We present the problem of perceptual agreement (of determinate color) and submit that it proves to be a serious and long overlooked obstacle for those insisting that colors are not objective features of objects, viz., nonobjectivist theories like C. L. Hardin’s (2003) eliminativism and Jonathan Cohen’s (2009) relationalism.

Humeanism about laws has been famously accused of the explanatory circularity by David Armstrong and Tim Maudlin, since the Humean laws hold in virtue of their instances and, at the same time, scientifically explain those very instances. Barry Loewer argued that the circularity challenge rests on an equivocation: in his view, once the metaphysical explanation is properly distinguished from the scientific explanation, the circularity vanishes. However, Marc Lange restored the circularity by appealing to his transitivity principle, which connects the two types of explanation. Lange’s transitivity principle has been widely discussed and criticised in the literature. In view of counterexamples, Lange refined both the principle, by taking into account the contrastive nature of explanation, and the requirement of prohibition on self-explanation. Recently, Michael Hicks has developed a new strategy for defending Humeanism about laws from the refi ned circularity challenge, critically appealing to the contrastive nature of both explanations and meta-explanations. We will argue that his strategy fails.

Projectibility has traditionally been given a prominent role in natural kind theories. However, where most of these theories take projectibility to be a necessary but insufficient feature of natural kinds, this paper defends an account of natural kinds according to which the naturalness of kinds is to be identified with their degree of projectibility only. This view follows thus the path opened by Häggqvist (2005), although it goes significantly further on two main respects. First, I develop and discuss two important dimensions of projectibility that are overlooked in Häggqvist’s work. Second, I address two recent important objections (Magnus 2012 and Spencer 2015) against projectibility-based accounts.

Recently, there has been some excitement about the potential explanatory payoffs the newish metaphysical notion of grounding seems to have for metaethical non-naturalism. There has also been a recent upsurge in the debate about whether non-naturalism is implausibly committed to some acts being wrong because of some sui generis piece of ontology. It has, in response, been claimed that once we have a clear enough picture of the grounding role of moral laws on non-naturalism, this is not (objectionably) so. This move, I argue, is inconsistent with certain constraints on what non-naturalist-friendly moral laws must be for them to do the explanatory work non-naturalism requires of them elsewhere. In other words, there is tension between the grounding reply to the supervenience objection and the grounding structure implied by some responses to the normative objection.

I propose a new fundamental principle in ethics: everyone who makes a choice has to avoid unwanted arbitrariness as much as possible. Unwanted arbitrariness is defined as making a choice without following a rule, whereby the consequences of that choice cannot be consistently wanted by at least one person. Other formulations of this anti-arbitrariness principle are given and compared with very similar contractualist principles formulated by Kant, Rawls, Scanlon and Parfit. The structure of arbitrariness allows us to find ways to avoid unwanted arbitrariness. The two most important implications of the anti-arbitrariness principle are discussed: non-dictatorship and non-discrimination.

One common argument against sweatshops is that they are exploitative. Exploitation is taken as sufficient reason to condemn sweatshops as unjust and to argue that sweatshop owners have a moral duty to offer better working conditions to their employees. In this article, I argue that any exploitation theory falls short of covering all standard cases of sweatshops as exploitative. In going through the most prominent theories of exploitation, I explain why any given sweatshop can either be wrongfully exploitative or not, depending on the exploitation theory being considered and the circumstances of the application. I conclude by suggesting that sweatshop critics had better find other reasons besides the charge of exploitation to protest or interfere with these workplaces.

