CPA26 | ACP26

This work explores a philosophical critique of the use of griefbots, aritifical intelligent chatbots designed to emulate the deceased, by appealing to grief literature which argues that grief is inevitably good for us because it leads to the cultivation of self-knowledge and contributes to a well-lived human life.

This submission examines transgression as a social phenomenon through a conceptual use of modal logic. It focuses on questions of normativity, possibility, and rupture within social philosophy and normative ethics.

In this presentation, I will propose a new feminist and victim-centred bioethical framework to study the injustices faced by survivors of sexual assault in the courtroom and look at the possibility of using neuroscientific knowledge of trauma to better serve survivors.

The paper aims to provide a normative defence of compulsory licensing mechanisms for certain goods (e.g., vaccines) under international law, from the libertarian objection that these mechanisms undermine state sovereignty in the global free market.

I argue for for a virtue ethics of gossip, one that centers its potential as a site for the development of practical wisdom and thus the improvement of our characters.

I argue that inflation can be seen as a functional tax on savers and creditors but that redistribution that arises from it requires new theorizing that traditional taxes do not. I argue 1) That the complaint about property rights violations from taxation do not arise in the case of inflation 2) That there are procedural justice concerns that arise from central bankers acting as "tax collectors" and fiscal spenders and 3) That the inability of inflation to target the rich gives rise to fairness concerns that other traditional taxes such as the income tax do not.

I argue that there is a pressing philosophical need to theorize real, present-day barn façades as mechanisms for perpetuating settler ignorance and inaction in what is commonly called the Maritime region. More specifically, I demonstrate that commonplace vernacular architecture that emulates agrarian structures across the Maritime provinces can illuminate two important features of settler placemaking in contested landscapes.

In debates on the rightness and wrongness of NIMBY, the focus is often on NIMBY resistance to proposed environmental projects. This paper focuses on NIMBY reactions to people in their communities experiencing homelessness. For this context, we have in mind as examples informal settlements (encampments), shelter locations, and supervised consumption sites; we will also explore how these examples differ in nature from each other. The examination of NIMBYism in light of these examples, we argue, helps to elucidate the moral aspects of NIMBYism we think are overlooked in previous philosophical debates on the phenomenon, namely that NIMBY claims can make moral claims about other people, i.e., they are less or not worthy of moral consideration.

I argue that a dominant strand of democratic theory fails to support the claim that enfranchisement is a necessary component of democracy’s justification. Standard arguments understand enfranchisement as an equality constraint: if anyone has a say, everyone ought to have it equally. This constraint falters in “anocratic” cases where no one holds power. But recent attempts to deliver the necessary link also fail. They misunderstand the value of political participation or introduce problems that depart from democracy. The common shortcoming lies in a failure to properly appreciate the underlying social value of democracy. I explore the idea of democracy as a social and political order and demonstrate that this recovers the necessary link between enfranchisement and democracy’s justification.

A proposal for a new practical outlook that improves on the failings of Effective Altruism.

My abstract discusses the ethical and epistemic risks of using metadata and Artificial Intelligence-Decision Support Systems (AI-DSS) in military and intelligence operations. It highlights how reliance on metadata can obscure important context and qualitative information, leading to biased and subjective outcomes despite a façade of objectivity. The integration of AI-DSSs increases these risks by amplifying data volume and complexity, making it impossible for humans to maintain the epistemic conditions necessary for moral responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for a role-based virtue epistemology akin to the role-based ethics articulated by Confucian philosophers. It both articulates a framework for such an epistemology and applies it to understand the role-based epistemic virtues that facilitate various aspects of cultural evolution.

In this paper, I argue that models of AI alignment that are implicitly or explicitly anthropocentric are associated with significant moral, epistemic and environmental risks, both short- and long-term, and that those risks threaten both human and non-human sentients. As AI capabilities develop, it will be delegated more decision-making, with less human oversight. Some of those decisions are certain to affect non-human sentients (most relevantly, non-human animals). Non-human animal welfare and rights are not morally negligible. However, anthropocentric models of AI alignment effectively treat them as negligible. The best way to prevent this situation is to incorporate relevant non-anthropocentric guidelines into core principles of AI alignment.

I propose a paper that analyzes Nick Bostrom's simulation argument in terms of Husserlian phenomenology. The analysis attempts to show that the simulation argument is logically incoherent.

