NICU ENVIRONMENT. CAN WE BE IGNORANT?: REPLY

Can We Be Too Careful?

Epistemic Indefinites: Are We Ignorant About Ignorance?

Epistemic indefinites make an existential claim and convey that the speaker does not know which individual makes this claim true. The account put forward by Aloni and Port [3, 2] —which we will dub ‘the Lack of Relevant Identification Approach’— defends that ‘not knowing who’ means that the speaker cannot identify the individual that satisfies the existential claim in a contextually relevant wa...

Leading The Ignorant: Can Ignorance Eliminate The Free Riding Problem?

Should We Be Population Pluralists? a Reply to Stegenga

In “‘Population’ is Not a Natural Kind of Kinds,” Jacob Stegenga argues against the claim that the concept of “population” is a natural kind and in favor of conceptual pluralism, ostensibly in response to two papers of mine (Millstein 2009, 2010). Pluralism is often an attractive position in the philosophy of science. It certainly is a live possibility for the concept of population in ecology a...

Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We?

Artificial intelligence researchers predict that _thinking machines_ will take over our mental work, just as their mechanical predecessors were intended to eliminate physical drudgery. Critics have argued with equal fervor that _thinking machine_ is a contradiction in terms. Computers, with their foundations of cold logic, can never be creative or insightful or possess real judgment. Although m...