement). It was rewarding to work on, and we hope it'll be a rewarding read as well! n/n
comment in response to
post
To learn more about this thought, I really hope you’ll check out the paper (it’s short!). Our work to make it precise involves a number of ideas that we hope will be useful to others working on a wide array of topics, well beyond the value of irreplaceable objects. 10/n
comment in response to
post
The idea is that (roughly) there’s value in diversity of values, i.e. the world is better to the extent that there are more different “types” of valuable things. This is an intuitively compelling idea, but it is hard to articulate exactly (what’s a “type”?). 9/n
comment in response to
post
But what about artificial cases where one is sure that there will be objects of this type, even if one of them is destroyed? That’s where our second idea comes in. 8/n
comment in response to
post
If there’s value in there being objects of this kind at all, then the expected cost of the loss of each object will also increase as the total number decreases. So, these facts about uncertainty naturally predict stronger reason to preserve each object as there are fewer! 7/n
comment in response to
post
Our account involves two ideas. The first is that typically if there are fewer objects in a class, destroying one of them leads to a larger loss of rational confidence that there will still be objects of this type than destroying one of them would lead to, if there were more. 6/n
comment in response to
post
Roughly, her idea is that, as there are fewer of the irreplaceable objects, their degree of irreplaceable value (not the amount) increases, and this underwrites stronger reason to preserve the objects. We think this view is *very* interesting, but we present an alternative. 5/n
comment in response to
post
Our paper responds to an important paper by Gwen Bradford (and Gwen personally helped us a lot!). She poses the above problem clearly, and argues that the best resolution of it involves a technical notion of degree of irreplaceable value. 4/n
philpapers.org/rec/BRAUIV
comment in response to
post
The intrinsic properties of the remaining works of art haven’t changed. Why should each work now count for more, just because there are fewer of them? 3/n
comment in response to
post
There’s a puzzle about the value of irreplaceable works of art. There are only so many Hokusai prints, and we can’t make more of them. As there are fewer of these prints, it seems we have stronger reason to preserve each of the remaining ones. But why should this be? 2/n
comment in response to
post
amazing
comment in response to
post
thank you for noticing :)
comment in response to
post
Eh, surely getting out of academia is a bullet dodged!
comment in response to
post
Name drops don't help: in the industry of knowledge production, someone who admits they know nothing *and* doesn't publish just can't survive
comment in response to
post
:)
comment in response to
post
I agree with Christian about this! (Though in writing the paper, I kept forgetting this issue, and Christian had to keep reminding me that I couldn't have this view!)
comment in response to
post
Haven't discussed this with my collaborators, and they may well disagree @christiantarsney.bsky.social...
comment in response to
post
the gamble's values aren't coming from any outcome's value (as I discuss at more length in Marbles and Matchsticks). I agree this isn't exactly what we say in this paper to motivate Negative Dominance, but I think it's what we wanted to get at with the notion of final value here.
comment in response to
post
But I wouldn't accept the particular model you offer to motivate a counterexample, since it explains the non-final value in terms of the expectation of various values-in-worlds, i.e. in terms of the pattern of those values across outcomes. To me this means...
comment in response to
post
Thanks for these very interesting comments, @bweatherson.bsky.social ! The abstract point that one can reject Negative Dominance by explaining comparative nonfinal value in terms of final-value-related facts if they're not comparative is a good one.
comment in response to
post
x.com/LongFormMath...
comment in response to
post
Thanks for the discussion @bweatherson.bsky.social! This looks fascinating. I'm traveling today, but look forward to working through this carefully later in the week.
comment in response to
post
I will tag philsky next time! I just completely forgot about that...
comment in response to
post
whoa! i knew this existed, but i would never look there! who knew
comment in response to
post
my whole feed is still US political news
comment in response to
post
roughly equivalent?
comment in response to
post
It's interesting! I would have predicted the opposite, given that my BlueSky is much more populated with academics...
comment in response to
post
I agree with Christian! The argument we give for Negative Dominance depends on the objects over which it's defined being the locus of final value (i.e. not lotteries). And I only think Negative Dominance is attractive in that case...
comment in response to
post
Will do!
comment in response to
post
These sorts of visits and groups really do make an impact on research. I feel very lucky to have had chances for this kind of collaboration! 9/9
comment in response to
post
This paper is a direct product of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT. Also, I wouldn’t have started working on these questions if I hadn’t had a visit at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute in 2022. 8/9
comment in response to
post
Christian and Dean pushed me to think about these questions in the context of the ethics of distribution and population, where the (slightly different) premises seem to me much harder to give up. In this case it seems to me an argument against incompleteness. 7/9
comment in response to
post
The paper was inspired by comments Dean and Christian independently gave me in response to my paper "Marbles and Matchsticks". In writing that paper, I thought that there just obviously could be cases of incomplete betterness.
philpapers.org/rec/LEDOMA-2
philpapers.org/rec/LEDIIA 6/8
comment in response to
post
Our argument relies instead on decision-theoretic "dominance" principles. We show that, if there are cases of incompleteness, two compelling dominance principles will conflict. The basic problem is stated in one page (p. 3) – it’s quick to get into: I encourage you to check it out!
comment in response to
post
We present a new argument against standard forms of incompleteness. Previous arguments to this effect have relied on controversial principles about borderline cases or about the connection between natural language comparatives and the relations of moral/prudential betterness. 4/9
comment in response to
post
Lots of philosophers have argued that betterness can be incomplete, that is, there can be pairs of lives or worlds, where neither is at least as good as the other. Such cases are also sometimes discussed under the heading of “incomparability”, “incommensurability”, or “parity”. 3/9
comment in response to
post
The deep hard work on this paper was really done by the great @christiantarsney.bsky.social, who we’ve been lucky to have at UT for the last few years. Christian is now headed to Toronto as an assistant professor. We’ll miss him here – he’s a rising star!
sites.google.com/view/christi... 2/9