What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them.

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Author

Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science.

Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673

https://a.co/d/iobiDIc

2. Book Summary

Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable.

The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes.

Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:56 - Overview of book

02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty

11:42 - Epistemology

13:33 - Vagueness

17:38 - First layer of error: raw data

29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual

50:25 - Third layer of error: social

1:10:46 - Recognizing error

1:22:34 - Resolving error

1:26:10 - Humans and history

1:29:18 - Useful biases

1:36:03 - Negative knowledge

1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction

1:47:42 - Value of philosophy

1:50:23 - Conclusion

What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Author

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb

2. Book Summary

Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.

The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way.

He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:43 - What is “discrimination”?

07:17 - Irrelevant features

10:48 - Framing the project

18:43 - Socially salient groups

23:44 - Connection with the law

26:49 - Empirical research

28:04 - Vagueness

33:12 - Political beliefs

35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination

38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination

43:35 - Statistical discrimination

46:24 - Different category?

48:41 - Structural discrimination

52:40 - Wrongful discrimination

55:09 - Rejoinder

1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts

1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts

1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts

1:19:16 - Monistic accounts

1:23:05 - Value of philosophy

1:27:10 - Conclusion

If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper “Without microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,” motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalām cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causation—specifically, whether “whatever begins to exist must have a cause”—or whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we don’t see arbitrary “raging tigers” popping into existence out of nowhere.

A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the Hobbes–Hume–Edwards–Pryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, we’d lack a good explanation for why things don’t begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that won’t do the work causal-principle defenders want.

Linford then develops an alternative picture—drawing on “neo-Russellian” themes—on which causation isn’t fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying “effective strategies” (a Cartwright-inspired point about intervention vs mere correlation). The upshot is that even if microphysical causation fails, it doesn’t follow that “anything goes”: what can begin to exist is still constrained by nomic (law-based), metaphysical, and logical principles, and those constraints can underwrite explanations of why tigers (etc.) don’t pop into existence. He also addresses a familiar objection to Humean-style views—why expect an “ordered continuation” of the mosaic rather than chaos—by appealing to Lewis-style similarity/“closeness” considerations (and related constraints on probability talk), arguing that the standard HPP-based worry doesn’t straightforwardly land.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Intro

00:30 - Overview

04:40 - How strong is the causal principle?

10:15 - The Hobbes-Edwards-Prior (HEP) principle

16:20 - Expecting chaos vs. no explanation

20:35 - What if explanation just runs out?

23:37 - Neo-Russellianism

32:30 - Fundamental physics

36:13 - Time asymmetries in fundamental physics?

40:49 - The main challenge to Neo-Russellianism

44:23 - Do microphysical things "begin to exist"?

51:33 - Law-based explanations without causation

57:22 - Are laws more mysterious than causes?

1:03:41 - The Neo-Humean response

1:14:35 - Where does metaphysical explanation end?

1:17:37 - Theological connections and brute facts

1:21:45 - Final thoughts

1:22:14 - Value of philosophy

1:24:30 - Conclusion

What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guests

Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

2. Book Summary

Battle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call “the Big Bang” is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial “bang” or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as “science’s earliest memory,” while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier “lost memory,” using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity.

The middle of the book is a guided tour through today’s rival “origin stories,” presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style “no boundary” beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired “big bounce” pictures, cyclic models, “born from a black hole” proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-creation/time-loop possibilities. A recurring theme is that the singularity is widely treated as a sign that our two great frameworks, quantum mechanics and general relativity, cannot both be straightforwardly applied at the earliest times, so any serious account has to confront quantum gravity head-on, even though there is no consensus (and sometimes “too many answers”) about what that looks like in detail.

In the final stretch, the book turns from “what might have happened” to “how could we ever know,” stressing the limits of what current headline instruments can actually tell us about the beginning. The authors note that even spectacular observatories like JWST are not designed to see back to the origin itself, and that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can directly observe, so ordinary telescopes hit a hard wall; to probe earlier than that, we likely need new “messengers,” especially primordial gravitational waves, and better ways of squeezing evidence out of subtle imprints on the sky. They also reflect on the sociology of foundational disputes, warning that scientific consensus is not the same thing as popularity, and that the “battle” can sometimes resemble factional conflict more than dispassionate evaluation. The upshot is deliberately modest: nobody yet knows what happened at the Big Bang, but the path forward is clearer than it used to be, because future observations could rule whole classes of models in or out.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Impetus for the book

07:12 - Historical background

09:01 - The Big Bang

15:22 - The meaning of “nothing”

15:43 - Quantifier vs. noun sense of nothing

18:22 - Almost nothing scenarios

23:37 - How theories bear on cosmic origins

28:47 - Concerns about multiverse theories

29:10 - Testability of multiverse models

34:05 - String theory and brane theory

39:25 - Could there be time before time?

39:59 - Limits of temporal concepts

43:43 - Two-direction time models

50:05 - Other models

54:01 - Are we on the cusp of a new cosmic revolution?

1:01:31 - Favorite cosmological models

1:04:36 - Connections to theology and the Kalam

1:09:30 - Conclusion

What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics.

Check out her book!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biotechnology-gestation-and-the-law-9780198873785

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198873786

2. Book Summary

In Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated.

Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be equality-enhancing for marginalized groups, but that it is a mistake to treat them as a simple “solution” for women’s equality; the more radical potential lies in “unsexing” generative labour and disrupting the assumption that gestation is inherently female.

Later chapters apply this framework to parenthood and abortion. Romanis examines why gestation has been used to anchor legal motherhood, and how that rationale becomes unstable once gestational work can be divided across people and machines (as in partial or complete ectogestation), creating new puzzles about who counts as a legal parent and when parental rights and responsibilities should begin. She emphasizes the importance of keeping clear boundaries that protect pregnant people, including carefully distinguishing entities undergoing extra-uterine gestation from fetuses, precisely to avoid expanding fetal-centred regulation of pregnancy. Finally, she argues that technologies enabling gestation do not change the morality of abortion when the harms of unwanted pregnancy are centred, but they are likely to generate politically motivated pressures on abortion provision because much ectogestation literature frames abortion as “the problem” rather than recognizing it as a response to unwanted pregnancy.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Overview

02:43 - Pregnancy vs. gestation

05:50 - Conceptual engineering

08:19 - Fetal relationship

13:13 - Legal metaphysics

14:43 - Gradual part-whole views

19:22 - Biotech and gestation

22:39 - Social and legal issues

25:59 - Uterus transplants

30:23 - Social narratives

36:44 - Biological essentialism

42:50 - Legal motherhood

49:03 - Biotech and abortion

58:53 - Abortion and metaphysics

01:01:04 - Reforming abortion law

01:11:36 - Value of philosophy

01:14:16 - Conclusion

What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/59446

https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X

2. Book Summary

Zahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition.

In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an irreducible plurality of perspectives is exactly what makes distinctive forms of being-with possible in the first place.

Parts II and III then explain how we-ness is built up through concrete interpersonal relations and can take multiple forms. Zahavi emphasizes empathy and second-person engagement as ways of encountering another that preserve otherness while enabling coordination and mutual “contact,” and he distinguishes this from mere imaginative perspective-taking; this sets the stage for his analysis of shared emotions and why “affective sharing” needs clearer criteria than simple emotional contagion or matching feelings. Finally, he maps “varieties of we,” moving from intimate dyads and triads to thicker communal and national identifications: larger-scale wes are highly mediated, shaped by norms and institutions, and often sustained through “us–them” demarcation—sometimes actively orchestrated by political forces—so understanding we-formation also means understanding the risks of overly exclusive group identification.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:07 - Overview

04:12 - Phenomenology

10:29 - "I" and "we"

13:03 - Worry

17:12 - Individualist bias

25:33 - Semantic variance

27:13 - More empirical research

29:26 - Individual and social aspects

33:49 - Data

38:05 - Husserl

44:27 - Primacy

51:49 - Higher order theories of consciousness

59:40 - Vagueness

1:07:36 - Group membership

1:12:39 - Empathy

1:19:17 - Collective intentionality

1:23:00 - Technology

1:28:55 - Artificial intelligence

1:31:45 - Value of philosophy

1:35:05 - Conclusion

What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Barry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws.

Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” problem to show that even stating the induction problem correctly requires constraints on which predicates/generalizations count as projectible.

In the final stretch, the interview broadens into the metaphysical question behind Loewer’s book-title riff on Hawking: what “breathes fire into the equations,” i.e., why this universe and this lawlike structure at all—and what the world (and knowers like us) must be like for physics to succeed. Loewer suggests physics can’t itself answer “why there is a universe” or “why there are laws,” since any such explanation would already presuppose laws (a theological answer might be possible, but it wouldn’t be a scientific one). He then connects laws to chance and time via the Albert–Loewer “Mentaculus” program: add a “Past Hypothesis” that the universe began in a very low-entropy state, combine it with the dynamical laws and a Boltzmann-style probability measure, and you get a package that yields objective chances and explains time’s arrow—what he calls a “probability map of the universe.”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Development of views about laws

15:15 - Two schools

26:37 - Popularity of non-Humean views

30:15 - Induction

38:15 - Further issues with induction

49:28 - What breathes fire into the equations?

1:01:25 - Background to the Mentaculus project

1:04:15 - Time

1:10:20 - Statistical mechanics

1:14:32 - Putting the Mentaculus package together

1:22:52 - Value of philosophy

1:35:57 - Conclusion

If humans are as irrational and “automatic” as some psychologists suggest, why does explaining what people believe and want still feel like the best way to understand what they do?

1. Guest

Emma Borg is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, although before that was for a long time Professor at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science. In this interview, we focus on her recent book, "Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology".

Check out her book!

https://academic.oup.com/book/58959

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNCYHXC5/

2. Book Summary

Emma Borg’s Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology argues that the familiar ‘common-sense psychology’ (CP) framework—explaining action via contentful mental states like beliefs and desires—remains broadly vindicated despite recent experimental and theoretical backlash. Borg characterizes CP as combining (i) a claim about action generation (typically, behaviour is caused “in the right way” by an agent’s reasons) and (ii) a claim about action understanding (typically, we explain and predict others by attributing mental states and inferring what those states should lead them to do). The book’s central aim is to resist the increasingly popular conclusion that “common-sense psychology is wrong” and to show that CP’s reach is much broader than “high days and holidays” cases of explicit deliberation.

The first half of the book takes on the Heuristics-and-Biases-inspired attacks on CP’s picture of decision-making. Borg distinguishes two strands: the No Reasons challenge, where heuristics are treated as automatic, “gut-feel” processes that bypass reasons altogether, and the Insufficient Reasons challenge, where people do consult reasons but in a biased, evidentially thin, or otherwise irrational way. She argues that defining heuristics as reasons-insensitive (or inferring that from their “fast, automatic” feel) is a mistake, and that much of the empirical case for endemic irrationality relies on contentious interpretations and methodological pitfalls (including concerns tied to replication, stability, and ecological validity). Overall, Borg’s conclusion on this side is that widespread heuristic reasoning does not by itself undermine CP’s general assumption of individual rationality and reasons-responsiveness.

The remainder of the book turns to CP’s second component—how we understand other people—and targets “deflationary” alternatives that try to explain social cognition without robust belief–desire attribution (e.g., behaviour-reading, mirror-neuron stories, “submentalizing,” or more “minimal” mentalizing). Borg argues that fully behaviour-reading approaches face serious empirical and theoretical problems, and that mid-ground views still don’t justify demoting CP to a niche role. Her final position is that deflationary resources may at most supplement CP (for certain developmental or special-purpose explanations), but they don’t supplant CP as the central, everyday framework for making sense of intentional action—so, taken together, the book concludes that common-sense psychology is broadly vindicated.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:47 - Overview of common-sense psychology

02:50 - Further consequences of view

06:38 - Intuitive view

10:51 - Kahneman and Tversky

18:35 - "No reasons" challenge

23:36 - "Insufficient reasons" challenge

29:39 - Vagueness

34:25 - Introspectable properties challenge

41:37 - Unconscious action

47:18 - Reasons-sensitivity

52:41 - Semantic issue

57:28 - Response to insufficient reasons

1:06:57 - Useful fictions

1:13:40 - Why read the book?

1:17:32 - Value of philosophy

1:19:54 - Conclusion

How can Nyāya philosophy teach us to argue better, spot bad reasoning, and still live well amid uncertainty?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College. His work focuses primarily on Indian philosophy. In this interview, we focus on his book, "Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well".

Check out his book!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG5ZTTCP/

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reason-in-an-uncertain-world-9780197634257

Check out his page!

https://www.youtube.com/@UCtmzNhD4qq9HZYKkqBV3C8A

2. Book Summary

Reason in an Uncertain World argues that Nyāya philosophers offer something modern “critical thinking” usually doesn’t: a unified picture of how reasoning and argumentation connect to living well. Keating starts from the fact that we now face an overwhelming stream of claims and controversies, and while people often look to “ancient wisdom” for emotional stability, they look elsewhere for tools to sort truth from fiction. Nyāya, he argues, can do both: it treats reasoning skills and debate practices as socially embedded ways of getting to truth and as crucial for leading happy, virtuous, meaningful lives.

The first half of the book develops Nyāya’s epistemology as a response to uncertainty and suffering. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage and introduces the Nyāya thought that understanding (especially epistemology) can relieve pain and suffering, orienting inquiry toward an “excellent” human goal; Keating illustrates this with Nyāya reflections on duḥkha and the attraction of a final state without pain and suffering. Chapters 2–6 then build a toolkit of “ways of knowing” (including perception, inference, and testimony), highlighting the idea of “certification” (reflectively checking that one really knows), the structure and varieties of inference (and how counterfeit inferences arise through pseudo-reasons), how to evaluate testimony and handle conflicting reports, and how doubt—especially doubt arising from controversy—can be a rational trigger for further inquiry rather than a skeptical dead-end.

The second half turns from knowing to arguing: how people should (and often do) reason together when disagreements become interpersonal. Nyāya distinguishes truth-seeking “discussion” from competitive formats like disputation (aimed at victory), and Keating uses that contrast to analyze fallacies, equivocations, misleading objections, and the “points of defeat” that explain how someone can lose a debate even without directly refuting their view. The closing chapter draws the ethical lesson: because real debates often mix truth-seeking with ego, politics, and high stakes, Nyāya thinkers sometimes allow even morally serious arguers to use less-than-ideal argumentative tactics in special circumstances—while still treating reasoned discourse as a practice that shapes (and is shaped by) character and virtue.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:59 - Overview of book

02:27 - Modern relevance

10:34 - Background of Nyāya

20:00 - Perception

25:44 - Concerns with perception

31:38 - Inference

36:40 - Probabilistic inferences

42:38 - Testimony

50:04 - Reasoning errors

58:34 - Doubt

1:07:56 - Debate and argumentation

1:15:00 - Wrangling

1:18:55 - Living well

1:25:04 - Value of philosophy

1:28:56 - Conclusion

Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Amir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language.

Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intentionality-deconstructed-9780198896432

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198896433

2. Book Summary

Horowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others.

The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks naturalistic reduction strategies: even if minds/languages stand in many causal/informational relations to the world, the reductive naturalist must explain what makes one of them the semantic/intentional relation, and Horowitz argues that the needed justification is unavailable—mere stipulation (“identify R with aboutness”) won’t get realism off the ground.

Having cleared the ground, Horowitz develops intentional anti-realism in detail. The negative thesis is that content ascriptions “in themselves” lack truth conditions, but he pairs this with a practice-dependence account: relative to a scheme/practice of content ascription, such ascriptions can be true/false—e.g., “Gödel” can “refer” to Gödel under a causal-historical practice or to Schmidt under a descriptivist practice, while outside any practice the right answer is “to no one.” He then explains why content talk can still be useful and often successful: content ascriptions carry logico-syntactic messages (structural commitments) that can be true/adequate even if their semantic “aboutness” message is not, and the predictive/explanatory payoff of folk psychology can be attributed to these structural patterns rather than to real intentional properties. Finally, he addresses objections like the “success” argument and the “cognitive suicide” worry by treating “claim that/believe that” talk as rhetorical/“quoted” within a radical revisionary framework, and he closes with an Ockham-style moral: since intentional properties are dispensable and unsupported, we should reject their instantiation altogether.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:39 - Overview

03:48 - Irrealism and anti-realism

04:57 - Concrete and abstract

07:31 - What is intentionality?

14:15 - Primitivism

19:00 - Relations

23:54 - Phenomenal intentionality

28:20 - Representationalism

31:23 - Introspection and intuition

37:46 - Too skeptical?

47:40 - Empirical research

57:23 - Arguments against intentionality

1:04:09 - Another option?

1:15:58 - Truth

1:19:35 - Success of intentional theories

1:23:33 - Challenges

1:31:12 - Value of philosophy

1:33:38 - Conclusion

Can ethics be fully naturalistic while still explaining why moral reasons genuinely have authority over us?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

David Copp is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and his work has focused on moral and political philosophy.