In this paper I contribute to the growing literature on epistemic blame and accountability by articulating and defending a hitherto overlooked distinction between two kinds of epistemic accountability: internal epistemic accountability on the one hand, and external epistemic accountability on the other. Roughly, the distinction is this. Internal epistemic accountability occurs when we hold someone to account for (culpably) violating an epistemic norm that is in force in their epistemic community through a reduction of epistemic trust in that person, and a reluctance to participate in shared inquiry. External epistemic accountability, on the other hand, occurs when we hold someone to account for following an epistemic norm(s) operative in her community that is viewed as illegitimate or inadequate by the one issuing the sanction. External epistemic accountabiltiy is characterized not only by a reduction in epistemic trust in that individual, but a kind of reduction in social-epistemic trust, i.e., a reduction of confidence in the legitimacy or adequacy of the epistemic norms themselves. After defending the distinction, I argue the distinction has important consequences for our understanding of the nature and source of epistemic normativity.

The paper is about whether large language models and counterpart AI systems can or do have person-level psychological states like beliefs

We offer an evolutionary grounding of our intimate rights by considering first how living creatures are local reversals of entropy and why self-reflective agents would as a result establish intimate zones central to their personhood.

This abstract draws on new ideas about creating interspecies political space from Donaldson and Kymlicka's (2025) book Animals and the Right to Politics. Where I want to shift the narrative away from treating animal rights as a precondition to interspecies politics.

This paper argues that the constitutive properties of videogames situate them as an artform that is especially suited to aid in the cultivation of virtue, in the aristotelian sense.

I argue for the overlooked importance of a young, female correspondent of Kant's (Maria von Herbert), and contend that she is best understood as a proto-pessimistic thinker of Kantian vintage.

We take a data-driven, philosophical approach to assessing the causal factors responsible for an increase in polarization, extremism, and intolerance in digital communication–specifically social media.

Bioethics typically focuses on clinical issues faced by patients, families, health care providers and health care institutions and this focus seems to preclude effectively addressing the broader effects of the climate crisis in health care. We argue , however, that both the fields of mental health ethics and public health ethics provide important practical and theoretical perspectives that can help us continue to integrate more traditional bioethics concerns with environmental ethics concerns.

I challenge the exclusion of individuals with mental disorders from the epistemic activities of psychiatry on the basis that their exclusion constitutes a political form of injustice, as it precludes the fulfillment of their rights to justification for the normative relations to which they are subject and excludes them from the co-determination of these normative relations.

This abstract argues that climate misinformation creates an intergenerational harm by degrading the epistemic environment that future generations inherit. Like atmospheric carbon, misinformation accumulates over time, shaping future people’s beliefs about climate change, and how well they can evaluate expert advice. The abstract introduces the term epistemic inheritance to describe how this polluted informational landscape undermines responsible climate action.

I argue that AIs may be a kind of entity that can be moral patients

My submission concerns the ethics of a subset of communicative acts, namely directives (e.g. demanding, requesting, urging). On the popular view that blame involves making a demand of the blamee, blame too has a directive component. While it widely held the would-be hypocritical blamer lacks the 'standing' to blame, it is generally overlooked that (non-blaming) demands, requests, and other directives can be similarly hypocritical and so, standingless. (This provides grounds for rejecting views according to which blame is standing-governed in virtue of some property unique to blame (or even 'holding responsible').) By broadening the analytic scope of the phenomena that are take to be governed by a norm of standing, I aim to simultaneously i) provide a vindicatory account of why the blamer's lack of commitment to the norm appealed to in blaming undermines their standing to blame, and ii) develop an account of the standing to give directives (e.g. in blaming, demanding, requesting, urging) generally. Central to the view I develop—the directive-commitment view—is that there is an important and unexplored explanatory connection between the values/norms an agent’s own will is invested in, on the one hand, and the values/norms that an agent can appeal to in directing the will of another.

This submission develops Hosiasson's advancement of a subjectivist interpretation of probability between 'Why Do We Prefer Probabilities Relative To Many Data?' (1931) and 'Notes on the Psychology of Inductive Inference' (1935). Hosiasson's detailed consideration of the problem of the value of information along with both her technical and experimental approaches differentiates her thought from contemporary Frank Ramsey.

I consider what philosophers who reject radical moral encroachment (the thesis that moral considerations can affect the epistemic status of our beliefs) should say about cases of doxastic wronging that motivate radical moral encroachment. I give a debunking explanation of our intuitions about these cases that relies on the notion of agent-regret.