This article informally presents a solution to the paradoxes of truth and shows how the solution solves classical paradoxes (such as the original Liar) as well as the paradoxes that were invented as counterarguments for various proposed solutions (“the revenge of the Liar”). This solution complements the classical procedure of determining the truth values of sentences by its own failure and, when the procedure fails, through an appropriate semantic shift allows us to express the failure in a classical two-valued language. Formally speaking, the solution is a language with one meaning of symbols and two valuations of the truth values of sentences. The primary valuation is a classical valuation that is partial in the presence of the truth predicate. It enables us to determine the classical truth value of a sentence or leads to the failure of that determination. The language with the primary valuation is precisely the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics (LIFPSK3). The semantic shift that allows us to express the failure of the primary valuation is precisely the classical closure of LIFPSK3: it extends LIFPSK3 to a classical language in parts where LIFPSK3 is undetermined. Thus, this article provides an argumentation, which has not been present in contemporary debates so far, for the choice of LIFPSK3 and its classical closure as the right model for the truth predicate. In the end, an erroneous critique of Kripke-Feferman axiomatic theory of truth, which is present in contemporary literature, is pointed out.

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more and more popular. Many funding bodies encourage interdisciplinarity, as a criterion that promises scientific progress. Traditionally this has been linked to the idea of integrating or unifying disciplines. Using evolutionary game theory as a case study, Till Grüne-Yanoff (2016) argued that there is no such necessary link between interdisciplinary success and integration. Contrary to this, this paper argues that evolutionary game theory is a genuine case of successful integration between economics and biology, shedding lights on the many dimensions along which integration can take place.

This paper argues—contra some Austro-libertarians—that whether a given exchange is welfare-enhancing or welfare-diminishing does not depend on whether that exchange is just or unjust, respectively. Rather, we suggest that in light of our two thought experiments, Austro-libertarianism has at least a pro tanto reason to conceive of justice and welfare as two logically distinct ideals. This would in turn, most interestingly, predict the possibility of (a) just but welfare-diminishing exchanges and (b) unjust but welfare-enhancing ones. Upon considering possible rejoinders to our points, we suggest that Austro-libertarians abandon a justice-based notion of welfare.

Should we descry the nature of the self from thought experiments? Shaun Nichols says ‘maybe,’ but only if we use thought experiments that do not recruit the indexical “I” (non-I-recruiting). His reason is that the psychology of “I” perforce mandates that imagination responds to thought experiments that recruit it (I-recruiting) peculiarly. Here, I consider whether he is correct about non-I-recruiting personal identity thought experiments. I argue positively using the same framework, i.e., considering the underlying psychology.

The supporters of the neurodiversity movement contend that autism is not a mental disorder, but rather a natural human variation. In a recent paper Jerome Wakefield, David Wasserman and Jordan Conrad (2020) argued against this view relying on Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction theory of mental disorder (the HD theory). Although I argue that the HD theory is problematic, I contend that arguments offered by Wakefield et al. (2020) against those of the neurodiversity movement are plausible, except in one respect: their claim that high functioning autism in general is not a disorder is not well supported. I argue instead that the disorder status of high-functioning autistic persons should be judged on a case-by-case basis, depending on the harmfulness of the condition. In this regard, I maintain that the list of basic psychological capacities provided by George Graham (2010) provides an adequate conceptualization of harm. Moreover, I show how this framework may offer an appropriate tool for a case-by-case assessment of harm associated with high-functioning autism.

Cosmopolitans including Charles Beitz, David Richards, Brian Barry, Thomas Pogge and Gillian Brock propose the device of an original global position to work out global principles of justice. However, John Rawls does not agree with this kind of proposal. In this paper, I add two key original contributions, which go beyond previous arguments by cosmopolitans and advance the current debates. First, to argue against Rawls’s objection to the global original position, I demonstrate the importance of the distinction between accepting a particular substantive principle and accepting the original position procedure. Second, in order to respond to cultural pluralism, I take a unique approach to show that the idea of the person as free and equal is a fundamental part of the global public culture by examining the most fundamental legal documents: the proto-constitutional documents in international law and the constitutions of the major states. I apply Samuel Huntington’s classification of civilisations to identify the major civilisations and their core states and show that the idea of the person as free and equal is implicit in the constitutions of most infl uential countries even these countries are categorised in different civilisations.