Check out his new book, "Ethical Naturalism and the Problem of Normativity"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ethical-naturalism-and-the-problem-of-normativity-9780197601587

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPGFFK2W

2. Book Summary

David Copp frames the book around what he takes to be metaethics’ central puzzle: the ‘problem of normativity’. He wants a theory-neutral grip on what needs explaining when we say that reasons, oughts, and values are ‘normative’, and he treats this as a problem not just for ethical realism in general, but especially for ‘ethical naturalism’. The worry is straightforward: if normative facts are what would make basic moral claims true, it’s hard to see how such facts could fit into a world that we learn about through experience and science—since it doesn’t look like experience (ordinary or scientific) can simply reveal that (say) torture is wrong or compassion is a virtue.

To make the dispute precise, Copp develops an ‘empirical criterion’ of the natural: roughly, a property counts as natural only if no synthetic truth about its instantiation is ‘strongly a priori’—so, for the naturalist, substantive basic ethical truths (if any) must be empirically defeasible. He then maps the space of ethical naturalisms: non-reductive views (often cast in terms of grounding/supervenience) versus reductive views, and within reductionism, ‘analytic’ versus ‘non-analytic’ versions—where he explicitly favors the non-analytic, metaphysical-analysis approach. Along the way he argues that to take the normativity problem seriously, it’s not enough to say ethical facts are natural (or grounded in natural facts); we need some reductive story of what ‘robust normativity’ itself consists in.

The second half of the book tests concrete proposals: he reviews several substantive naturalist options (including Cornell-style views, the Canberra Plan, neo-Humean and neo-Aristotelian approaches, and his ‘Pluralist-Teleology’) and then answers major objections (the ‘is/ought gap’, Parfit-style challenges, and the “just too different” intuition). A recurring verdict is that non-reductive naturalisms like Cornell Realism may be compatible with naturalism, but they don’t by themselves deliver a philosophically satisfying account of robust normativity, because they don’t provide the needed reductive explanation of what normativity is. Copp presents ‘Pluralist-Teleology’ as the most promising route: very roughly, basic ethical truths are grounded in facts about which systems of standards would best help humans solve different ‘problems of normative governance’—with morality tied in particular to the ‘problem of sociality’ and an ‘ideal moral code’ understood in those terms.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:39 - Overview of book

05:59 - The problem of normativity

12:59 - Normativity

19:17 - Formal vs. robust normativity

22:53 - Robust normavity

30:41 - Authoritativeness

35:35 - Categorizing theories

41:18 - Empirical research

50:39 - Normative conceptualism

54:05 - Analytic naturalism

1:09:32 - Plausible normative theories

1:15:10 - Parity thesis

1:18:50 - Nominalism

1:24:14 - Metaphysical naturalism

1:28:51 - Non-naturalist realism

1:33:00 - Non-primitivist non-naturalism

1:37:37 - Error theory

1:41:13 - Non-cognitivism

1:46:37 - Disunified moral semantics

1:50:12 - Natural properties

1:54:26 - Metaphysical characterization

1:56:24 - Counterexamples?

2:01:10 - Nature of normative properties

2:05:54 - What are these properties?

2:07:55 - Relation between natural properties and ethical properties

2:13:47 - Supervenience

2:21:48 - Frank Jackson’s direct argument

2:27:55 - Subjectivist neo-Humeanism

2:34:39 - Is it realist?

2:38:37 - Neo-Aristotelian naturalism

2:43:37 - Potential objections

2:49:03 - Pluralist teleology

2:53:05 - Desire-dependent again?

2:59:11 - Is-ought gap

3:04:34 - Bilgrami’s pincer argument

3:16:51 - “Just too different” objection

3:23:03 - Upshots

3:26:21 - Value of philosophy

3:29:03 - Conclusion

Craige Roberts explains how formal semantics and pragmatics model meaning by tracking context, presupposition, and modality to show why what we say depends so deeply on discourse structure.

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Craige Roberts is Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University. Her work has focused on the philosophy of language, primarily on formal semantics and pragmatics.

2. Interview Summary

Craige Roberts is introduced as a leading figure in formal semantics and pragmatics, with work on topics like modal subordination, anaphora, and the way context shapes interpretation. In the interview, the emphasis is repeatedly on using explicit, formal tools (in the Montague-style tradition the host flags) to build increasingly good models of linguistic data—models that make predictions you can test and then refine.

A central thread is how Roberts thinks about the semantics/pragmatics boundary: rather than treating pragmatics as an unstructured “everything else,” the discussion treats it as something that can itself be modeled, especially once you track context, discourse goals, and what counts as an appropriate contribution in conversation. This comes out as the host contrasts “more ‘formal’ approaches” with speech-act frameworks (with John Searle as the reference point) and presses on whether there’s any deep tension here. A related point that’s explicitly highlighted is that for certain expressions—like epistemic modals—you can’t just “read off” the relevant domain without knowing the conversational setting.

From there, the conversation spotlights several of Roberts’s hallmark topics: the possible-worlds way of modeling propositional content (the host frames this in a Stalnaker-style key and asks how much metaphysics about “possible worlds” the framework really commits you to), and how that connects to context dependence in modal talk. The host also brings up her work on presupposition “triggers” and “projection,” and then pivots to the broader philosophy-adjacent question of how (or whether) we can infer ontological commitments just from the semantics of natural language—where Roberts is described as comparatively conservative about what semantics alone can settle.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:33 - Overview of field

20:01 - Pragmatic vs. formal semantics

53:59 - Searle’s taxonomy

58:29 - Speech act theory

1:06:51 - Formal pragmatics

1:13:59 - Propositions

1:23:45 - Necessary propositions

1:35:49 - Probabilities

1:41:23 - Might and must

1:56:44 - Presupposition and projection

2:20:39 - Existential language

2:25:38 - Open challenges

2:37:56 - Amazing capacities

2:42:53 - Value of philosophy

2:46:57 - Conclusion

What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind.

Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!"

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz

2. Book Summary

Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory.

A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say.

The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - The hard problem

06:51 - Dualism

10:06 - Panpsychism

12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders

15:28 - Modal structure

24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology

27:22 - Description-sensitivity

32:00 - Identity

34:52 - Type identity theory

36:27 - Boltzmann brains

39:17 - Correlations vs. identity

43:54 - Phenomenal concepts

45:56 - Zombies and inverts

50:07 - A priori reasoning

51:47 - Color experience

57:38 - Are colors real?

1:02:39 - Other senses

1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness

1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states

1:12:29 - Animal consciousness

1:15:48 - Vagueness

1:16:55 - Functionalism

1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence

1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach

1:25:51 - Progress

1:27:11 - Value of philosophy

1:28:32 - Conclusion

Can sentence meaning be built up locally from the meanings of words and their modes of combination, without positing a separate intermediate “logical form” to do the interpretive work?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Polly Jacobson is Professor of Linguistics at Brown University, where she has been a professor for many years. Her work focuses on linguistics and formal semantics, and especially on the formal tools needed to model the syntactic and semantic systems of natural languages.

2. Interview Summary

After the introductions, Polly Jacobson (Brown University) and the host of Friction move straight into compositionality: the idea (roughly) that sentence meanings are determined by the meanings of their parts plus the rules for putting those parts together. Jacobson treats some compositionality as non-negotiable, but emphasizes that the real controversies concern how much compositionality natural language exhibits, what the composition rules are, and how the topic developed into a live research program rather than a slogan.

From there, the interview centers on Jacobson’s “direct compositionality” approach by contrasting it with an “indirect” picture where syntax first generates an intermediate representation (often described as a kind of “logical form”) and semantics interprets that representation afterward. The direct-compositional alternative aims to avoid that intermediate interpretive layer and keep syntax and semantics working in tighter tandem. This leads into the “degrees” or “types” of direct compositionality: at the strong end, syntax is (in a sense) “blind” to structure and semantics does the interpretive work; at weaker ends, syntax is allowed more operations—without collapsing back into the idea that it’s merely producing a logical form for semantics to read off.

A recurring payoff claim is that direct compositionality helps preserve local interpretation—making it clearer how meaning can be built up step-by-step without global “repair.” In that spirit, they discuss why an operation like infixation (letting substrings/phrases combine in more flexible ways) might be needed to prevent a syntax–semantics mismatch where some structural piece “should” get an interpretation but can’t under stricter locality constraints—while also noting how quickly things could become unwieldy if the system allowed unlimited iterations of such operations. The conversation also links the view to processing considerations: if humans don’t wait until the end of a sentence to interpret it, a direct-compositional framework can look like a natural fit, whereas denying it may require extra theory to explain incremental understanding. The interview closes with Jacobson on open problems and on the broader value of theorizing about language—even if models idealize a messy phenomenon, there’s real intellectual and explanatory value in trying to understand complex systems better.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Direct compositionality

09:45 - Misconception

12:46 - Direct vs. indirect compositionality

22:02 - Cross-serial dependencies and infixation

32:07 - Example with infixation

35:48 - Motivation for direct compositionality

40:07 - Language without direct compositionality?

51:26 - Language processing

56:48 - Complicated syntax and direct compositionality

1:00:15 - Degrees of direct compositionality?

1:01:00 - What more might be needed?

1:06:41 - Donkey sentences

1:11:58 - More motivations for direct compositionality

1:15:08 - Analogy to logic

1:17:26 - Idioms and locality

1:26:13 - Challenges to view

1:28:17 - Value of linguistics

1:32:47 - Idealization

1:34:54 - Conclusion

What really makes a behavior a social norm, and how can measuring people’s expectations about what others do and approve of help us change it?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Cristina Bicchieri is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program.

2. Interview Summary

Bicchieri starts by pushing back against how loose and “catch-all” talk of social norms can be—especially definitions that treat a norm as simply “what people commonly do.” Instead, she frames social norms as genuinely social rules of behavior: shared within a group (sometimes local, sometimes society-wide) and “alive” in the sense that they’re sustained by what people expect of one another. On her view, two kinds of expectations matter—empirical expectations about what others do, and normative expectations about what others think one ought to do—and a behavior counts as governed by a social norm only when people’s preference to comply is conditional on those expectations. A key selling point is that this makes norms testable: you can measure the relevant expectations and the conditionality, which in turn makes norm talk more predictive and scientifically usable.

From there she emphasizes both the psychology and the methodology. Psychologically, she notes that many everyday norms function like default rules: we often follow them automatically because they coordinate social life and spare us constant deliberation (her example is familiar “greeting” behavior like handshaking). Methodologically, she’s interested in detecting conditionality rather than just asking people what they personally endorse. So she stresses the importance of specifying the relevant reference group, then measuring empirical and normative expectations (via surveys), and then using vignette designs to reduce “experimenter demand” and to see whether predicted behavior shifts across different combinations of “most people do X” and “most people approve of X.” Those off-diagonal cases let her test what happens when descriptive and normative signals conflict—and she reports that, in her data, descriptive/empirical expectations typically “win the day”: when people believe most others do something, that tends to guide what they’ll do even if they also think most others don’t approve.

A big theme in the latter part of the interview is application: if policymakers want to shift behavior, they need a clearer picture of the “cognitive plumbing” behind how people interpret social information. She treats “norm nudging” as a kind of black box—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—and points to systematic asymmetries in the inferences people draw from descriptive vs. approval messages, depending on whether the behavior is seen as positive or negative. She also highlights how crucial it is to target the right reference network: in a successful intervention aimed at curbing antibiotic overprescribing, the message was framed around what the majority of doctors in London do, so recipients couldn’t dismiss it as irrelevant. At the same time, she warns that you can’t design good interventions if you misclassify behaviors: in work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on open defecation in India, she found it wasn’t a social norm at all but a widely shared custom, which changes what it would take to replace it with a toilet-usage norm. She also connects this to why norm change is hard: trendsetters and tipping points exist, but thresholds are difficult to know in advance, so we can often explain change better than we can predict it. Finally, she notes that messaging can backfire when it clashes with what people observe locally—prompting a “pragmatic” (suspicious) rather than “semantic” (straightforward) interpretation—before closing with a defense of philosophy’s analytic mindset as a real asset for doing this kind of careful conceptual and empirical work.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:00 - What are social norms?

05:23 - Formal definition

12:42 - Context

16:14 - Beliefs

19:52 - Empirical research

28:34 - Inferences and norm nudging

32:20 - Historical development

36:04 - Game theory

40:56 - Norms and normativity

44:28 - Changing social norms

49:49 - Too broad?

52:42 - Upshots of account

56:50 - Open questions

1:00:12 - Value of philosophy

1:01:52 - Conclusion

A probing conversation with Graham Oppy on why classical arguments for God often fail to establish their intended conclusions, and on how pragmatics, metaphysics, and Bayesian reasoning shape debates in philosophy of religion.

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.

2. Interview Summary

Graham Oppy (a philosophy of religion professor at Monash University) begins by describing how he lost his childhood Christianity around age 12–13, then—after reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography as a teenager—decided he wanted a life in philosophy. From there, several questions press him on “existential inertia” and classical theistic arguments: he says the label covers different theses, but in the basic sense—if something exists at a time and nothing intervenes to destroy it, it continues to exist—he accepts it (not as a special force, just as the idea that things don’t pop out of existence without a cause or reason). In a related exchange about agency, he’s skeptical of “agents without mechanisms,” arguing that positing such a category is theoretically costly (it multiplies kinds of agents without clear explanatory payoff), whereas ordinary organisms act via mechanisms, and our intuitions about “mechanism-free” agency are both fallible and malleable. He also flags a physicalist/identity-theory picture on which mental states just are brain states, dissolving certain “mysteries” about mind–body correlation.

On religious language and theological discourse, he dismisses A. J. Ayer–style verificationism as self-undermining, and he’s likewise unconvinced by some later “Wittgensteinian” moves in philosophy of religion. A concrete example he uses is Norman Malcolm’s famous line that it can be conversationally odd to say “I believe” when one knows; Oppy follows H. P. Grice in treating this as pragmatics (a norm of being maximally informative), not as evidence that knowledge fails to entail belief. He also notes that the thought that God-talk is “meaningless” because “God” lacks meaning is now rarely defended in academic philosophy, though he mentions Michael Martin as flirting with the idea. And he emphasizes that theological traditions diverge sharply over whether we can form any positive conception of divine attributes: he contrasts approaches associated with Thomas Aquinas (and some early Muslim thinkers) with post-Reformation Protestant traditions that treat “omnipotence,” “omniscience,” and “perfect goodness” as more literally and directly graspable. Stepping back, he suggests philosophy of religion is plural and somewhat siloed: he points to both analytic and continental work (including colleagues and Jacques Derrida–influenced strands), but doubts there will be much integration given how far apart the subfields’ aims and methods can be.

When the discussion turns to what counts as a “good case” for theism, he recommends thinking in a cumulative-evidence style associated with Richard Swinburne: rather than expecting a single knockdown proof, you weigh a wide range of considerations (evil, the existence of the universe, and so on), and many of the relevant “data” will overlap across different theistic religions. On specific doctrines, he argues that even if one claims God’s omniscience is “non-propositional,” it still appears to commit you to the truth of a vast range of propositions, so the maneuver may not change as much as advertised. On classical arguments, he distinguishes (i) whether a conclusion is actually a logical consequence of the premises from (ii) whether the premises are true; and he reiterates his view (from Arguing About Gods) that, at least for the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways, the intended conclusion does not follow from the stated premises (and he’s unsure, on the spot, how much he said about the fourth and fifth). Finally, in a later exchange about Bayesian reasoning, he voices familiar worries about “subjective Bayesianism”: in empirical domains with lots of data, priors (within limits) tend to wash out, but in data-poor areas, demanding precise numerical credences can feel arbitrary because we lack the kind of evidence that would drive convergence.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:14 - What got you into philosophy

01:11 - Existential inertia

04:53 - Ultimate causal explanations

15:34 - Psychophysical harmony

22:11 - Religious language

27:05 - Religious epistemology

35:48 - God's knowledge

37:46 - Validity of the five ways

40:01 - Understanding God

42:20 - Ignosticism

48:04 - Continental philosophy of religion

53:02 - Fracturing of academia/education

57:45 - Fine-tuning

1:03:40 - Subjective bayesianism

1:06:46 - General model of inquiry

1:10:02 - Münchhausen trilemma

1:15:43 - Conclusion

Can getting more information ever make a rational agent worse off, not better, once you factor in real-world costs, group disagreement, and the way inquiry can change the very decision you face?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Ted Seidenfeld is Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and his work focuses on decision theory, statistics, and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Seidenfeld frames the conversation around a classic decision-theoretic result associated with Jack Good: in a simplified Bayesian/expected-utility setting, if there is an experiment whose possible outcomes would rationally lead you to act differently, then (given a “free” chance to learn) it is instrumentally rational to delay and gather that information, since it has expected value precisely by guiding action. But his main aim is to stress that this is a mathematical theorem with substantive assumptions, and once you relax them the “value of information” conclusion can flip: additional information can, by your current lights, predictably make decision-making worse rather than better.