This paper is about epistemic factionalization—the phenomenon where our multi-dimensional space of independent debates collapses into a single axis of “left” versus “right.”

Some have argued that Scanlonian contractualism is unable to accommodate our intuitive convictions in cases where one person facing certain death or serious injury competes with a large group of people each facing a small risk of the same fate. I consider one existing answer to this apparent impasse and offer an alternative.

A paper that critically examines the idea that the deontic terms, such as duty, right, and wronging, can be applied to oneself in the same way as being applied to others.

I argue that it is challenging to interpret data visualizations as assertions, owing to the huge number of potential assertions that each contains. I further argue that the Question Under Discussion framework (developed by Craige Roberts on work by Robert Stalnaker) allows us to arrive at a partial solution, but that more work is needed to fully answer the challenge.

Futurist discourse, spanning predictions of artificial general intelligence, technological acceleration, and civilisational disruption, routinely presents projections with confidence that exceeds their evidential warrant. Yet epistemology has devoted surprisingly little systematic attention to the distinctive logical failures of future-directed theorising. This paper addresses that gap. I first establish that futurist inference is necessarily ampliative: because present evidence underdetermines future states, any projection introduces content not contained in its premises, and evaluating whether that step is warranted requires normative principles that purely epistemic criteria cannot supply. I then propose the Future-Theory schema (FT-schema), a set of grounding and projection conditions constitutive of epistemically responsible futurist theorising. Against this standard, I reconstruct two compounding failure structures characteristic of futuristically lax theories: the degenerate Futurist Inductive Schema (FIS*), in which missing premises allow conclusions to import content unwarranted by the evidence base; and claim-type conflation, in which the systematic blurring of descriptive, normative, and conjectural claims generates the rhetorical appearance of cumulative warrant where no valid inference exists. I conclude by arguing that these failures produce concrete epistemic and socially epistemic harms, including structural unassessability, epistemic undiscoverability, and epistemic opportunity cost.

Despite how central intuitions are to philosophical practice, there has been little work done on the methodological questions concerning how to collect them as evidence while avoiding error. Instead, the existing research on intuitions has focused on metaphysical and epistemological issues surrounding them. While these debates are relevant to methodology, they offer no guidance on how to effectively collect and handle intuitive evidence. As intuitions are widely invoked as evidence, direct research on how to handle them is necessary. In this paper, I argue in favour of a particular view of what makes a good thought-experiment, and explain what factors introduce error when collecting intuitive data.

Should patients have the right to refuse a treatment plan generated by AI? This paper argues that patients have the right to refuse treatment plans proposed by AI, paralleling existing rights concerning traditional treatment plan refusals. Ultimately, to maintain a patient’s right to refuse AI-generated treatment plans, we need policies and frameworks for patients to reasonably exercise this right.

I argue that the forgiveness held up as virtuous in both Wicked and Beauty of the Beast is in fact forgiveness to excess. I therefore argue that both of these cultural-touchstone stories teach children, and especially girls, something that is actually a vice (in that it misses the Aristotelian 'golden mean') or, at best, a burdened virtue (in that despite being choiceworthy in the short term it is ultimately self-destructive).

My submission is an abstract for a full scale paper I aim to write. I want to explore the language used to identify and categorize the term anger. I argue that the term itself ought to be understood as a unique emotion, as it is often mistakenly used as a generalizing term that covers too broad a range of unique emotions.

This paper argues for eliminating Fregean-style propositions from the philosophy of ordinary language, criticizing their status as abstract, context-independent bearers of truth. Drawing on critiques from Peter Hanks and others, it contends that truth and meaning stem from concrete acts of predication by speakers in context, not from abstract propositions. Objectivity and communication can be explained by shared word meanings and context without positing propositions as abstract types.

It's a paper in applied epistemology. Epistemology of the Web, of online tools like search engines, social media, and chatbots, in relation with the concept of epistemic luck.

I offer an account of the value of friendship as intrinsically moral but not always morally good. On this view, the value of friendship is like that of freedom: a life without friendship is morally imperfect, yet the demands of friendship are not by default moral demands.

The focus of the paper is paternalism between peers, e.g., spouses or friends. It argues that peer paternalism is sometimes justified.

In this paper, I propose the intimacy presupposition to argue for consent's linguistic appropriateness in sexual ethics, a response to another author's argument that consent is not necessary for ethical sex. I draw upon the intimate zones account, put forth by Jasmine Gunkel, to support my argument.