The text presents the activities of Dr. Kathleen Vaughan Wilkes, a philosopher from the University of Oxford in the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik (IUC) from the beginning of the 1980s to the end of the millennium. Dr. Wilkes was co-directing the longest standing IUC course Philosophy of Science, but she also initiated other IUC academic programmes. As a member of the IUC governing bodies, she was highly engaged in securing scholarships for participants from Central and East Europe in IUC programmes, mostly through Open Society Foundation. Dr. Wilkes played a crucial role in spreading information from the city of Dubrovnik during the attacks of the Yugoslav People's Army in 1991 and during Croatian’s struggle for independence, for which she was awarded honorary citizenship and posthumously one of the squares was named after her.

This is a personal memoir about the life, work and courage of Professor Kathleen Wilkes, a Fellow in Philosophy for 30 years at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. The article traces—and sets out to explain—particularly her links to Dubrovnik and Croatia and the Inter–University Centre since 1981, and supported strongly through the 1980s and even during the 1990s, remaining on site during the cruel siege of the city when the IUC suffered a devastating fire. Three key aspects of her life are explored—her work as a significant philosopher of science; her outstanding courage and work in defending academic freedom widely over the East Central European region, and her warm personality and generous friendship. This is why she can be regarded as Dubrovnik’s Global Citizen, the IUC was only too ready and willing to host this conference in her honour.

Kathy Wilkes contributed to two books on Goal-directed Behaviour and Modelling the Mind based on interdisciplinary graduate classes at Oxford during the 1980s. In this article, I assess her contributions to those discussions. She championed the school of philosophers who prefer problem dissolution to problem-solution. She also addressed the problem of realism in psychology. But the contribution that has turned out to be most relevant to subsequent work was her idea that in modelling the mind, we might need to “use as structural elements synthetic cells, or things that behaved very like neurones.” I show how this idea has been developed in my own recent work with zoologist and neuroscientist, Raymond Noble, to become a possible physiological basis for the ability of organisms to choose between alternative actions, and so become active agents. I consider that this insight became her seminal contribution in this field.

The primary aim of this article is to find out what different linguists say about the role of intentions in the study and explanations of language change. I try to investigate if in the explanation of language change, “having an intention” does any explanatory work. If intentions play a role, how do they do it, at which point it is salutary to invoke them, and what do they contribute to the explanation of language change? My main claim is that speakers’ intentions have a role to play only on higher linguistic levels, i.e., in speakers’ communicative strategies. Since this is a celebration for Kathy Wilkes and her contribution to goal-directed behaviour, in the Concluding remarks I go back to her remarks on language and intentions and see how they fit my discussion in this paper.

Machine learning researchers distinguish between reinforcement learning and supervised learning and refer to reinforcement learning systems as “agents”. This paper vindicates the claim that systems trained by reinforcement learning are agents while those trained by supervised learning are not. Systems of both kinds satisfy Dretske’s criteria for agency, because they both learn to produce outputs selectively in response to inputs. However, reinforcement learning is sensitive to the instrumental value of outputs, giving rise to systems which exploit the effects of outputs on subsequent inputs to achieve good performance over episodes of interaction with their environments. Supervised learning systems, in contrast, merely learn to produce better outputs in response to individual inputs.

How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading.

In her already classical criticism of thought-experimenting, Kathy Wilkes points to superficialities in the most famous moral-political thought-experiments, taking the Ring of Gyges as her central example. Her critics defend the Ring by discussing possible variations in the scenario(s) imagined. I propose here that the debate points to a significant dual structure of thought experiments. Their initial presentation(s) mobilize the immediate, cognitively not very impressive imaginative and reflective efforts both of the proponent and the listener of the proposal. The further debate, like the one exemplified by Wilkes’s criticisms and some of the answers, appeals to a deeper, more rational variety of imagination and reasoning. I suggest that this duality is typical for moral and political thought experimenting in general, conjecture that it might be extended to the whole area of thought experimenting.