He then walks through several ways those assumptions fail. One route is social: if the “agent” is really a group with multiple probability/utility perspectives, new evidence can surface latent disagreements and turn prior unanimity into polarization, forcing compromises that both parties regard as worse than the pre-inquiry choice, which raises the question of whether inquiry is worth it when it predictably destabilizes collective action. Another route concerns what counts as ‘cost-free’ information: if your utilities include valuing uncertainty (the theater mystery example), information can be costly simply by spoiling an experience. He also emphasizes ‘moral hazard’ and ‘act–state dependence’, where the very act of setting up or pursuing inquiry changes the relevant state of the world (or your future dispositions), so dominance-style reasoning breaks down and the Good-style theorem no longer applies.

The discussion later uses Newcomb’s paradox as a case study: Seidenfeld notes that two-boxing looks dominant unless you are prepared to endorse choice-dependent conditional probabilities (the “reverse” conditionals), and he argues that a predictor’s track record by itself does not automatically justify those probabilities. He presses the point with a market/auction thought experiment about selling ownership of the “one-box” outcome, meant to test whether the purported conditionals genuinely guide action. From there he pivots to a deeper worry about agency: too much self-knowledge (for example, knowing you are an expected-utility maximizer with fixed probabilities/utilities) threatens the idea that you face live options at all, and he is skeptical about assigning probabilities to your own acts in a decision problem. He finally situates these tensions historically via Kenneth Arrow and Leonard J. Savage, suggesting that attempts to generalize Bayesian rationality from individuals to cooperative groups (even under a unanimity constraint) run into impossibility-style pressures that leave “compromise” looking unstable unless you relax parts of the Savage framework.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Is ignorance bliss?

11:22 - Cost-free information

16:22 - Sample case

19:27 - Moral hazard

27:20 - Newcomb’s problem

38:25 - Dominance argument

44:07 - Deliberation and prediction

48:32 - Causalist rejoinder

50:32 - Variation

55:27 - Paying to avoid cost-free information

59:19 - Simpson’s paradox

1:07:57 - Group decisions

1:22:58 - Imprecise preferences

1:25:21 - Imprecise credences

1:27:52 - Other models

1:39:01 - Causal bayesian networks

1:43:49 - What does caustion add

1:48:57 - Relevance

1:51:27 - Backward intervention

1:54:02 - Application to groups

1:59:27 - Sleeping beauty problem

2:10:02 - Thirder argument

2:14:12 - Halfer solution

2:15:55 - Ambiguity of ‘’now’‘

2:18:00 - Betting odds

2:26:00 - Value of philosophy

2:29:57 - Conclusion

Can we keep everything that makes mathematics rigorous by treating it as the study of possible structures, without committing to a mysterious realm of abstract objects?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Geoffrey Hellman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and metaphysics.

2. Interview Summary

Geoffrey Hellman frames the philosophy of (pure) mathematics as a contest between a default “objectivist” or Platonist picture—where mathematics is about abstract objects—and a structuralist impulse that treats mathematics as primarily about patterns of relations rather than special entities. They note how, after Richard Dedekind and David Hilbert, this structuralist thought was often sidelined by approaches that re-centered “definite objects,” most notably in Principia Mathematica and related work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Hellman’s guiding complaint is the familiar epistemic worry: if mathematical objects are outside space, time, and causation, what could ground our knowledge of them—so the philosophical pressure is to keep what’s powerful in mathematics without buying a mysterious ontology.

Against that background, the Hellman reconstructs the route to “modal structuralism” by weaving together historical foundations work and a modal turn. They highlight the need for a rigorous account of the structuralist idea that axioms characterize any system of objects interrelated in the right way (rather than a single privileged domain), an idea they connect to Howard Stein and especially to Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that foundations should explicitly use necessity/possibility talk—mathematics as the study of possible structures. They then use set theory as the main case study, sketching the standard ZFC story associated with Ernst Zermelo (plus choice) and Abraham Fraenkel (replacement), and motivating an “indefinite extensibility” picture: any given model can be extended to a bigger one, so there’s no coherent “standing outside” all of them at once.

Finally, Hellman contrasts this with “face-value” Platonist structuralisms—especially Stuart Shapiro’s ante rem approach—and argues that they inherit a version of Paul Benacerraf’s permutation/uniqueness worries: even if you grant abstract positions, you can permute them (e.g., swap 2 and 3) and get an equally good “number structure,” with no non-arbitrary fact to pick the intended one. On the Hellman’s modal view, the point of arithmetic, set theory, etc. is preserved by talking only about what could exist (structures satisfying the axioms), not about a realm of abstract objects—making the view attractive to nominalist-leaning philosophers and close in spirit to functionalist attitudes about theoretical commitments.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Overview

08:41 - History and development

59:21 - Motivating the view

1:25:38 - Modal structuralism

1:48:53 - Proposed semantics

1:54:30 - Other abstracta

2:03:20 - Logical possibilities

2:11:08 - Logical truths and nominalism

2:20:36 - Compatibility with other views

2:23:50 - Indispensability arguments

2:37:47 - Non-classical mathematics

2:58:30 - Classical mathematics with non-classical logic

3:01:56 - Value of philosophy

3:13:30 - Conclusion

How did a little-known 17th-century physician help shape Cartesian philosophy after René Descartes by trying to complete its account of the mind, the body, and their union?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on 17th century philosophy, and he has a variety of published works in this area.

Check out his book, "The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-good-cartesian-9780197671719

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197671713

2. Book Summary

Steven Nadler’s The Good Cartesian tells the story of how Louis de La Forge—a young provincial physician—helped René Descartes’s philosophy become a dominant “new” paradigm in the decades after 1650. Nadler opens with the broader French and European backdrop: institutional anxiety about “philosophical novelties” and the way Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional Scholastic frameworks, especially in sensitive theological contexts. Against that setting, Nadler argues that La Forge’s role has been underappreciated: not only is he a key early figure in debates about occasionalism, but he is also central to how second-generation Cartesians tried to complete, correct, and extend Descartes’s system while still presenting themselves as faithful disciples.

The book then reconstructs La Forge’s life, networks, and projects in detail, showing how a thinker working far from Paris nonetheless became deeply involved in the Cartesian movement—through local intellectual milieus, ties to Cartesian promoters, and access to manuscripts and correspondence. Nadler portrays La Forge as “the most loyal of all Cartesians,” someone who wanted to articulate not just what Descartes said but what Descartes would have said if he’d lived longer, done more anatomical work, and absorbed later scientific developments. The heart of Nadler’s historical case is that there had never been a single sustained study of La Forge’s main contributions: (i) his role in illustrating and commenting on the first French edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664) and (ii) his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, which aims to finish Descartes’s account of the human being by treating the mind and its relation to body.

Finally, Nadler offers a chapter-by-chapter philosophical analysis of what La Forge actually adds to Cartesianism—especially in philosophy of mind and causation: the nature of the Cartesian mind, the mind–body union, occasionalist explanations, the mechanics of bodies, mind–motion interaction, and the structure of ideas and volitions. A central theme is La Forge’s attempt to demystify “union” by treating it as a stable, law-like reciprocity between mental and bodily states grounded in God’s instituted order, not as some further metaphysical glue; on this view, union persists as long as the relevant capacities for coordinated interaction remain. In the conclusion, Nadler argues that La Forge’s overall position is subtle: while bodies (as mere extension) are passive and so push La Forge toward strong divine-causation claims about bodily motion, La Forge simultaneously insists that the mind is active and (in an important sense) causally efficacious over its own thoughts and volitions—yielding something closer to a “conservationist” picture for the mind than a fully thoroughgoing occasionalism.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:59 - Overview

04:03 - Historical factors

06:35 - Importance of other figures

08:11 - Eucharist

13:36 - Louis de La Forge

15:27 - Treatise on Man

19:04 - Commentary

21:04 - Motivation

21:54 - What is a “good Cartesian”?

27:19 - Treatise on the human mind

33:32 - Causation

37:24 - Occasionalism

40:48 - Partial occasionalism

42:13 - Why does only God have this power?

47:33 - Is the view coherent?

50:00 - Other potential contributions

51:39 - Pineal gland

55:01 - Immortality of the soul

57:33 - Value of philosophy

59:27 - Conclusion

How far can arguments like the Grim Reaper paradox, divine conceptualism, and the problem of evil really take us in deciding whether theism is philosophically credible?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Alex Malpass's work focuses on philosophical logic, philosophy of time, philosophy of physics, and more. His website is https://useofreason.wordpress.com/, and he runs the Thoughtology YouTube channel.

2. Interview Summary

Alex explains that his route into philosophy was basically driven by curiosity: as a kid he read a book of “great philosophers,” latched onto Socrates as a model of irreverent questioning, and then just kept following whatever topics struck him as interesting. He emphasizes that he approaches philosophy as an independent hobby—doing it because it’s fun rather than because he’s representing an institution or defending a fixed “doctrinal” package—so he’s comfortable treating big debates (including the ‘fine-tuning argument’) as open-ended problems where you can explore multiple frameworks without having to “take a view on everything.”

The first major topic is the ‘Grim Reaper paradox’ (presented as a descendant of a “Benedetti/Benedetti paradox” in the transcript): Alex walks through how you can set up an infinite sequence of “reapers” (or triggers) arranged so that any given event is prevented by an earlier one, and yet there’s no first event—pushing you toward an inconsistent description of what happens. He discusses why this is often taken to be evidence against an actually infinite past, and he engages an objection that uses a kind of “copy-and-paste”/recombination principle (if one reaper-scenario is possible, why not infinitely many?), explaining how the paradox is meant to show that certain infinite constructions you might have thought were coherent actually aren’t.

From there the conversation broadens into several connected philosophy-of-religion disputes. On abstract objects, he discusses the move to ‘divine conceptualism’—treating things like mathematical truths as ideas in God’s mind—and sketches a critique that leans on intentionality: if thoughts are essentially about something, then we still owe an account of what a “divine thought” is about without silently reintroducing the very abstracta we were trying to explain. He then turns to the problem of evil and “perfect being” expectations, arguing that re-describing evil as a privation (often associated with Augustine) doesn’t really touch the evidential force of suffering, and he discusses what a “defense” needs to accomplish (logical consistency rather than plausibility) while also criticizing aspects of traditional Christian narrative like inherited guilt. He also touches modal issues (including ‘modal collapse’ and skepticism about God knowing counterfactuals for merely possible situations), and ends with remarks about Alvin Plantinga–style evolutionary worries: he’s cautious about quick debunking stories, stressing that rationality looks like a gradual capacity that can be repurposed and amplified culturally over time. Summary based on the provided transcript.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:46 - What got you into philosophy?

03:28 - Grim Reaper paradox

13:34 - Omniscience and infinity

16:16 - Lord of non-contradiction

25:15 - Other divine conceptualist views

27:30 - Non-propositional knowledge

29:26 - Platonism and naturalism

36:10 - Intentionality of phenomenal states

36:52 - Divine simplicity

37:45 - Principle of sufficient reason

47:26 - Argument against Christianity

55:20 - Privation theory of evil

1:01:00 - Transworld depravity

1:10:55 - Evolutionary argument against naturalism

1:21:50 - Act and potency

1:28:30 - Is "existence" a predicate?

1:29:58 - Free will

1:35:22 - Conclusion

Can the strange “odd universe” result be defused by rethinking how parts, wholes, and counting fit together, rather than by giving up on common-sense mereology?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Meg Wallace is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky, and specialize in metaphysics and ontology.

Check out her book, "Parts and Wholes"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C94RMGVM

2. Book Summary

In Parts and Wholes, Meg Wallace uses the “odd universe argument” as a hook: from a small package of seemingly intuitive assumptions about parthood, composition, and counting, you can (purportedly) derive a priori that the universe contains an odd number of things—a conclusion that feels both wild and philosophically revealing. She treats that “something has gone weirdly wrong” reaction as a diagnostic tool: it pushes us to locate which assumption (or background method) is responsible, and Section 1 supplies the needed toolkit—basic mereology plus plural-logic resources for talking carefully about “the parts, taken together” versus “the whole.”

Section 2 turns to two big structural questions: composition (building up) and decomposition (breaking down). On the composition side, Wallace frames the Special Composition Question (SCQ) and walks through the familiar triad: universalism (“always” compose), nihilism (“never” compose), and moderation (“sometimes” compose). Universalism threatens to look “ontologically explosive,” but she sketches ways it can be tamed—e.g., by identifying the right sums with ordinary objects, or by pairing it with a view that preserves parsimony (eventually, her favored route goes through composition-as-identity). Nihilism gets its standard “arranged mug-wise” style defense and the idea that ordinary talk can still work without rampant error theory, while also facing serious worries about self-defeat if there are, strictly speaking, no speakers, utterances, or other composites. Moderation is initially tempting, but Wallace presses the familiar problems: proposed conditions for composition can look arbitrary or anthropocentric, and once vagueness/jumpiness enters, you risk getting a pervasive indeterminacy about how many things there are. On the decomposition side, she asks whether reality bottoms out in finitely many simples (one of the odd-universe assumptions), infinitely many simples, or gunk; and she shows how changing these “all the way down” options can generate further surprising cardinality results (e.g., pressures toward uncountably many objects).

Section 3 argues (with “a healthy bias”) for composition as identity (CI) and uses it to reframe what looked like runaway ontological commitments: if the whole just is the parts (in the relevant plural sense), then universalism can be “ontologically innocent,” double-counting worries dissolve, and familiar puzzles about coincidence and overdetermination lose their bite. But CI attracts “numerical” objections (cardinality, counting-style arguments, and puzzles involving “is-one-of” plus Leibniz’s Law), and Wallace’s core reply is methodological: our standard, singular way of counting bakes in the very “extra object” result that makes CI look impossible, so we should reconsider how numerical predicates attach—moving away from singular counting toward an alternative (she discusses “relative counting”). In the Conclusion she makes her preferred diagnosis explicit: accept simples, unrestricted composition (universalism), and count—but deny that count commits us to singular counting—and accept CI (rejecting “composition is not identity”), which blocks the odd-universe derivation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Book on mereology

02:45 - Odd universe argument

10:35 - Finitely many simples?

16:14 - Unrestricted composition

25:52 - Different senses of “object”

28:30 - Composition as identity

35:46 - Different properties

41:18 - Perdurantism

45:35 - Modal parts

50:05 - Worries

55:57 - Modal views

59:52 - Indeterminate constitution

1:03:26 - Problem of the many

1:10:20 - More objects?

1:18:21 - Value of philosophy

1:19:55 - Conclusion

What makes a scientific category more than a convenient label, and when do our classifications really track the causal structure of the world?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science, as well as some work on classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy.

Check out his book in Cambridge Elements on "Natural Kinds"!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/natural-kinds/8CA215EA3A1878FC4856B84E28F4C447

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009005065

2. Book Summary

Khalidi argues that science can’t even get off the ground without classifying its subject matter, and that a central aim of scientific taxonomy is to carve reality “at the joints” by identifying categories that correspond to natural kinds. Adopting a broadly naturalist stance, the book treats scientific practice as a (defeasible) guide to what kinds there are, while still allowing that scientists can misclassify, over-lump, or over-split. The overall structure reflects that agenda: it first lays out metaphysical background (what “natural” amounts to, realism vs. anti-realism, and pluralism), then compares leading theories of kinds, then distinguishes different kinds of kinds, and finally tests the resulting framework on concrete scientific case studies.

In evaluating theories, Khalidi highlights a widely accepted constraint on bona fide scientific categories: projectibility—roughly, whether membership in the category supports nontrivial induction (e.g., from “x is beryllium” to further expectations about melting point, etc.). He then argues that traditional essentialism and even more recent “homeostatic property cluster” approaches can be too restrictive, especially when mechanisms are absent, multiple, or not what really explains a category’s stability. In place of these, he defends a “simple causal theory” (SCT): natural kinds correspond to clusters of properties, but what makes them non-arbitrary is that the properties are bound together by causal relations (in many possible structures), so kinds are the categories that figure in generalizations that “correctly describe the causal structure of the world.”

A major payoff of the SCT is its flexibility about pluralism and crosscutting: the world may support multiple overlapping classifications, so scientists (and philosophers) needn’t choose once and for all between lumping and splitting—one can legitimately “lump for some purposes and split for others,” depending on explanatory and predictive aims. Khalidi also broadens what can count as a real kind: besides “intrinsic” kinds, there are functional kinds grounded in stable causal-functional profiles even when intrinsic make-up varies. He likewise defends etiological (historical) kinds where common origins and trajectories explain present similarities and differences. And he argues that even interactive (mind-dependent) kinds can be real when they participate in robust causal regularities, despite being partly shaped by human classification and response. The closing case studies illustrate the method: “planet” comes out as a real kind (both functional and etiological), “pandemic” (as currently used) does not, and “autism” looks like a promising candidate though it may be an umbrella that lumps multiple kinds together.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:18 - Introducing natural kinds

04:47 - Realism and conventionalism

12:55 - Mixed views

19:27 - Folk discourse

25:05 - Conceptual engineering

27:49 - Science

30:52 - Degrees of naturalness

34:32 - How many kinds?