This essay explores an underdiscussed area of Elizabeth Anscombe’s thought: her philosophy of perception. Through her adoption of Wittgenstein's grammatical procedure, Anscombe provides a novel contribution to the topic of sense-perception. She intervenes on traditional debates concerning perception by showing that the concepts that figure into our talk about sensation are necessarily subject to public standards of correctness. In my exposition of central papers in Anscombe’s philosophy of perception I intend to support the following interpretive claim: Anscombe rejects a subject-object framing for the investigation of the character of perception.

One of the core questions of philosophical ethics is the practical and existential question, how should we live? The history of moral philosophy has offered a range of answers to this question, guiding normative concepts that we can think of as suggestions about how to set our moral compass. Classic options include virtue, duty, consequence, and care. In this session, we consider an alternative. Can we live a good life by setting our moral compass to growth? Is growth good? This project explores the pragmatist conceptions of growth offered by John Dewey and Jane Addams. Ultimately, I argue that Addams’s view of growth is more defensible as a guide to the good life.

A presentation about the two forms of ancient Greek scepticism and how to tackle the relations between them.

How changes in the conception of matter and the role of God in creation contributed to a collapse of the distinction between artifacts and natural things (cf abstract attached)

The "common sense" conception of the self as a discrete individual standing over against a world of objects is structurally continuous with the psychology of the tyrant in Plato's Republic. The tyrant emerges out of a radicalization of this ordinary conception of subjectivity.

The paper critically examines James Shaw’s “naïve” response to Kripke’s semantic skepticism in his recent book "Wittgenstein on Rules: Justification, Grammar and Agreement", and argues that the Wittgensteinian resources Shaw highlights—uniformity, regularity, similarity—cannot uniquely determine meaning in the face of Kripkean indeterminacy without help from dispositions and shared practice, and once these other factors are in place, it becomes unclear what work is left for Shaw’s initial notions to do.

This paper examines non-eudaimonistic and eudaimonistic readings of Thomas Hobbes's moral philosophy. I argue, based on four formal features of eudaimonism, that Hobbes is not strictly-speaking an eudaimonist, but nevertheless holds some ambivalence towards eudaimonism by virtue of his ethical focus on felicity.

Mechanistic interpretability treats internal “features” as the basic units of computation in AI models, but the field still lacks a precise account of what a feature is. I argue that features must both support bottom-up explanations of AI model behaviour and meet a universality requirement, and that existing accounts fail on these grounds. I then propose a new, graded conception of features based on two-dimensional universality: stable representational patterns across both inputs of the same class and across different models.

In the context of policy, a recent proposal from economists aims to replace traditional cost-benefit analysis methods with "Relative Social Willingness-To-Pay" or RS-WTP (Richardson et al. 2014). In RS-WTP, instead of asking people about their self-interested preferences to assess a potential benefit, we ask people for their judgments comparing different ways of allocating resources; we then use the results to understand how people judge the "social value" of a potential intervention or policy decision. This paper evaluates RS-WTP from a perspective of ethics and political philosophy.

The abstract submitted is a part of a larger paper project related to Margaret Cavendish's conception of matter as perceptible.

This paper argues that Spinoza’s conception of power (potentia) is the most fundamental concept of his metaphysics and has been largely neglected in scholarship. Interpreting Spinoza through the lens of dispositionalism, it shows that substance, attributes, and modes are best understood as structurally differentiated expressions of power rather than distinct ontological kinds. Drawing on close textual analysis of the Ethics and the Short Treatise, historical precedents in Aristotelian, Scholastic, Jewish, and early modern philosophy, and contemporary dispositionalist theories, the paper defends an actualist conception of potentia as pure activity and clarifies key puzzles concerning causation, dependence, and metaphysical structure in Spinoza.

This paper deals with the topic of operationalism, as discussed in the philosophy of measurement, and discusses the role it plays in psychiatric measures based on literature in the social sciences.

The paper I am submitting engages in scholarly debate about the function and nature of shame by offering a critical analysis of an often overlooked feature of Sartre's analysis of shame in the French concept of pudeur.

History of philosophy piece on a Sanskrit theory of introspection. I examine the view of the central but widely neglected author, Prabhākara (c. 8th century), who constitutes the origin point for plausibly the most influential view of introspection in the Sanskrit philosophical tradition.

I defend a view that combines perdurantism (temporal parts theory) with material plenitude (the view on which there are an abundance of essences).

This paper is an attempt to locate vulnerabilities in John Harsanyi’s argument for a utilitarian social welfare function.

In this paper, I reconstruct Kant’s conception of equal treatment before the law, and analyze the way he treats instances of social inequality in his work. I discuss Kant’s vehement rejection of a sentimentalist approach to beneficence as instrumentalizing the need of others for self-serving motives, and draw the implications of his critique for social policies in the legal-political domain. I focus on two examples: his argument for the state’s right to tax its citizens to support those who cannot maintain themselves, and infanticide motivated by the honor of unwed mothers. I argue that Kant’s fundamental insight is that only a formal account of equality before the law can guide social reforms and welfare in a way that upholds and preserves the equal status of all members of social contract, and genuinely expresses respect for them as persons.

The classic argument from inductive risk (AIR) in the philosophy of science is widely supposed to have established that non-epistemic (including ethical and social) values, must or should be weighed up along with more epistemic or truth-oriented considerations (such as predictive accuracy), when deciding on hypotheses. However, the classic AIR focusses on only the two options of hypothesis acceptance or rejection. In current scientific practice, scientists often exercise a third option: formally suspend judgement on the hypothesis. Generalization of the classic AIR requires modifying it to properly recognize and accommodate this third option. I argue that adequately generalizing the AIR to include the option of suspending judgement requires more carefully distinguishing between epistemic and pragmatic dimensions of trade-offs, and that this allows for scientists to more rationally exercise suspension of judgement in practice. The overarching aim is to provide considerations that enable more rational non-epistemic value influences.

This talk discusses the philosophy of approximation.

Philosophy of Biology using Philosophy of Physics

Can shame really challenge the inequalities inherent to the application of reactive attitudes in sexist context ? Although shame can be a moral emotion when it incites us to integrate the perspective of others in our self-conception, it has been known to motivate immoral practices. Considering this dilemma, our abstract explores the role shame can play to put an end to our collective tendency to excuse abusers.

This is a paper about modern Indian aesthetics: specifically, distinctively modern theories of aesthetic emotion (rasa) as theorized by as exemplified in the writings of Mysore Hiriyanna (1871-1950), A. K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), and K. C. Bhattacharyya (1875-1949). It would fall under the categories of philosophy of art, history of philosophy, and global philosophy in the areas listed below.

The topic is scientific explanation. The paper argues for expanding the role for contextualism in explanation. It develops and defends a novel approach I call "constrained contextualism," it considers case studies from science, and it responds to a challenge from Angela Potochnik.

This project responds to contemporary debates surrounding the nature and value of hope in analytic philosophy, with attention to the political and social dimensions of the topic.

This paper argues that in light of emerging philosophical work in nonideal sexual ethics, sexual consent education often ought to be understood as being an idealization. Features of consent are intentionally distorted and simplified, at the expense of truth and transparency, to promote a risk-averse sexual ethic, and combat sexualized violence. There are good reasons for the strategic approach to consent education, but there are also costs (to the project of 'good sex', to trust in educational institutions, among others).

The paper takes issue with the traditional empiricist paradigm of aesthetic theory, highlighting its tension with objects whose ostensibly aesthetic nature does not seem straightforwardly related to manifest perceptual qualities (e.g., literature, conceptual art, mathematical models, and ritualistic cultural practices). I offer an alternative to aesthetic empiricism which draws upon contemporary developments in the qualitative nature of mental life (i.e, cognitive phenomenology) to characterize aesthetic acquaintance with non-perceptual entities.

An analysis of whether GenAI can perform a genuine apology, drawing on recent work on public and institutional apologies and focusing on the recent instance of Grok's "apology" post on X.

This paper presents a new analysis on the sense of scientific explanatory understanding by drawing insights from empirical research on problem solving in psychology.

This paper presents a philosophical account of homesickness. While philosophers have discussed the notion of home, there seems to be no philosophical account of homesickness. My account suggests that homesickness as a negative affective state can be partly explained by recognizing it as agency-limiting. In arguing for this claim I draw upon work in political philosophy on gentrification and displacement.