38:45 - Uninstantiated kinds

44:19 - Other sorts of kinds

48:14 - Ontological commitment

50:42 - Arbitrariness

54:35 - Essentialism

59:42 - Vagueness

1:03:10 - His approach

1:06:31 - Causation

1:09:24 - Another approach

1:15:42 - Non-natural kinds

1:17:32 - Value of philosophy

1:20:17 - Conclusion

What does it take for a theory of being to earn its ontological commitments, and can we make sense of nonexistence, properties, and possibility without bloating our inventory of what there is?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and is Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is well-known for his work in a variety of fields, but primarily metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action.

Check out his book, "Being: A Study in Ontology"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/44876

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192883968

2. Book Summary

Being: A Study in Ontology by Peter van Inwagen has a two-part aim: to lay out a meta-ontology (what we’re doing when we ask “What is there?” and how to answer it) and then to use that meta-ontology to do substantive ontology. He explicitly frames ontology as a systematic answer to “What is there?” and meta-ontology as reflection on the question and method; on his map of the book, Chapters I and V are meta-ontology, while II–IV (and VI) apply it to specific disputes. The meta-ontological stance is “deeply Quinean”: he’s willing to present it as (roughly) W. V. Quine’s view, sharply tied to how quantification works and how ontological commitment is extracted from what we accept.

With that Quinean methodology in hand, the middle of the book argues for several “anti-Quinean” ontological results (even while agreeing with Quine about non-existent things). In the Introduction he flags the central applications: whether there are things that “do not exist,” whether there are abstract objects, and whether modal discourse commits us to a realm of possibilities and possible worlds. On the abstract-object side, he pushes toward a picture in which properties and propositions are hard to avoid, and he develops a positive account of properties as “assertibles”: propositions are “saturated assertibles” (things that can be said, full stop) and properties are “unsaturated assertibles” (things that can be said of things). He then presses the consequences: if properties are assertibles, they are not literally “constituents” of concreta, and a lot of familiar metaphysical talk about properties (as parts, as perceivable constituents, as ontologically prior) is misguided. On the modal side, he shows how talk of truth, existence, and property-possession “in a world” can be handled by connecting worlds and possibilities tightly to propositions, rather than treating worlds as Lewis-style concrete “ways things could have been.”

The culminating move is Chapter VI’s “lightweight platonism,” which is meant to provide a single framework in which the earlier positions “can be placed.” In the book’s own summary, this is “lightweight” because the universals and other abstracta it accepts are causally inert: they have no causal powers and “explain nothing,” even if they can still figure in explanations the way numbers do in scientific reasoning. The result is a stark division of reality into (i) things that move and are moved, and (ii) things to which motion, causation, and change do not apply, with van Inwagen insisting that denying the second category would force him into contradiction given the commitments he thinks our best theorizing incurs.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:23 - Development of views

04:20 - Existence and being

07:51 - Technical vs. ordinary language

11:09 - Holes

14:18 - Paraphrase

20:17 - Negative existentials

22:19 - Fiction

29:05 - Having and holding

34:25 - Worry

39:20 - Attempt at paraphrase?

41:25 - Indefinable?

45:00 - Non-Meinongian paraphrase

51:03 - Platonism

53:56 - Fictionalism

58:16 - Effective theories

1:03:55 - Properties

1:08:25 - Modality

1:11:28 - Another approach

1:16:15 - Value of philosophy

1:17:36 - Conclusion

What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy

1. Guest

Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception.

Check out his book with Cambridge Elements!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A

2. Book Summary

Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself).

His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis.

On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 – Introduction

00:50 – Overview of the book

11:09 – Intention

17:58 – Is deception always wrong?

29:25 – Functional account

36:29 – Function

43:08 – Sci-fi case

48:13 – Vagueness

53:45 – Objections

57:51 – Self-deception

1:02:15 – Function and self-deception

1:09:12 – Semantics

1:17:27 – Value of philosophy

1:24:33 – Conclusion

Can a stripped-down naturalism really match theism’s explanatory ambitions, or does it secretly inherit the very mysteries it’s meant to avoid?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.

2. Interview Summary

Oppy opens by stressing that debates about God rarely turn on a single knockdown proof, and he thinks there are no convincing arguments for God (or against) that should force assent. Still, he thinks some arguments are instructive and carefully built: he says he recently published a long paper on Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, and argues that you can make it deductively valid only by weakening the conclusion, whereas the stronger Thomistic conclusion needs extra premises. He adds that he finds ontological arguments especially interesting, and wrote a book-length study cataloguing different kinds of them. When asked who presents the strongest case for theism, he points to Richard Swinburne, praising The Existence of God as a well-constructed cumulative-case presentation, even though he remains unconvinced by it.

A recurring theme is that many “cosmological” moves look dialectically symmetric: whatever explanatory pressure you feel about a first cause, a beginning, or an initial explanatory posit arises just as much for the naturalist as for the theist. In response to contingency arguments, he’s happy (in principle) to grant talk of a “necessary being” so long as it’s identified with the initial, fundamental part of causal reality on a naturalistic picture. He also presses a familiar worry (associated with Peter van Inwagen): if you start from something necessary and claim “all contingency” comes from it, you still owe an account of whether the link is necessary or contingent, and either answer threatens the intended contingency/necessity contrast. Relatedly, when people build modalized explanatory principles into “new” cosmological arguments, he notes that the contingency of the God–world relationship can reintroduce pressure for explanation of God’s creating (or of God) rather than cleanly stopping the regress.

On methodology, Oppy says he’s skeptical that a Bayesian framework is doing the real work in many cumulative cases; he prefers an ‘argument from dominance’ where naturalism wins by being simpler while (he claims) not being explanatorily worse once the “evidence” is partitioned appropriately. This connects to a more general ‘Occam’s razor’ stance: when two theories do the same explanatory work, adding extra entities (like God) without added explanatory payoff is something you should reject, not merely remain agnostic about. He applies the same measured attitude to theological doctrines: he thinks the Arguing About Gods posture is “suspend judgment unless pushed,” and while he’s open to the coherence of the Trinity (a low bar, in his view), it remains hard to make sense of outside the tradition. He also discusses Pascal-style prudential arguments, warning that “choose to believe” is psychologically suspect and that infinite-utility setups can collapse comparisons, and he’s similarly deflationary about the “hard problem” of consciousness, endorsing an identity-theory line in the spirit of J. J. C. Smart.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:10 - Aquinas’s first way

01:06 - Best argument for God

02:41 - Theistic literature

04:53 - Contingency argument

07:19 - Kalam cosmological argument

11:46 - Act and potency

13:54 - Cosmological arguments and modality

20:16 - Bayesian analysis of theism

23:32 - Consciousness

25:15 - Artificial intelligence

26:45 - Spacetime

28:13 - God and space

29:31 - Divine simplicity and monotheism

32:59 - Pascal’s wager

37:36 - Principle of sufficient reason

39:45 - Causal series

43:50 - Coherence of the trinity

45:06 - Simplicity and agnosticism

50:07 - Account of modality

51:49 - Rasmussen’s argument

59:02 - Mathematical entities

1:01:21 - Platonism

1:05:19 - Causal origin

1:09:23 - Arbitrary limits

1:12:25 - Classical theism

1:14:27 - Divine simplicity

1:17:10 - Unities and unifiers

1:21:56 - Holism and reductionism

1:23:23 - Conclusion

How can sentences still represent the world if their meanings are grounded not in reference but in the practical rules that govern how we use and accept them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

José Zalabardo is a Spanish-British philosopher who works on epistemology, metaphysics, and related areas. He is a professor of philosophy at University College London.

Check out his book, "Pragmatist Semantics!"

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatist-semantics-9780192874757

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1W1BTLF

2. Book Summary

In Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation, José Zalabardo starts from the intuitive idea that many declarative sentences represent the world, and asks what grounds their meanings—what facts make it the case that a sentence has the meaning it does. He frames the central dispute as a contest between representationalism (meanings are grounded in language–world relations like reference) and pragmatism (meanings are grounded in patterns of use). A key target is what he calls the RR assumption: that any sentence that represents things as being a certain way must have a representationalist meaning ground. He then develops “open-question” style arguments—first in ethics and then (more centrally for his project) in semantic discourse about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes—to motivate the claim that attempts to give representationalist meaning grounds for these discourses run into serious trouble (e.g., by undermining the idea that their core predicates have referents).

Zalabardo’s positive proposal is that we can reject RR: a sentence can still be genuinely representational even if its meaning ground is pragmatist. The general template is to explain meaning in terms of acceptance procedures—roughly, the actual rules/practices by which speakers regulate when to accept or reject sentences of a discourse. He illustrates the template across the “problem” discourses: for belief/desire ascriptions, he starts from Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance and treats its behaviour-prediction role as central to how we regulate acceptance of attitude ascriptions. He also argues that we should drop (as meaning-grounding) appeals to what an agent ought to believe/desire, and instead characterize our predictive practice in a way that explains our bias toward attributing true belief (via a “default” predictive strategy and a more sophisticated fallback). For meaning and truth ascriptions, he develops a pragmatist account that draws on W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson on radical interpretation, and he treats disquotation as central to how we regulate truth ascriptions.

A major remaining challenge is what he calls the problem of harmony: if a sentence represents a determinate state of affairs (or a predicate a determinate property), how can a use-based meaning ground be sufficient to secure that representational target rather than some deviant alternative? His strategy is to use abstraction principles: identify the referents of pragmatist-grounded predicates (and the states of affairs associated with pragmatist-grounded sentences) via equivalence/synonymy conditions generated by the relevant acceptance/ascription procedures. With that in hand, he broadens the picture in the final chapter (“The Primacy of Practice”), arguing that pragmatist resources aren’t just a patch for a few troublesome discourses but point toward a more general account of linguistic representation—one on which our access to reference and representational contents is systematically mediated by practice.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Overview of book

03:36 - Open question arguments

11:17 - Moorean shift

13:10 - Vagueness

17:25 - Other representationalist approaches

20:25 - Motivating pragmatic position

25:20 - Open questions?

28:47 - Contrasting with representationalism

31:15 - Comparison with Wittgenstein

35:20 - Messiness of natural language

43:40 - Other areas of discourse?

49:53 - Sharp distinction?

55:01 - Disagreement

1:04:01 - Non-propositional?

1:06:43 - Other parts of speech

1:09:51 - Belief and desire

1:19:25 - Belief without expectation of manifestation

1:22:09 - Akrasia

1:26:06 - Gerrymandered attributions

1:28:56 - Example

1:33:50 - Hybrid model

1:36:45 - Familiarity

1:44:31 - Projection

1:49:20 - Is ascription relative?

1:51:25 - Meaning vs. meaning ascription

1:57:33 - Other interpretive procedures

1:59:11 - Generalizations

2:01:11 - Coextensive terms

2:05:15 - Truth ascriptions

2:09:13 - Theories of truth

2:12:35 - Properties

2:17:13 - General meaning grounds

2:19:02 - Complexity of theory

2:23:44 - Harmony

2:29:24 - Remaning difficulties

2:33:07 - Value of philosophy

2:35:23 - Conclusion

Why do people sometimes refuse to update on clear evidence, and what would a properly functioning epistemology say we ought to believe when the evidence is right in front of us?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Mona Simion is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Her work focuses on a range of topics, including epistemology, ethics, language, and feminist philosophy.

Check out her book, "Resistance to Evidence"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009298526

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/resistance-to-evidence/147AC15A7EA89095A820FF16B1D0525A

2. Book Summary

In Resistance to Evidence, Mona Simion (University of Glasgow) argues that a central epistemic problem of our time is not just believing on insufficient evidence, but failing to believe (or suspending) when sufficient, undefeated evidence is easily available—a distinctive kind of epistemic failure she calls ‘resistance to evidence’. She frames this as “positive epistemology”: a project aimed at articulating epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs in response to available evidence (a counterpart to the familiar evidentialist worry associated with W. K. Clifford). The first part of the book links philosophical normativity with the empirical literature and offers a taxonomy of resistance cases (spanning testimony, perception, inference, bias, motivated reasoning, etc.), then pressures standard accounts of what evidence one has (and of permissible suspension, responsibility, and vice) for lacking the resources to explain why paradigmatic resistance is epistemically impermissible.

The second part builds Simion’s positive alternative: an epistemology grounded in proper function. Our cognitive systems, she proposes, have an epistemic function of generating knowledge, and epistemic norms “drop out” of that function; on this picture, resistance to evidence is an input-level epistemic malfunction—a failure to take up the right inputs (evidence and defeat) that the system could have easily taken up. She then develops a unified framework: evidence is understood as knowledge indicators—facts one is in a position to know that raise the evidential probability of a proposition for the subject—so resistant agents malfunction by failing to uptake these indicators. Likewise, defeaters are ignorance indicators—facts one is in a position to know that lower the evidential probability of the proposition (and so can undermine justification when ignored). With these pieces in place, she argues that permissible suspension and doxastic justification should be explained in terms of whether the relevant belief/suspension is produced by properly functioning knowledge-generating processes that appropriately respond to knowledge and ignorance indicators.

The final part draws broader lessons. First, even if epistemic justifiers can be treated as epistemic “oughts,” Simion argues this doesn’t imply that epistemic life is riddled with genuine dilemmas; rather, it yields a more modest picture on which the epistemic domain (like other normative domains) often involves conflict without widespread dilemma. Second, she applies the framework to scepticism, engaging neo-Moorean responses to arguments associated with G. E. Moore and debates involving Fred Dretske, Timothy Williamson, and Jim Pryor; she proposes a “new” radical neo-Mooreanism on which the sceptic’s stance counts as resistance to evidence, yet can still seem somewhat reasonable because it involves impermissible suspension while nevertheless satisfying certain contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations. Finally, she offers a distinctive account of disinformation with practical implications: disinformation needn’t be false, but is (roughly) content disposed to generate ignorance in a context under normal conditions—so purely fact-checking strategies will systematically miss many disinformation mechanisms. In her concluding policy-oriented remarks (with Cambridge University Press in view), she argues that effective interventions must often focus on polluted epistemic environments—e.g., improving the quantity and quality of reliable evidence flow (including trusted sources) and, for more isolated malfunction cases, supporting cognitive flexibility training to reduce rigid resistance.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:07 - Purpose of book

06:03 - Varieties of evidence resistance

09:25 - Unified account

15:07 - Williamson’s reply

18:19 - Ideal epistemic agents

22:30 - Problems with ideal agents

29:18 - Blameless resistance?

37:59 - Epistemic error and blame

39:43 - Semantic issues

46:23 - Vagueness

47:36 - Evidence and defeat

1:02:03 - Functional account

1:12:19 - Compatibility with other accounts

1:16:59 - Resistance to evidence

1:23:45 - Sufficiency

1:32:28 - Natural language

1:37:27 - Shiftiness

1:43:21 - Worry for view

1:54:22 - Inquiring vs. updating

1:58:13 - Fallibilism

2:04:44 - Defeater defeaters

2:08:59 - Getting probability one

2:13:30 - Information and disinformation

2:19:55 - Ignorance

2:25:30 - Value of philosophy

2:29:39 - Conclusion

Can chemistry really be reduced to physics, or do concepts like elements and the periodic table show that it has its own irreducible structure?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Eric Scerri is a lecturer at UCLA, and focuses on chemistry, the philosophy of chemistry, and science more generally.

2. Interview Summary

Eric Scerri argues that philosophy of chemistry arrived relatively late partly because chemistry sits so close to physics in the usual “hierarchy of the sciences,” which encourages the popular thought that chemistry is “nothing but” physics—and so not in need of its own philosophical scrutiny. He suggests that the right question isn’t whether chemistry is or isn’t reduced to physics (as if it were all-or-nothing), but how far reduction goes and in what sense, since both scientific practice and philosophical models of reduction have shifted over time. On his picture, the most sensible stance is to talk about “degrees” of reduction that can increase as molecular quantum chemistry advances, rather than expecting a clean yes/no verdict.

A major theme is the concept of a chemical element: Scerri emphasizes that “element” is used in (at least) two senses—an element as a simple substance (often associated with Antoine Lavoisier) and an element as a more abstract bearer of properties (revived in Dmitri Mendeleev’s thinking about the periodic system). He illustrates the abstract sense by noting that pointing to “carbon” on the periodic table is not pointing to diamond or graphite (or any particular isotope), but to something that underlies them all—something that can be characterized in modern chemistry chiefly by atomic number. He then uses the sodium/chlorine → sodium chloride case to argue that the familiar simple substances can “disappear” in compounds while the elements persist in the abstract sense, which helps explain chemical novelty. Scerri adds that this dual usage is often left implicit (even by IUPAC), and that chemical education tends to foreground orbitals and electron configurations so early that students may lose contact with the ordinary chemical character of substances.

On the periodic table, Scerri discusses the “left-step” proposal that moves helium into group 2 on electronic-configuration grounds, and he defends the idea that (beyond mere representational convenience) it can still make sense to ask which table is most fundamental. This connects to his broader view of reduction: he distinguishes epistemological reduction (always partial and a matter of degree) from ontological reduction, where he favors a “unity of science” picture on which chemistry is not a free-floating realm apart from physics—so reduction is more a direction than an achievable final goal. Methodologically, he leans instrumentalist about theoretical posits like orbitals—useful mathematical constructs rather than the kind of thing one literally “images”—and he’s skeptical of philosophical debates that ignore how working scientists treat things like laws and bonding. Finally, he stresses a broadly evolutionary picture of scientific change, where even apparent revolutions have extended build-ups, detours, and pragmatic rule-breaking that matter more than tidy, armchair reconstructions. Transcript:

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:52 - Neglected field?

04:36 - Elements

08:31 - Too abstract?

09:46 - Advantages of abstract view

12:04 - Atomic number enough?

14:38 - Chemical education

22:10 - Periodic table

27:01 - Best table?

30:20 - Helium

33:14 - Historical development

38:38 - Orbitals

40:08 - Chemical bonding

45:55 - Theoretical reduction

49:12 - Limitations of reduction

51:48 - Orbital filling

53:50 - Ontological reduction

54:52 - Ontological levels

58:56 - Ideal theory

1:00:24 - Prospects of reduction

1:01:44 - Other issues in philosophy of chemistry

1:04:52 - Laws

1:08:31 - Metaphysics

1:09:19 - History of chemistry

1:12:12 - Scientific revolution

1:15:30 - Value of philosophy

1:17:08 - Conclusion

Can we keep the predictive power of mathematics in science while refusing to believe in mathematical objects at all?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Mary Leng is a professor at the University of York, specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.

2. Interview Summary

Mary Leng begins by laying out her ‘mathematical functionalist’ (or fictionalist-leaning) view: ordinary mathematical talk looks like it’s about objects—numbers, functions, real-valued magnitudes, infinitely many primes—but she thinks we shouldn’t automatically read that surface grammar as a commitment to a realm of abstract entities. In the interview’s opening framing (including her background in philosophy of mathematics and science and her book Mathematics and Reality), she contrasts this stance with more realist options like Platonism and with structuralist approaches that try to treat mathematics as “about” abstract structures rather than particular objects.

A central motivation, she says, is epistemic: the standard “negative characterization” of mathematical objects (not spatiotemporal, not causal, not mental, etc.) makes it hard to give any satisfying story about how we could know truths about them—yet mathematical knowledge is supposed to be among our most secure. So her proposal is to rethink what we’re doing when we do mathematics: instead of aiming at literal truths about abstract objects, we speak as if there are such objects and investigate what would be the case if there were. Along the way she presses familiar trouble for robust Platonism—like “embarrassment of riches” (many distinct set-theoretic reductions can equally play the natural-number role), and the way working mathematicians tend to be relaxed about identity conditions (they don’t worry whether “2” is this set or that set so long as the axioms are satisfied). She also locates herself on the “revolutionary” side of the revolutionary/hermeneutic divide: even if mathematicians often proceed as if they’re talking about objects, that doesn’t settle what the best philosophical interpretation or reform should be.

In the later part of the conversation, the focus shifts to science: why mathematical language is so effective, and whether that effectiveness supports realism about mathematical objects. Leng argues that much of mathematics’ role in empirical theory is representational—letting us index and describe patterns in concrete reality—so it’s not surprising that scientific practice could keep working even if there were no mathematical objects “behind” the discourse. That thought underwrites her resistance to “no-miracles”-style arguments for mathematical entities (including a recurring thought experiment about mathematical objects “popping in and out of existence” without affecting successful science). She does grant that mathematics sometimes seems explanatory, and discusses examples meant to push that point (like prime-number life cycles in cicadas), but she maintains that the best lesson is structural: the explanation can run via the way concrete systems instantiate patterns to which theorems apply, without requiring numbers themselves to be causally or ontologically doing explanatory work.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:32 - Mathematical fictionalism

09:03 - Characterizing platonism

13:42 - Revolutionary vs. hermeneutic

17:13 - Empirical semantics

22:06 - Ontological commitment

27:58 - Thick and thin discourse

34:46 - Thin objects

42:36 - Progress

49:46 - Chess example

52:42 - Benacerraf

55:03 - Structuralism

59:44 - Are structures objects?

1:03:10 - Irrelevance of abstracta?

1:09:43 - Acausal but not independent?

1:16:03 - No miracles argument

1:22:06 - Making a difference

1:31:33 - Explanation without truth

1:34:38 - Value of philosophy

1:38:48 - Conclusion

Can quantum “spookiness” be explained without nonlocal action if we take seriously the idea that later measurement choices can constrain earlier physical states?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Huw Price is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Bonn and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, physics and time, causation, probability, decision, language, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Huw Price’s conversation ranges across the foundations of quantum theory, the nature of causation, and a broadly pragmatist stance toward metaphysics. He lays out the familiar problem: Bell-type correlations tempt us toward “spooky” nonlocal influence, but if we allow a correlation between measurement settings and underlying variables, two broad strategies open up. One is a common-cause story often labeled “superdeterminism”; the other is a genuinely retrocausal or “input-dependent” approach, where later measurement choices influence earlier physical states, so the apparent nonlocality can be replaced by a “zigzag” influence that stays within light cones. Price argues this is attractive partly because it can preserve relativity by avoiding spacelike action and privileged frames, even if it still feels counterintuitive in a “temporal nonlocality” sense.

From there, Price connects retrocausality to a more general point about what we should demand from “causation.” He notes that some philosophers treat forward-directedness as definitional, but he emphasizes that causation’s link to rational agency (means–ends reasoning) is at least as central, and he invokes Michael Dummett’s discussion of whether it even makes sense to deliberate “for the sake of” the past. Dummett’s idea of “quasi-causation” (a deliberately loosened notion) becomes a template for how retrocausality might be intelligible without forcing a terminological fight over the word “cause.” He also ties this to decision-theoretic themes, using simple cases to illustrate how an agent’s deliberative standpoint partitions the world into what’s held fixed versus what’s treated as choice-sensitive, a partition that usually tracks past versus future but need not do so in exotic setups.

On the metaphilosophical side, Price frames his “neo-pragmatist / expressivist” approach as shifting attention from metaphysical structure to the role our concepts play for creatures like us: for causation, the illuminating questions are psychological/functional (“why do we think this way?”) rather than ontological (“what is the relation?”). He’s especially skeptical about familiar “heavy-duty” metaphysical disputes, suggesting that questions like whether tables are “really” collections of particles, or whether ordinary objects are spacetime-extended worms versus wholly present at instants, often lack an interesting fact of the matter and can dissolve into interchangeable frameworks. He then criticizes a two-stage “Canberra/Cambridge Plan”-style methodology (Ramsey-sentence first, then hunt for realizers) on the grounds that it leans on robust semantic notions like reference, truthmaking, and coreference in ways that risk indeterminacy or circularity for a naturalist. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a transferable toolkit of careful distinctions and conceptual scrutiny, especially at the foundations of other disciplines like physics, alongside its broader normative and social contributions.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Quantum mechanics and retrocausality

08:02 - Still spooky?

11:48 - Superdeterminism

13:52 - Causation

24:22 - Decision and causation

27:39 - Deliberating over the past

33:25 - EDT and the past

37:27 - Retrocausality and free will

40:07 - Pragmatism

46:07 - Metaphysical questions

51:41 - Modern metaphysics

56:03 - Value of philosophy

58:59 - Conclusion

What if the biggest mistakes in debates about gender come from treating “gender identity” as one unified thing, instead of a cluster of different feelings, traits, and social norms that can come apart?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Ray Briggs is professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and their work has focused on a range of topics, including chance and decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and gender. This interview was recorded with audio only.

Check out their book with B. R. George, "What Even is Gender?"!

https://www.routledge.com/p/book/9780367513214

2. Book Summary

In What Even Is Gender?, Ray Briggs and B. R. George argue that the familiar question “what is gender?” invites confusion, because there isn’t one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or “gender identity”). Instead, mainstream discourse (including lots of well-meaning “trans 101” framings) tends to conflate a cluster of distinct social, material, and psychological phenomena—conflations that can make trans and gender-nonconforming lives unintelligible and can smuggle in hidden assumptions about what trans legitimacy is supposed to require. The book’s project is therefore largely conceptual: to diagnose where our ordinary talk goes wrong and to engineer a clearer alternative framework that can better represent the variety of lived experience and the political demands of trans liberation.

Chapters 2 and 3 build the book’s core “map” of what the authors call the ‘sex/gender system’. Chapter 2 replaces the overly unified notion of ‘gender identity’ with a more fine-grained account in terms of ‘gender feels’: self-situating attitudes toward different gendered traits, organized (for their purposes) into sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories. This helps explain why different subjective “feels” can come apart (and why lumping them together causes practical and political misunderstandings). Chapter 3 then shifts from subjective attitudes to public structure, distinguishing different kinds of social norms that link categories, biology, and behavior; it treats many of these norms as obvious targets of feminist and queer critique, while warning that some “abolitionist” rhetoric slides illicitly from opposing oppressive norms to condemning the categories or behaviors the norms are about.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn from diagnosis to guidance: Chapter 4 argues that we should treat people’s self-reports of ‘gender feels’ as deserving default trust—presuming sincerity, competence, coherence, and moral respect—unless we have specific reasons to depart from those defaults, and it critiques common patterns of dismissing trans subjectivity. Chapter 5 defends a political principle of ‘gender self-determination’: in general, we should categorize people according to their sincerely expressed wishes rather than outsiders’ projections, and this requires treating gender categories as irreducible (not settled by biology, behavior, or the norms society imposes), without that irreducibility collapsing into circularity or mysticism. The conclusion frames many recurring confusions as a kind of “essentialism” that mistakes contingent links (between traits, norms, and feels) for constitutive necessities; the authors urge “less essentialism, more imagination,” emphasizing both the real variety already present in human lives and our collective power to change gender norms and the rules by which category membership gets socially administered.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:44 - Target audience

02:23 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive

06:23 - History and cross-cultural comparison

12:48 - Idealizing gender

15:00 - Gender as a single thing?

19:07 - Gender traits and feels

26:30 - Gender identity

31:34 - Vagueness of gender language

33:17 - Developing categories

35:55 - Second-order gender feels

38:26 - Gender norms

41:24 - Feels and norms

43:14 - Abolitionism

53:53 - Semantic trade-offs

56:15 - Another case for abolitionism

59:45 - Too many categories?

1:03:39 - Self-determination

1:05:14 - Circular?

1:10:22 - Reductive definitions

1:11:35 - Uninformative account?

1:16:11 - My general descriptive view

1:24:38 - Term haggling

1:26:02 - How this might help trans people

1:27:24 - Value of philosophy

1:29:44 - Conclusion

Can mathematics be indispensable to science without forcing us to believe in a realm of abstract objects?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Michael Resnik is Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill, and his work has focused on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, decision theory, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Michael Resnik begins by discussing the indispensability strategy associated with W. V. Quine and developed in an influential way by Hilary Putnam: if our best scientific theorizing essentially uses mathematics, then (given standard views about truth and ontological commitment) we end up committed to mathematical objects. Resnik emphasizes a practical, discourse-focused version of the point: to use the mathematics in scientific (and scientific-adjacent) reasoning, we typically have to assert mathematical claims, and that assertion is what drives commitment—even in idealized modeling or in theories we suspect are literally false. He illustrates this with a simple geometrical case about comparing travel routes (New York → Pittsburgh → DC vs. New York → DC): once you model cities as points and appeal to a theorem about triangles, you’ve already imported mathematical structure and quantification over geometrical entities.

From there, the interview turns to structuralism and why Resnik has moved toward a non-ontological form of it. Structuralism, on his view, is best treated as a guiding slogan—mathematics studies patterns/structures, and mathematical “objects” (like numbers) don’t have any identity beyond their place in a structure. He sketches several ways philosophers have tried to make that slogan precise, ranging from set-theoretic reductions to views that locate structural instantiation in the physical world, and then to more explicit “positions-in-structures” accounts (e.g., Stewart Shapiro) and modal structuralism (e.g., Geoffrey Hellman). What pushes him away from settling on a single ontology is his appeal to ontological relativity, underwritten by what he calls the “same size theorem”: roughly, if a theory has a model at all, it can be reinterpreted with a model in any domain of the same cardinality—so the most we can robustly preserve across reinterpretations is structure, not a unique answer to “what the objects really are.”

In the final portion, Resnik pivots to logic and defends a comparably deflationary stance: logic has a descriptive side (studying validity relations in a mathematically precise way) but its normative side—talk about what we ought to infer or what counts as a good argument—shouldn’t be conflated with psychology, and may be closer in spirit to something like “applied ethics.” He then distinguishes ordinary acceptance of particular logical claims from logical realism about “logical truth” as an objective, practice-independent status; his “logical anti-realism” denies that further realist step, and he’s open to a kind of logical non-cognitivism on which some familiar logical utterances function more as tools for regulating inferential practice than as straightforward fact-stating claims. He closes with a meta-philosophical note: philosophy matters (and philosophy of math in particular) because it trains clarity about abstract, often-vague questions—even when the “final” metaphysical picture remains elusive.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Indispensability arguments

10:22 - Against Quine

12:10 - Indispensability and scientific anti-realism

14:49 - Balaguer and denying the truth of theories

19:34 - A world without mathematical entities

22:50 - Folk discourse

30:41 - Structuralism

43:01 - Structuralism and ontological relativity

44:21 - Same size theorem

50:05 - Changes to view

51:51 - What are structures?

54:14 - Foundations

56:30 - Realism and structuralism

1:01:17 - What structures are there?

1:05:21 - Epistemic concern

1:09:35 - Logic as normative/descriptive

1:20:05 - Logical anti-realism

1:26:42 - Logical non-cognitivism

1:30:21 - Motivation for view

1:31:49 - Necessity of mathematics

1:34:04 - Value of philosophy

1:36:05 - Conclusion

What does it mean for something to be “true in a fiction,” and why might even the category of “art” be a historically contingent way of organizing aesthetic practices?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Kendall Walton is Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work has focused on the philosophy of art, as well as other issues in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and language.

2. Interview Summary

Kendall Walton lays out his core idea about “truth in fiction”: roughly, a proposition is fictional in a given context when it is to be imagined (in a normative, “prescribed” sense) as part of properly engaging with that work or practice. He emphasizes that “fictional worlds” aren’t limited to novels and films: they can arise in fleeting, ordinary social moments wherever there are local prescriptions about what to imagine—like people lying in a meadow informally “adopting” a rule about whether a cloud counts as a bear or an elephant. Walton also downplays the importance of drawing a sharp boundary between works of fiction and nonfiction (since many cultures or contexts may not treat that as central), while insisting that it often does matter which propositions are true-in-the-fiction. When the interviewer asks about “pretense” theories, Walton is broadly sympathetic but prefers “imagination” because it covers passive cases (e.g., simply looking at a picture) as well as more active, game-like pretending; he also admits we still lack a fully general account of what imagining is.

A big part of the discussion is about pressure points for simple tests like “to be imagined = fictional.” Walton highlights how background knowledge helps generate many implicit fictional truths via something like a “reality principle” (e.g., if a story presents someone as a normal human, then—should the question arise—lots of ordinary facts about humans come along for free), while still allowing that these truths differ radically in importance to the work. At the same time, he stresses that a work can mandate imaginings that are not true in the relevant fictional world: for instance, to interpret an embedded picture inside a painting (his Vermeer/Cupid example), viewers may have to imagine Cupid even though (strictly speaking) the larger painting only makes it fictional that there is a picture of Cupid. Similarly, one might have to imagine something odd (like a “golf ball nose”) to see what’s being depicted or pointed out, even though that proposition isn’t true “in the picture as a whole.” Walton’s solution is to distinguish different clusters or nested fictional worlds—separating what’s true in the primary fiction from what’s required to grasp an internal representation or a local interpretive task.

The interview then turns to aesthetics and the concept of art. Walton argues that aesthetics lacks a single “grand basic question” in the way ethics is often organized around “How should we live?”, and he describes recent aesthetics as an intellectually rich but somewhat ununified “hodgepodge” of topics. He adds a historical diagnosis: the Western category of “fine art” as a single unified genus is relatively late (he cites Oscar Kristeller’s claim that it emerges around 1750), which helps explain why theorists’ competing “definitions of art” can feel disconnected or like people are talking past each other. Even if the question “What is art?” mattered enormously in some settings (like the 1960s/70s New York avant-garde), Walton thinks it can be beside the point for understanding many other practices (e.g., Greek sculpture or Javanese gamelan), where you can study what the works do and how they matter without forcing them under a modern category. Methodologically, this ties into his sympathy for a kind of conceptual engineering: once we have the “data” of our practices and reactions, philosophy can aim to organize it more perspicuously—sometimes by revising or inventing concepts—rather than assuming the folk extension of “art” sets the target and then hunting for strict necessary-and-sufficient conditions.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Fiction

08:28 - Fiction and vagueness

10:50 - Pretense theory

12:48 - Imagining

18:59 - Fictions in fiction

22:01 - Resolving problems

23:59 - Broadest world

29:26 - Bizarre fictions

31:50 - Norms of fiction

38:09 - Another issue

40:18 - Reality principle

43:15 - Varying norms

45:52 - Aesthetics

51:18 - What is art?

55:42 - Is the dispute substantive?