This paper asks why some women do not adopt feminist beliefs, even in contexts where feminist activism has visibly improved their lives in their society. Focusing on a specific case in South Korea from 2015 to 2022, I bring together System Justification Theory by John T. Jost and Peter Strawson’s distinction between participant and objective stances. Standard Systemic Justification Theory explanations attribute oppressed groups’ anti-feminist beliefs primarily to non-epistemic, system-justifying motivation. I argue that when such explanations are applied in a basic, prejudicial way toward subordinated groups, they may risk a form of epistemic injustice: dissenting women are treated as objects of psychological diagnosis rather than as co-participants in cooperation to solve the patriarchal problems all women are facing, according to Amy Flowerree's Theory of psychologizing. Utilizing South Korean digital feminism among the young generation, the Nth Room Cybersex crime case, and the “Escape the Corset” and 4B movement as a case study, I develop an account of self-projection under hierarchy that treats many anti-feminist beliefs as rational responses to sanctions and social punishment, while still considering anti-feminist women as participant stance agents.

In the paper, I discuss how Descartes addresses aesthetic pleasure in his writings on sensory perception and the passions.

I argue that reasons-responsiveness views of moral responsibility avoid key problems on other views by 'externalizing the notion of capacity': what matters is not what the agent would do 'if they tried', but what they would do 'if the reason was present'. I argue that this externalization solves a deep problem with the classical view of capacity, but only at the cost of its own normative appeal: external capacities are poorly suited to do the normative work we need from a capacitarian theory of moral responsibility.

An examination of Hegel's mention of thinking as embodied, such that too much thinking causes headaches, in the context of feminist philosophy and philosophy of disability.

This paper critiques theories that treats adaptive preferences as autonomy deficits, and offers a promising new approach to adaptive preference theory.

Frege's philosophy of mathematics meets numerical cognition data: how the psychology of chunking can answer Benacerraf's challenge

This paper advances a novel account of the function of pain as explaining rather than causing behaviour. If correct, this view would have consequences for our attributions of pain to phylogenetically distant species and lends itself to a novel solution to the causal exclusion problem.

This is a philosophy of mind paper focused on the notion of understanding

My submission focuses on the relationship between generative AI and critical thinking. It aims to create a framework that will help to meditate potential negative impacts by drawing on recent work in epistemic cognition.

My paper engages in a reconstruction and critique of Giorgio Agamben's concepts of the Anthropological Machine and Whatever Singularities, arguing that the refusal of identity he proposes is not sufficient to counter the exclusionary social violence caused by traditional forms of humanism. I propose a new way of conceptualizing the human on the basis of analogy that attempts to circumvent both the problems with traditional humanisms, and Agamben's critiques.

Explores the unique cognitive and social dynamics of explicitly articulated (versus unarticulated, implicit) social norms and their implication for projects of norm change

Argues against the view that intentional action can be non-circularly analyzed as a form of successful trying. Argues that this casts doubt on the prospects of obtaining suitable materials for an analysis of world-involving intentional action by abstracting the mind's contribution from the world's cooperation.

An exploration of satisficing principles applied to scalar consequentialism

This talk assumes a panpsychist framework, according to which consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, and discuss the conscious experiences of fundamental physical entities. I argue that panpsychists ought to take this question seriously, and then survey the different answers that have been given to that question, before suggesting a new one, grounded in Mørch's phenomenal powers view.

This paper examines the methodological prominence of the fidelity-to-practice requirement in contemporary human rights theory and argues that it reflects a Rawlsian inheritance rooted in Rawls’s political turn. It reconstructs how concerns with stability, pluralism, and realism shape later appeals to fidelity, especially in Tasioulas’s work, and identifies two recurrent errors, domainal and perspectival, that arise from an overly narrow conception of practice. The paper concludes by proposing a pluralist reconstruction of fidelity as a composite evaluative standard.

My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that nonhuman animal minds face a version of what Cameron Buckner has called the control problem. The control problem is what minds face when they must distinguish and manage different types of processes and/or content. For example, a mind that is incapable of distinguishing perceptual experiences from imaginings would be a mind that has failed to find a solution to the control problem. There is a wealth of empirical evidence that strongly suggests that many nonhuman animals dream. I will argue that if animals dream, then their minds must have a way of sorting dream processes/content from other sorts of mental processes/content. In other words, if animals dream, then animal minds must be capable of a form of metacognitive control.

The submission is about one of the more radical claims in Gareth Evans' The Varieties of Reference, a claim about the category of so-called "singular thoughts." This claim faces a significant objection, concerning the possibility of psychological explanation, which I develop a solution to by assembling and building on some neglected ideas of Evans'.

This paper concerns the conceptual connection between intrinsic value and a priori knowledge of value. In particular, commitment to a certain non-trivial form of intrinsic value entails that synthetic a priori knowledge of value exists.