59:50 - Empirical psychology

1:03:56 - Representation

1:05:56 - Folk concepts

1:12:32 - Conceptual engineering

1:16:29 - Relevance to art

1:19:11 - Dispensing with “art”?

1:23:24 - Value theory

1:26:17 - Empathy

1:32:06 - Empathy by negation

1:36:07 - Value of philosophy

1:38:36 - Conclusion

How should philosophers understand “information” in the digital age, and can thinking of ourselves as informational organisms reshape ethics, privacy, and the self?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Luciano Floridi is John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

2. Interview Summary

Floridi argues that a philosophy of information became unavoidable once “information” stopped being merely a silent tool philosophers used in the background and instead became a central object of inquiry in its own right—especially under the pressure of the digital/information revolution. He also emphasizes that philosophy shouldn’t be a purely descriptive exercise: it should help us make a difference in how we live and organize society (invoking Socrates as a model of philosophy with public stakes). To make sense of that ambition, he frames philosophy as an inescapable blend of model (how things are) and blueprint (how they should be), and he characterizes good theorizing as “conceptual design”: not just analyzing problems, but designing solutions under constraints—like designing different kinds of chairs for different purposes.

A big chunk of the interview then clarifies what “information” even is. Floridi distinguishes the quantitative, engineering-oriented notion associated with Claude Shannon from richer notions that involve meaning: Shannon-style information can measure how many yes/no “answers to questions” a channel can carry, but by itself it doesn’t tell you what is being said or why it matters. From there he pushes a taxonomy that helps prevent people from talking past each other: we may mean information about the world (e.g., timetables), information in the world (signals embodied in physical systems), or information for the world (instructions/affordances for agents). And when the topic is semantic information about the world, he defends a truth requirement: well-formed, meaningful data that’s false is better classified as misinformation/disinformation—he illustrates this with the absurdity of a doctor “answering” a diagnosis by coin-flip. He also stresses that everyday looseness about words is fine, but philosophy/science need sharper distinctions.

Finally, Floridi connects information to the self and to privacy. From an explicitly Immanuel Kant-inspired angle, he treats “what we are” talk as less helpful than asking how we should model ourselves given our epistemic situation and current historical conditions; today, he suggests, the most fruitful model is of humans as informational organisms. That shift dovetails with thinking in terms of networks rather than mechanisms: nodes don’t come first and then get linked—rather, nodes (including selves) emerge from patterns of relations. This, he says, reframes privacy away from a simple ownership/economics picture (“my data is my property”) and toward protecting the informational profile that partly constitutes personal identity and autonomy (e.g., against manipulation, coercion, or misuse). He closes with a direct call to philosophers—especially newcomers—to stop merely extending inherited frameworks and instead write the “new chapter” that the 21st century’s digital transformation demands.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - What does “information” mean?

07:34 - Conceptual engineering

11:45 - Descriptive and prescriptive

12:30 - Philosophy as conceptual design

18:13 - Design vs. invention

21:39 - Shannon information and more

33:27 - Semantic information

37:43 - Information and the self

44:24 - Philosophy going forward

45:59 - Conclusion

If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/

2. Book Summary

Emily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible.

The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes.

Stepping back, Adlam’s through-line is that you don’t get to quarantine these issues inside “interpretation”: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for “sceptical” hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stances—e.g. “intersubjective QBism” that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequencies—would drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - The measurement problem

05:14 - Shut up and calculate

07:00 - Different senses of "measurement"

09:11 - Bootstrapping

10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice

13:18 - Quantum bayesianism

17:46 - Many worlds

20:05 - Recovering the Born rule

32:21 - Bohmian mechanics

36:09 - Probability

37:58 - All-at-once laws

42:54 - Anti-Humeanism

45:12 - Superdeterminism

48:56 - Naturalness

50:15 - Retrocausality

54:33 - Primitive ontology

57:51 - Fundamentality

1:01:41 - Consistent histories

1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics

1:07:25 - Making progress

1:08:38 - Value of philosophy

1:10:20 - Conclusion

Can fiction tell us genuine truths about the world and ourselves, or does it mainly invite us into a kind of structured pretense that can mislead as easily as it can illuminate?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Manuel García-Carpintero is Professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His work has focused on a variety of issues in and related to the philosophy of language, such as fiction, assertion, proper names, presuppositions, quotation, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Manuel García-Carpintero frames the interview around the classic Plato/Aristotle dispute about whether we can learn from fiction. He notes that ordinary audiences often treat fictions (especially “based on a true story” works) as conveying truths, and he uses examples like the biopic Rocketman and debates around the Chernobyl—including Masha Gessen’s piece in The New Yorker about the HBO series—to illustrate how viewers criticize “lies” even when something is openly fictionalized. He then draws a careful distinction between ‘truth in fiction’ (correctly stating what the story says) and the more contentious idea that fiction can communicate truths about the world or “the human condition” that go beyond the story’s explicit content. This is where the Plato/Aristotle contrast becomes vivid: Plato’s worry is that fiction can mislead, while Aristotle’s more optimistic line is that poetry can deliver more general, “philosophical” insight than history.

The conversation then turns to ‘pretense theory’, the idea that fiction-making involves speakers acting as if they are asserting things while not genuinely asserting them—illustrated with cases like J. K. Rowling writing about wizards. García-Carpintero agrees this picture captures something important and explains why it became a mainstream approach (with roots traced to figures like Margaret MacDonald and J. L. Austin). He also connects pretense to ‘immersion’: the psychological sense of being “present” in a fictional world can be modeled as going along with a kind of narrated pretense (he uses Dr. Watson-style narration in Sherlock Holmes stories to make the pull of this model intuitive). But he argues pretense can’t be the whole story: lots of everyday pretending isn’t fiction, and some fictions (including self-undermining or “postmodern” cases) make it clear that no one is straightforwardly “telling you” facts—so we need a more positive account of fiction-making as a representational activity, with pretense functioning as a common tool rather than the essence.

On the semantic side, he’s sympathetic to David Lewis’s possible-worlds framework as a modeling technique for the special discourse we use when we describe what a fiction says—without taking possible worlds to be “real”. Part of the attraction, he suggests, is that it pushes toward an abstract notion of content that can in principle be shared across languages and even across media (novel/film/theater), which helps make sense of adaptation and “faithfulness”. At the same time, he worries about Lewis-style implementations that effectively force a ubiquitous narrator/asserter into every fiction, and he discusses how principles for implicit content have to handle tricky phenomena like unreliable narrators—sometimes motivating probabilistic/conditional-probability ideas about what’s “taken for granted” in the story. Finally, on fictional entities and names, he pushes back on views that treat names like Emma Woodhouse as referring to abstract artifacts; instead, he treats the “artifact talk” (e.g., saying a character was created by Jane Austen) as derivative and emphasizes a presuppositional picture where names come with reference-fixing descriptive material—helping with “mixed” comparisons like Mickey Mouse vs. Nancy Pelosi, or liking Harry Potter more than Donald Trump, and with co-identification inside a fiction (Superman = Clark Kent).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:17 - Importance of fiction

08:52 - Truth in fiction

13:37 - Pretense theory

26:52 - David Lewis’s view

38:37 - Issues with pretense theory

44:15 - Fictional entities

1:04:12 - Issue with Meinongianism

1:07:10 - Graham Priest’s view

1:18:12 - Another issue with Meinongianism

1:20:46 - Likelihood in fiction

1:39:04 - Reality principle

1:41:13 - Coreferring names

1:49:42 - Propositions

1:58:22 - Fiction as falsehoods

2:01:40 - Value of philosophy

2:12:11 - Conclusion

What if the biggest threat to good decisions isn’t a lack of intelligence, but a lack of the right reasoning tools and habits to spot bad arguments, weigh evidence, and update our beliefs?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His work has focused on language, cognition, social relations, and more.

Check out his book, "Rationality: What it is, Why is Seems Scarce, Why it Matters"!

https://a.co/d/02RdsyAT

2. Book Summary

In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Steven Pinker argues that rationality should guide “everything we think and do,” especially in a moment when public life is awash in misinformation and shaky reasoning. The book is organized as a practical toolkit: after setting up the puzzle of how rational an animal we are, it walks through core “instruments of reason” (logic and critical thinking; probability; Bayesian updating; expected utility; signal detection; game theory; and correlation vs. causation), ending with chapters on what goes wrong and why rationality matters.

Pinker’s diagnosis of why rationality can look scarce is that we mistake it for a single mental “power,” when it’s really a set of tools that work well only when they’re learned, cued, and applied to the right kinds of problems. He also emphasizes modern “reasoning traps”: people can be impressively capable in real-world settings yet still fall for distortions amplified by today’s information ecosystem, where falsehoods spread easily and grab attention. And he thinks part of the confusion comes from mixing two “modes of believing”—a reality mindset aimed at truth and evidence, and a mythology mindset that treats some cherished ideas (religious or national narratives, for instance) as insulated from ordinary truth-testing.

Finally, Pinker’s case for why rationality matters is both urgent and concrete: we face large-scale threats (to health, democracy, and the planet) where solutions exist but persuading people to accept them is itself a rationality problem. The reasoning tools he surveys aren’t just classroom formalities; they’re meant to help us avoid personal and policy blunders by calibrating risk, evaluating claims, and making decisions under uncertainty. He also ties rationality to moral and social progress: historically, big improvements often begin with arguments that expose inconsistencies between what people already value and what they tolerate in practice—showing how “reasoners” are not just individual brains but members of communities that can revise norms when better arguments win out.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - Rationality

03:43 - Instrumentalism

05:32 - Irrational goals

09:28 - Expected outcomes

12:15 - Rationality and morality

17:20 - General outlook

22:08 - Bayesian reasoning (audio improves here)

27:08 - Hume

28:16 - Priors

31:56 - Vagueness

35:37 - Expected utility

37:10 - Newcomb’s problem

41:07 - Decision theory

49:45 - Causation

53:47 - Higher-level causation

55:56 - Improving rationality

1:00:10 - Why does rationality matter?

1:04:22 - Conclusion

Can formal semantics really explain meaning compositionally, or do intonation, context, and discourse do more of the work than we admit?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Barbara Partee is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work has focused on formal semantics and language.

2. Interview Summary

Barbara Partee frames the interview around how to make the intuitive slogan of ‘compositionality’ precise: yes, sentence meaning depends on the meanings of parts and how they’re combined, but every term in that slogan (“meaning,” “part,” “combined,” “structure”) is theory-laden, so different formalizations yield different predictions. She illustrates how semantic considerations can adjudicate between syntactic analyses, using relative clauses: if “boy” and “who loves Mary” are both treated as predicates, composition can be simple set intersection—yielding “boy ∩ loves-Mary”—whereas building the definite “the boy” too early wrongly hardwires uniqueness and then can’t be “undone.” Along the way she credits insights from Richard Montague and notes parallels with W. V. O. Quine (including Quine’s Word and Object) about treating common nouns as predicates rather than names.

A major through-line is that many apparent counterexamples to ‘compositionality’ are really prompts to enrich what counts as “structure.” Partee points to intonation and focus as meaning-relevant (and often truth-condition- or presupposition-relevant): shifting stress in “John didn’t invite Mary to the party” changes what’s being denied, and similar effects show up with contrastive stress and “just anyone.” She also treats some constructions as having built-in “slots” that syntax doesn’t resolve, like genitives: “John’s team” contains an implicit relation variable (team John plays for/owns/writes about, etc.) that must be fixed pragmatically by context and shared expectations. This sets up her broader picture of semantics working in tandem with pragmatics and discourse—e.g., modeling how conversation updates a common ground, referencing work associated with Hans Kamp and Irene Heim on discourse and ‘context change’ perspectives.

In the latter part of the conversation she zooms out to what formal semantics has clarified over the decades: once you allow intermediate “open” structures (roughly, lambda-abstracts) rather than only closed sentences, quantification and scope phenomena stop looking like hacks and start looking systematic. She then uses anaphora puzzles—‘pronouns of laziness,’ donkey sentences, and the ‘paycheck’ pattern (traceable in the literature to Peter Geach and his Reference and Generality)—to show how natural language can require richer machinery than simple bound-variable models. Finally, she emphasizes both the strengths and limits of formal semantics: it excels at logical/structural effects (the kind that even large-scale statistical systems can miss, as in negation), but it can’t ignore lexical meaning entirely—illustrated by mass/count noun distinctions, cross-linguistic classifier strategies, and a lattice-based way of modeling why plurals and mass nouns pattern together.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Compositionality

08:11 - Idealization

13:50 - Relevance of idealizations

19:02 - Non-syntactic expression

24:43 - Genetives

28:41 - Pronouns of laziness

33:45 - Pragmatic pronouns

36:31 - Pragmatics

40:32 - Anaphoric and deictic

42:25 - Other sorts of pronouns

43:34 - Takeaways

47:35 - Progress in linguistics

59:14 - Time and tense

1:06:24 - Meaning

1:14:20 - Many and few

1:24:26 - Difficult puzzles

1:31:18 - Modal terms

1:33:30 - Value of linguistics

1:41:12 - Conclusion

Is quantum mechanics a complete description of reality, or just a remarkably reliable calculation tool still waiting for a clear account of what actually exists?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, and his work has focused on the foundations of physics and science more generally, metaphysics, and logic.

2. Interview Summary

Maudlin argues that what physicists often teach as “quantum mechanics” is largely a predictive recipe—a mathematical procedure that outputs correct predictions but doesn’t yet tell you what the world is like. He illustrates this with familiar “electron orbital” diagrams: the same picture could be read as a smeared-out cloud, a long-exposure trace of a particle orbit, a kind of “bubbling” appearance, or even a composite over many atoms—yet the picture itself doesn’t settle which story is right. For Maudlin, that’s exactly the point: without an explicit ontology and dynamics, you don’t yet have a full physical theory, and “shut up and calculate” is (historically) a retreat from the earlier foundational demand—pressed by Albert Einstein and debated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg—to say whether the wavefunction is complete.

A big chunk of the interview is spent clarifying what the wavefunction is supposed to represent. Maudlin stresses that the wavefunction is a mathematical object (a function), and the interpretive question is what physical reality—if any—it corresponds to. He sketches three broad options: it represents a real physical feature of an individual system, it encodes statistical features of ensembles, or it reflects an agent’s credences (as in quantum Bayesian approaches). On his view, the “quantum state” (whatever the wavefunction represents, if it represents anything physical) is unlike anything in classical physics, and it’s bound up with nonlocality: John Bell’s result is taken to show that the actual physics of the world cannot be causally local in Bell’s sense, so we should be prepared for genuinely novel kinds of physical structure.

From there, Maudlin frames the measurement problem as a forced choice: to avoid Schrödinger-cat-style “smeared” outcomes, you must deny at least one of three theses—(i) the wavefunction is complete, (ii) it always evolves linearly by Schrödinger evolution, or (iii) measurements have single definite outcomes. He’s especially skeptical of many-worlds programs that keep (i) and (ii) and then try to recover probabilities via decision theory; he treats this as the kind of “degenerating research program” Imre Lakatos warned about, and he’s unconvinced that bringing rational betting behavior into the story explains objective frequencies (as in work associated with Sean Carroll and David Wallace). By contrast, he presents pilot-wave theory (tracing Louis de Broglie and David Bohm) as a comparatively straightforward completion strategy—nonlocal, yes, but after Bell that becomes “a feature, not a bug”—and he also treats objective-collapse approaches as a clear alternative. He closes with a broadly Sellarsian point: properly understood, physics doesn’t (and can’t) just “undermine” the manifest image, because experimental evidence and ordinary descriptions remain indispensable to doing physics at all.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Quantum mechanics as a theory

07:00 - Shut up and calculate

11:02 - Wave-function realism

18:49 - What the wave-function represents

21:50 - Ontology

27:04 - Fields

32:20 - Probabilities

39:53 - Many-worlds

44:18 - Simplicity

47:00 - Recovering probabilities

50:49 - Preferred approach

55:08 - Pilot wave theory

1:04:23 - Manifest image

1:07:46 - Other ways of talking

1:13:29 - Scientific anti-realism

1:16:42 - Anti-realism and physics

1:20:28 - Modality

1:26:18 - Metaphysical possibility

1:31:30 - Essences

1:33:07 - Fundamentality

1:37:40 - Concepts

1:41:16 - Vagueness

1:49:59 - Making language precise

1:52:20 - Classical logic

1:53:04 - Value of philosophy

1:57:20 - Conclusion

Can we actually solve philosophical disputes if we keep treating our inherited vocabulary as fixed, rather than asking how to redesign it to represent the world better?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. His work has focused on a range of topics, including semantics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

2. Book Summary

In Fixing Language, Herman Cappelen argues that a huge amount of philosophy (and plenty of non-philosophical inquiry) is best understood as ‘conceptual engineering’: the critical/constructive activity of assessing and improving our representational devices, rather than merely describing what our words currently mean. He frames this as an opposition between ‘representational complacency’ (taking inherited conceptual tools for granted) and ‘representational skepticism’ (treating it as a first-order intellectual task to ask whether our framing devices are defective and how to do better). The book’s opening parts map the terrain through a wide range of illustrations—explication in the Carnap/Quine tradition, Haslanger-style amelioration, revisionism about truth and morality, and more—then uses that map to motivate the need for a general framework rather than a pile of disconnected case-studies.

Cappelen’s positive proposal is what he calls the ‘Austerity Framework’, built around an externalist metasemantics. On this approach, any serious theory of conceptual engineering has to start with an account of how expressions get and change their semantic values, and Cappelen treats semantic change as broadly analogous to reference change. A striking upshot is that the usual mentalistic talk of “engineering concepts” is misleading: the framework doesn’t treat ‘concepts’ (as philosophers/psychologists standardly use that term) as the primary items being manipulated, and it predicts that the process is typically not under our control or even transparent to us, often remaining messy and inscrutable. He also uses this machinery to explain why philosophers are tempted by diagnoses of “incoherent” or “inconsistent” concepts while denying that such entities play the explanatory role they’re often assigned.

A major challenge for any revisionary project is how it can preserve continuity of inquiry rather than merely “changing the subject”—a worry Cappelen traces to Strawson’s objection to Carnapian explication and treats as a central constraint on engineering. His response leans heavily on ‘topic continuity’: the key question is when significant shifts in extension/intension still count (in context) as staying on the same topic, and he argues there’s no clean set of necessary and sufficient conditions here—more like an ongoing practice of contestation, negotiation, and genealogy than a tidy theory. He then contrasts his framework with alternatives that foreground ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ (debates about what words should mean) and with approaches that appeal to a term’s “function,” objecting that in many real disputes we care about torture (or freedom, etc.), not the fate of a particular English string, and that purportedly substantive “functions” often collapse into thin, disquotational ones. The concluding posture is deliberately revisionary and anti-foundational: Cappelen is skeptical of ‘bedrock’ concepts that can’t be engineered, urging instead the working hypothesis that “everything is in flux,” with no natural endpoint to conceptual engineering.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:23 - Fixing language

06:18 - Conceptual engineering in history

08:38 - Descriptive and prescriptive traditions

11:31 - Motivations for conceptual engineering

14:58 - Concepts

20:38 - Semantic externalism

31:23 - Internalist rejoinder

35:17 - Meaning of meaning

40:39 - Lack of control

51:20 - Stipulating new uses

57:36 - Example

1:01:49 - Base and superstructure

1:06:42 - Meaning and use

1:16:27 - Limits of revision

1:23:38 - Relevance of conventions

1:27:59 - Issue with topic change

1:33:55 - Worldly effects

1:38:43 - Worry

1:43:51 - Upcoming books

1:48:37 - Value of philosophy

1:54:00 - Conclusion

When should evidence guide choice over causation, how can meaning emerge from signaling games, and why might utility comparisons quietly break the ethics we build on them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Brian Skyrms is Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and an Emiritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. His work has focused on science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability.

2. Interview Summary

Brian Skyrms frames the opening around the long-running split between causal and evidential decision theory: both aim at “maximizing expected payoff,” but they compute “expectation” using different probability functions—ordinary degrees of belief for the evidentialist, versus probabilities meant to represent causal efficacy for the causal theorist. He suggests that once you’re clear on that conceptual difference, much of the remaining literature becomes a matter of pushing (and disputing) intuitions about “funny cases,” especially Richard Jeffrey–style “news value” reasoning versus causal evaluation in cases like Newcomb-style problems, which he’s surprised to see repeatedly “rise from the grave” in new philosophical (and AI-adjacent) waves of debate.

From there, the interview broadens into Skyrms’s broader picture of how decision theory connects to a cluster of topics—conditionals, causation, and modal/necessity talk—where he favors a pragmatic, human-centered treatment rather than hunting for extra “facts” supposedly delivered by raw intuition. In that spirit, he discusses Bayesian-friendly ways of handling subjunctive conditionals that preserve some “probability of a conditional” motivations while avoiding classic triviality worries, and he emphasizes that what counts as “rational” can shift with the setting: in correlated evolutionary contexts (where you reliably meet similar agents), evidential/Jeffrey-style reasoning can predict what evolves better than individualistic causal-choice reasoning, which helps motivate his interest in the evolution of cooperation.

In the second half, Skyrms highlights two big research programs. First, he explains how a naturalistic account of meaning can start from information transfer in David Lewis–style signaling games—tracking how learning dynamics can move populations toward equilibria where signals stabilize—and then treating deception as a deviation (strategic or mistaken) from an emergent equilibrium use-pattern. Second, he summarizes his recent work on utilitarianism as largely a measurement-theory project: many familiar philosophical “add up the utils” arguments implicitly assume overly strong scales, and once you respect the legitimate degrees of freedom in utility measurement, celebrated cases (including Derek Parfit-style population examples) can become formally meaningless because permissible rescalings flip the verdicts. He then connects this methodological moral to epistemology: you can’t “answer” the complete skeptic (that’s a fool’s game), but you can make progress with partial skeptics by getting precise about what “the future will be like the past” could even mean—a point associated with Nelson Goodman—and by using Bayesian tools to articulate which inductive inferences are actually supported. He closes on a deflationary note about philosophy’s value: he won’t sell it as for everyone; for him, it’s mainly that it’s fun to question what people accept without thinking.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:19 - Causal and evidential decision theory

04:05 - Maximizing expected payoff

05:27 - Correlation without causal connection

06:17 - Causation

10:41 - Deliberating over the past

13:42 - Common intuitions

16:11 - Philosophical landscape

18:05 - Predicted riches

21:27 - Transparent box case

23:55 - Normative significance of decision theory

28:33 - Subjunctive conditionals

33:33 - Closest possible worlds

35:15 - Backtracking counterfactuals

37:07 - Example

39:47 - Possible worlds

41:38 - Metaphysical possibility

44:05 - Suppositional approach

48:10 - Benefits of the approach

51:19 - Foundations of utility

56:55 - Utilitarianism and measuring utility

1:01:28 - Saving utilitarianism

1:02:43 - Vague preferences and credences

1:06:10 - Content in signalling games

1:13:48 - Not sui generis

1:15:23 - Signalling games with only one person

1:18:18 - Accounting for content more broadly

1:21:01 - Inductive skepticism

1:23:50 - Required assumptions

1:25:55 - Problem of induction

1:31:11 - Contracts and games

1:33:11 - Correlations

1:38:33 - Value of philosophy

1:39:56 - Conclusion

When you don’t have enough evidence to believe or disbelieve, is agnosticism a rational attitude in its own right or just a temporary pause on the way to a verdict?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Avery Archer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work has focused on the philosophy of action, philosophy of mind and intentionality, moral psychology and metaethics, epistemology, and more.

2. Book Summary

In The Attitude of Agnosticism, Avery Archer aims to (i) sort out what agnosticism is (as a distinctive doxastic attitude) and (ii) defend a package of claims about when it’s rationally appropriate. The book starts by laying down seven criteria any good descriptive account should satisfy—e.g., it must require ‘cognitive contact’ with the proposition, explain agnosticism’s ‘neutrality’ and ‘commitment’ to neutrality, allow for ‘spontaneous’ agnosticism, and (controversially) preserve the possibility of ‘agnosticism-involving doxastic inconsistency’ (someone can be irrationally inconsistent by both believing P and being agnostic toward P). With those criteria in hand, Archer then surveys leading contemporary ‘attitudinal’ accounts (Russell, Crawford, Masny, Raleigh, Wagner, Friedman) and argues that each fails at least one criterion, clearing the way for a new positive view.

Archer’s positive proposal is the ‘questioning-attitude account’: to be agnostic toward P is to be in a commitment-involving mental state of sceptically questioning both the truth and the falsity of P—so agnosticism is sui generis (not just a form of belief, disbelief, desire, etc.). On this picture, agnosticism is not defined by being “in inquiry”: Archer rejects the idea that agnosticism essentially entails an inquiring state of mind, arguing instead that the core of agnosticism is its rational appropriateness when one’s competently considered evidence is insufficient to establish either P or ¬P. The book also defends a ‘bipartite’ view of doxastic neutrality: the act of ‘withholding judgement’ typically puts you into the attitude of agnosticism (roughly as judging relates to believing). And it argues there is no practical analogue of agnosticism—no third practical attitude that stands to intending X / intending not-X the way agnosticism stands to belief / disbelief—drawing out consequences for how belief differs from intention and mere “acceptance.”

In the later chapters Archer connects this framework to live debates in epistemology. He argues that pragmatic considerations can sometimes be reasons to remain agnostic (reasons not to believe), even if they cannot be reasons to believe—using this to claim that ‘transparency’-style arguments at best constrain reasons for belief, not reasons for agnosticism, and motivating distinctions like ‘weak’ vs ‘strong’ evidentialism. He also defends a modest (‘weak’) form of permissivism on which, for some evidence e, it can be rationally permissible either to believe P or to be agnostic about P (without committing to permissibility between belief and disbelief), and he argues that agnosticism is the rationally appropriate response to certain cases of revealed peer disagreement. Overall, the book’s upshot is to “give agnosticism its due”: treat it as a distinctive, norm-governed attitude whose central role is to be the fitting doxastic response when our evidence doesn’t settle matters either way.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:47 - Background to book

03:38 - Philosophical relevance of agnosticism

06:52 - Agnosticism and inquiry

08:42 - Consideration criterion

11:26 - Two notions of consideration

17:37 - Basic approach

22:24 - Criticism

25:54 - Rejoinder

27:22 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive

33:02 - Inconsistency criterion

40:00 - Believing and disbelieving simultaneously

45:04 - Attitudinal account

47:28 - Second order beliefs

52:05 - Occurrent attitudes

1:02:25 - Agnosticism and inquiry

1:11:14 - No evidence case

1:14:36 - Alternatives

1:18:57 - Normativity

1:20:47 - Instrumental

1:23:36 - Example

1:26:22 - Other sorts of rationality

1:30:27 - Belief vs. judgment

1:36:13 - Questioning account

1:37:22 - Belief

1:40:37 - Unrealized disposition

1:43:22 - Minimum threshold

1:45:00 - Upshot of account

1:49:03 - Value of philosophy

1:51:08 - Conclusion

Can abortion be wrong even if ‘personhood’ is unsettled, and what do moral realism and parental obligations imply about bodily autonomy arguments?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Christopher Kaczor is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and his work has focused on bioethics, theology, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Christopher Kaczor argues that the abortion debate leans heavily on competing accounts of ‘personhood’, but that settling personhood isn’t strictly necessary for evaluating abortion: the discussion can proceed using arguments that don’t presuppose a verdict about fetal personhood (for example, a ‘future like ours’ approach). He also notes the lack of consensus among defenders of abortion on what personhood consists in, and he surveys influential proposals that place personhood only after birth (or later, given psychological capacities). In parallel, he presses a biological/moral baseline: embryos, fetuses, and newborns count as human beings, and Kaczor defends the claim that all human beings have basic rights, centrally including a right to life, while distinguishing that status from gametes (living cells but not human beings).

Friction then explores a gradualist or developmental picture, where moral status increases across gestation and reaches “full” standing at birth. Kaczor labels this the gradualist view and rejects it as implausible: physiological or psychological development is not ordinarily treated as what makes it more permissible to kill younger humans than older ones. He also challenges “cumulative-threshold” reasoning (the “rope” idea): if birth, viability, and sentience are each irrelevant to basic moral status, piling them up doesn’t generate moral standing. Kaczor allows that some rights sensibly track maturity (driving, voting), but he contrasts these with basic immunities—like not being intentionally killed, tortured, or enslaved—that don’t depend on the agent’s developed capacities. He reinforces the point with a historical warning about dividing humanity into those with basic dignity and those without, and he treats birth as an arbitrary line for that purpose.

On bodily-autonomy arguments, Friction asks about Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist-style reasoning, and Kaczor argues that the analogy breaks because parents have special obligations toward their own dependent children that don’t apply to strangers; he extends the critique to the “burglar” analogy by emphasizing the difference between an innocent dependent child and a culpable intruder. To support the idea that obligations aren’t always voluntarily assumed, he offers cases where moral responsibility arises from circumstance (for example, encountering a newborn in danger) and discusses parental responsibilities (including an adoption example) as responsibilities that can bind even without a chosen commitment. The interview also detours into metaethics: Friction articulates a stance/attitude-based way of hearing moral claims, while Kaczor diagnoses this as emotivism and defends moral realism—some acts are wrong independently of anyone’s preferences—and he argues that thoroughgoing subjectivism struggles to make sense of widespread moral condemnation (e.g., of rape or racism).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:08 - Persons

02:59 - Other categories

05:50 - Vagueness

07:27 - Choosing a precisification

09:40 - Argument from history

12:14 - Gradual view

17:23 - My preferences

22:36 - Connection to the mother

25:53 - Duties to others

28:42 - Responsibilities

34:35 - Moral realism

35:07 - Preferences and morality

39:20 - Understanding the claims

43:07 - Moral naturalism

45:18 - Subjectivist commitments

47:32 - Moral facts and motivation

51:40 - Consistency

53:40 - Variation on the violinist

56:01 - Issues for the violinist argument

59:50 - Double-effect

1:03:20 - Arbitrariness

1:07:23 - A Defense of Abortion

1:11:05 - Aggressors

1:13:51 - Framing problems

1:18:05 - Restatement of my view

1:22:51 - Value of philosophy

1:24:20 - Conclusion

What do we really mean when we say we “know” something, and why does that confidence fall apart the moment we try to explain it?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Linda Zagzebski is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. Her work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.

2. Interview Summary

Zagzebski develops the idea of ‘omnisubjectivity’ as a divine attribute: God’s perfectly accurate, complete grasp of every creature’s conscious states “from that creature’s own perspective,” including what those states are like. She argues that omniscience requires more than knowing all true propositions—it requires knowing subjective experience itself—and that traditional accounts of omnipresence (“present in everything that exists” in a non-spatial way) naturally extend to the non-spatial aspects of reality, like pain, joy, and anxiety. This is also tied to prayer and divine justice: if judgment depends in part on the fine-grained character of our conscious lives, God must be able to grasp those lives fully. She then presses a core explanatory challenge: if omnipresence means God is “in” your anxiety the way you are, that seems to require perfect first-person grasp rather than mere observation at a distance—but it’s hard to explain how that can be true without collapsing the distinction between God and the creature.

On free will and foreknowledge, she diagnoses the fatalist pressure as driven by the ‘necessity of the past’ plus some ‘transfer of necessity’ principle: if a past fact is fixed and entails a future fact, the future looks fixed too. She suggests that progress requires getting clearer on what we really mean by “we can’t do anything about the past,” proposing that what’s at issue may be causal reach (or “causal closure”) rather than a transferable modality—and that this reframes divine-foreknowledge worries as one instance of a more general causal structure. She also highlights that theological fatalism and logical fatalism share the same argumentative shape, and that our different reactions to them should make us suspicious that something subtle is being smuggled in. In exploring responses, she discusses a line associated with William of Ockham (treating relevant truths/beliefs as not straightforwardly “in the past”) and offers her own “Thomistic optimism”: drawing on Thomas Aquinas and divine simplicity, God’s knowing could be one undivided, continuous state spanning past, present, and future, so it doesn’t sit in the past in the way the fatalist argument requires. She adds that merely appealing to timelessness doesn’t automatically help, since it can generate an analogous “necessity” problem for eternity.

A later theme is her book The Two Greatest Ideas and a proposed “third” breakthrough: intersubjectivity—genuinely sharing perspectives and “seeing through other people’s eyes” in a way that becomes culturally transformative. She points out that the pieces already exist across fields (mirror-neuron research, empathy in psychology, applications in education, phenomenology), but they haven’t been integrated into a society-wide vision that changes how people actually think and live. Morally, she contrasts an older harmony-centered ideal (flourishing as living in harmony with the universe, in Aristotle’s sense of eudaimonia) with the modern elevation of autonomy (often traced in the culture to Immanuel Kant), and suggests many polarized disputes replay that deeper conflict. She’s skeptical that purely academic progress will reduce real-world rancor unless these insights are “imbibed” as ordinary habits of mind. She closes by defending philosophy’s value in broadly Socrates-style terms: it forces deeper reflection on what seems obvious, exposes the assumptions we live by, and cultivates intellectual humility.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:02 - Omnisubjectivity

04:52 - Omnipresence and omnisubjectivity

09:06 - Omniscience and omnisubjectivity

13:49 - Knowing that vs. knowing what it’s like

16:51 - Immoral states

25:11 - Knowing his creation

26:22 - Free will and alternative possibilities

30:00 - Is it libertarian free will?

30:53 - Foreknowledge and free will

38:00 - Necessity of the past

40:05 - Backward causation

42:30 - Theological and logical fatalism

45:37 - God’s infallibility

48:47 - God and time

52:15 - The Two Greatest Ideas

58:01 - Progress on intersubjectivity

1:02:55 - Philosophy of mind

1:04:25 - Identity over time

1:07:35 - Do souls solve the problem?

1:11:03 - Continuity of forms

1:13:33 - Value of philosophy

1:16:04 - Conclusion

Can perception itself, grounded in vision science, explain how the mind represents the world and still gets things wrong?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Tyler Burge is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. His work has spread a wide range of topics, especially mind, language, and epistemology.

Check out his book, "Perception: First Form of Mind"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198871015/

2. Book Summary

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge argues that to understand perception properly we need a systematic account of perceptual representation: what its representational contents are, how they present the world, and how those contents figure in explanation. He stresses that (as with thought) there can be different “modes of presentation” even when the perceived object and property are the same—for example, a rectangular surface perceived straight-on versus at an angle yields different perceptual contents, because the perceptual perspective and proximal stimulation differ. These differences matter not just for phenomenology but for explaining action and epistemic success or failure, since perceptual psychology and action-explanations advert to how the world is presented to the subject. The book’s core framework treats perception as built from “perceptual attributives”: repeatable representational abilities to characterize particulars as instantiating properties and relations.

Burge’s positive picture is that perceptual contents are fundamentally iconic and highly structured: an array-like, matrix format that represents particulars and their properties/relations in a perspective-dependent way, and any neat “linear” specification of perceptual content is an abstraction from this richer iconic format. The iconic format helps explain how perception can be massively complex yet computationally manageable, and why perceptual representation is not well-modeled as merely a string of symbols. A central explanatory target is perceptual psychology’s focus on how perceivers reliably represent the same repeatable environmental types across varying stimulus conditions; Burge treats perceptual attributives as precisely these repeatable competencies, and he emphasizes that studying how such attributives are formed is “the central occupation” of perceptual psychology. He also highlights how perceptual contents both encode a specific vantage point and nevertheless track stable attributes, with law-like linkages among different perspective-bound “presentations” of the same attribute (a hallmark phenomenon behind perceptual constancies).

The later parts broaden the view into an “architecture” story: perception is not an isolated module but anchors a wider family of perceptual-level capacities—attention, conation, affect, memory, learning, anticipation, and imagining—each with a perceptual-level species that uses only perceptual attributives and operations not more advanced than those in perception-formation. Burge uses contemporary vision science to sketch how the visual and visuo-motor systems operate as large, integrated complexes unified by their function, contents, and computational processing, rather than by being easily characterized as “early vision” plus something categorically different. Along the way he pushes back on much of the philosophical debate about “cognitive penetration” and modularity (associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn), arguing that both sides have often relied on dated science and muddled notions of “cognition,” and he develops a more careful way of talking about whether perceptual-level computations need to invoke supra-perceptual representation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:10 - Audience

04:29 - Perception: First Form of Mind

16:45 - Empirical work

26:37 - Consciousness and representation

32:21 - Language of thought

39:10 - Information-registration

46:47 - Which things are representational?

49:35 - Elimination and reduction

57:49 - David Papineau

1:00:03 - Perceptual states without consciousness

1:01:03 - Physicalism

1:05:20 - Vagueness

1:09:40 - Causation

1:14:36 - Lawlike correlations

1:16:26 - Tropes

1:22:42 - Perceptual constancy

1:29:36 - Value of philosophy

1:35:50 - Conclusion

What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity".

2. Book Summary

In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival.

The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival).

Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:44 - Self and Identity

04:25 - What and why questions

07:25 - Semantics

12:29 - Normative issues

13:29 - What matters in survival

18:36 - Numerical identity

21:04 - More conditions?

22:42 - The past

24:35 - Permanent comatose

30:49 - Memory wipe

36:05 - Psychological continuity

37:25 - Puzzles of identity

40:47 - Persistence and eternalism

46:43 - Relative identity

53:42 - Sci-fi cases

58:17 - Other views

1:00:24 - Non-reductionism

1:05:51 - Examples

1:10:55 - Vagueness

1:14:37 - Narrative accounts

1:18:32 - Christian theology

1:25:03 - A puzzle

1:27:32 - Value of philosophy

1:29:25 - Conclusion

Can neuroscience and psychology really undermine free will, or do they just force us to rethink what moral responsibility is for?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Manuel Vargas is professor of philosophy at UC San Diego, and his work has focused on moral psychology, free will, agency, Latin American philosophy, and more. His book is "Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility".

2. Interview Summary

Manuel Vargas maps the “scientific threat” landscape to free will, focusing on neuroscientific results often taken to show that “the brain decides before you do.” He treats Benjamin Libet–style readiness-potential findings as interpretively underdetermined: neural activity prior to reported awareness doesn’t yet establish that a decision has already been made, since it could reflect impulses, drives, or preliminary considerations rather than settled choice. He also suggests we’re misled if we model agency on arbitrary “picking” cases (grab any identical cereal) rather than “choosing” cases where reasons genuinely matter (e.g., tradeoffs between an SUV and an electric car), since the latter are what moral responsibility disputes are really about. Relatedly, he notes how compatibilist “reasons-responsiveness” approaches can be motivated by the idea that even if the process isn’t transparent at the “high-level,” it can still count as freedom if the overall system is appropriately responsive to reasons.

On the familiar objection that compatibilism is just a “definitional gambit,” Vargas reframes the clash as a deeper methodological dispute about what philosophy is trying to do. One tradition (associated with P. F. Strawson–style descriptive metaphysics and ordinary-language approaches) treats the philosopher’s job as articulating and systematizing the categories already embedded in common thought and talk; another, more revisionist strand treats philosophy as continuous with science and open to reshaping our self-conception in light of theoretical pressure—illustrated via Nelson Goodman / John Rawls–style reflective equilibrium. To show how even widespread communal agreement can be parochial or unstable, he uses a thought experiment about 12th-century Catholics who treat sacramental status as essential to “marriage,” contrasted with a later ethnographer who points to marriage-like practices lacking sacraments—forcing the question whether “sacrament” is essential or merely a local regimentation of a broader institution.

When the discussion turns to moral responsibility, Vargas develops an explicitly instrumentalist/revisionist justification: responsibility practices (blame, praise, resentment, etc.) are defensible if they help “build better beings”—fostering and extending moral sensibility and enabling the cooperation/coordination goods that creatures like us can otherwise struggle to secure. He emphasizes that a genealogical story about emerging from norm-enforcement doesn’t by itself justify continuing the practice; justification depends on whether the practice still produces valuable goods, and he argues the distinctive structure of responsibility talk calls for explaining features like backward-looking assessment and why negligence can count as culpable. At the same time, he resists a purely forward-looking “efficient” instrumentalism: capturing our practices and making revisionism workable likely requires some role for desert-like constraints, partly because uptake matters and partly because there may be independent normative limits—an issue he notes David Brink has treated in detail. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a historically “first-pass,” often messy frontier activity that incubates later disciplines and expands human knowledge—famously tracing even the idea of the academy back to Plato.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Scientific threats to free will

05:33 - Simple vs. complex decisions

08:29 - Compatibilist response

11:47 - Epiphenomenalist threat

17:37 - Are compatibilists changing the subject?

24:13 - Terminological dispute

29:26 - Theorizing and pragmatics

33:23 - Moral responsibility

43:33 - Content of blame judgments

45:13 - Settling reference

54:27 - Definitions

59:30 - Eliminativism, revisionism, and discretionism

1:02:23 - Issues with discretionism

1:06:54 - Instrumentalism about responsibility

1:12:39 - A thinner altnerative

1:26:19 - Backward-looking practices

1:30:07 - Luck and libertarianism

1:36:09 - Practices justified even with luck

1:37:23 - Stronger opposing reasons?

1:41:59 - Justified on balance

1:45:05 - Value of philosophy

1:50:04 - Conclusion

How should we understand the forces that shape public opinion and politics, and what do they reveal about human nature, language, and power?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

2. Interview Summary

In the interview, Chomsky reflects on Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward S. Herman), saying the “basic analysis” still holds even though the media landscape has been transformed by the explosion of digital platforms: the first edition didn’t consider digital media at all, and even the 2002 update treated the early internet as not yet changing the core picture. He argues that elites still work to “manufacture consent” by redirecting attention and “demonizing enemies,” and he uses China as a case study: in his view, the “threat” is framed as aggression, but the real concern is China’s development and expanding economic influence, met by military posturing and encirclement narratives.

A big portion turns to language and human nature. Chomsky says the distinctive human capacity for language appears extremely recent in evolutionary time—likely emerging with Homo sapiens—and he emphasizes the narrow window suggested by archaeology and genomics: humans separated into groups not long after our emergence, yet those groups shared language, implying a rapid, near-“instantaneous” development. He resists the idea that language is primarily an adaptation for communication, instead treating it as an instrument of thought whose core design often prioritizes computational elegance over communicative efficiency, and he links this to a broader picture of evolution as “disruption → simplest solution → selection,” not teleology. When asked about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rule-following worries, he pushes back that many “rules” are not sustained by social convention but by built-in biases and internal cognitive structure—pointing to how even young children acquire and use grammar without treating it like a publicly negotiated norm.

On politics and public life, Chomsky repeatedly shifts questions from surface fixes to underlying “pathologies.” On mass shootings (raised via Uvalde), he argues the central issue isn’t tactical response but preventing such events from being normal features of social life. On polarization and “patient” civic culture, he falls back on education, organization, and sustained activism as the mechanism by which norms actually improve over decades. He warns that Supreme Court of the United States’s post–Roe trajectory (as signposted by Clarence Thomas) could target contraception and same-sex relationships, and he describes a long-term legal/political project associated with Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society. He insists U.S. elections are extremely secure and treats fraud panic as a pretext for voter suppression and institutional capture—highlighting an Axios-reported civil-service reclassification push tied to Donald Trump as part of a broader authoritarian drift. He also returns to what still “surprises” him: public complacency since Hiroshima about existential risks (nuclear escalation and climate tipping points), and he condemns U.S. authorization and support for Israel’s settlement/annexation policies as unusually extreme in modern geopolitics.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:57 - Manufacturing consent

02:49 - Manufacturing consent still necessary?

08:06 - Development of language

10:54 - Capacities relevant to language

16:49 - Mentors

19:08 - A priori propositions and Quine

21:34 - Police response to Uvalde shooting

24:05 - Rule-following argument

27:30 - Social justice

29:36 - Roe v. Wade and what’s next

32:26 - Voting process

36:54 - Surprises

43:30 - Biden’s approval rating

45:17 - Israel

47:27 - Conclusion

Can supervenience and functionalism really explain consciousness, or do Mary-style cases, illusionism, and mind uploading reveal a deeper gap in the physicalist picture?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Pete Mandik is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University of New Jersey, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. Check out his channel and website:

https://www.youtube.com/petemandik

https://petemandik.net/

2. Interview Summary

Mandik starts by situating his work in debates about how the mental relates to the physical—especially the pressure points around ‘functionalism’, ‘type-identity’ views, and what exactly ‘supervenience’ is supposed to guarantee. He recounts reacting strongly against the David Chalmers/Andy Clark extended-mind picture, and he explains a worry that shows up when you combine the Otto-notebook case with John Searle’s Chinese Room: if you accept the “systems reply,” you can end up with what looks like two minds that both “supervene on the whole room,” which he takes to be a red flag about how liberally we’re individuating minds. He then connects this to a broader “regress” concern: once you “dig deep” into supervenience, you get a demand that differences must be physically underwritten (invoking Terry Horgan’s “super-dupervenience” and related arguments), and that strengthens supervenience in a way that can change the shape of the non-reductive physicalist’s position.

A big middle stretch focuses on the knowledge argument and variations on Mary. Mandik develops the “Swamp Mary” setup: a swamp-twin of post-release Mary who (by stipulation) has never actually seen red but is intrinsically like Mary after learning “what it’s like,” and he asks what that does to the claim that phenomenal knowledge requires the right experiential history. He explores the idea that pre-release Mary could get black-and-white, purely physical access to Swamp Mary and (in effect) “deduce” what it’s like—yet he also notes that the argument can feel “too easy,” and he flags that a lot turns on what we mean by the relevant “phenomenal knowledge” and by ‘deduction’ in these debates. Along the way he links the issue back to how ‘functionalism’ is often built to allow extreme multiple realizations—e.g., Ned Block-style “Chinese nation” cases—because once those implementations are in play, it affects what counts as an admissible physical basis for the mental.

Later, the conversation shifts to theories of consciousness and to some “meta” questions about how we should even frame the disputes. Mandik discusses Keith Frankish-style illusionism: the idea that many of us are under an illusion that there’s ‘phenomenal consciousness’ over and above access/functional notions, and he presses the challenge that the view is only interesting if that “illusion” is widespread and not just a philosopher’s artifact. He then contrasts illusionism with a more radical “qualia quietism,” where the thought is that the term ‘qualia’ is so damaged that we should refuse to assert or deny claims using it and instead talk in other vocabularies (like access consciousness). He also touches on Daniel Dennett-inspired themes—using a “retrospective judgment” analogy to frame how we might later come to say the transhumanists were right about mind uploading, drawing on Diaspora by Greg Egan—and closes with a defense of public-facing philosophy: philosophy needs to be made culturally “cool” and accessible, not treated as valuable only when it looks like journal-driven academic success.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:22 - Non-reductive physicalism

08:35 - Regress

14:57 - Benign regress?

17:07 - Another problem for supervenience physicalism

21:14 - Deviant phenomenal knowledge

30:40 - Phenomenal knowledge

35:05 - Answering Mary’s Room

46:24 - Primitiveness

50:22 - Varying the experiment

56:30 - Phenomenal concepts

1:06:24 - What is it like?

1:23:10 - Meta-illusionism

1:35:23 - Characterization and attribution

1:45:11 - Qualia quietism

1:49:33 - Use for qualia terminology?

2:01:03 - Quietism vs. abolitionism

2:08:08 - Keith Frankish and quietism

2:11:08 - Pragmatic use

2:13:52 - Color sensations

2:27:17 - Use for “sensation”

2:33:25 - Mind uploading

2:40:14 - Personal identity as vague

2:53:43 - Value of philosophy

3:02:27 - Conclusion

Is rationality mainly about keeping your beliefs coherent with each other, or about believing what your evidence really supports—even when the two come apart?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Alex Worsnip is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on rationality, epistemology, and more. His book, "Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality", was published by OUP in 2021.

2. Interview Summary

Alex Worsnip Alex Worsnip defends a ‘dualism’ about rationality: structural rationality is (broadly) coherence among one’s attitudes, while substantive rationality is having attitudes that are actually supported by one’s reasons/evidence. He motivates the split with a Superman case: someone can be substantively irrational for holding an unreasonable belief (“I’m Superman”), yet become additionally irrational when their beliefs clash (e.g., “Superman can fly” plus “I can’t fly”), where the new problem is incoherence rather than a fresh evidential mistake. Comparing this person to a “coherent twin” highlights the intuitive pull: coherence can make you more rational in one respect even while you remain (or become) less rational in another, purely evidential respect.

A major theme is how this distinction interacts with evidence. Worsnip argues that someone can be substantively irrational (failing to believe what their evidence really supports) without being structurally irrational, so long as they have a coherent “story” by their own lights—illustrated with a person who knows about expert consensus on climate change but dismisses it via a conspiracy hypothesis or a principled anti-testimony stance. That leads to a clean characterization: structural rationality pressures you to believe what you take your evidence to support, whereas substantive rationality pressures you to believe what your evidence actually supports. He then uses probabilistic reasoning to discuss the preface paradox and argues that “deductive closure” (believing all logical consequences of what you believe) is too strong to be a genuine requirement of structural rationality: probabilistic coherence can force low credence in a long conjunction, and it’s structurally incoherent to outright believe what you regard as more likely false than true.

Later, the discussion widens to normativity and reasons, especially instrumentalism (the idea that reasons are always tied to one’s goals/desires). Worsnip pushes back using epistemic cases where we plausibly have reasons to believe things even absent any relevant goal (his “unicycles in Mexico City” example), and he argues that instrumentalism doesn’t really “demystify” normativity because it must still take some fundamental normative principle for granted (roughly, that goal-advancement itself generates reasons). He also clarifies how ‘reasons’ relate to ‘ought’: reasons are pro tanto contributors toward what one ought to do all-things-considered, and he sees no special added suspiciousness in goal-independent reasons once we’re already comfortable with goal-independent ‘ought’ claims. The interview closes with a defense of philosophy’s value: engaging these questions is part of being reflective about ourselves and the world, and it also has practical payoff by improving clarity, critical thinking, and reasoning—especially through teaching.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Dualism about rationality

07:33 - Substantive rationality

12:21 - Reasons and evidence

22:39 - Evidential support

29:01 - Unclear terms

36:05 - Brute vs. unclear

43:19 - Instrumental norms

51:06 - Demystifying by stipulation

1:00:13 - Nihilism and metaethics

1:07:09 - Analytic naturalism

1:11:11 - Avoiding false metalinguistic claim

1:12:47 - Preface paradox

1:28:09 - Deductive closure too strong?

1:33:49 - Inconsistency constraint

1:39:17 - Strengthening the hypothetical

1:42:24 - Epistemic contextualism

1:51:23 - Pascal’s wager

1:52:53 - Reasons and well-being

1:53:54 - Is well-being normatively loaded?

1:55:49 - Value of philosophy

2:00:19 - Conclusion