Weight of Words: Moral Responsibility and Freedom of Speech

In this thesis, I will propose a moral responsibility framework termed “the Anticipation Model,” which argues that for an agent to be held morally blameworthy for any act, two necessary conditions are required. First, they can freely choose not to perform the action, and second, the committed act either violates their normative judgment at the time of action or violates the agent’s general moral beliefs. Based on the above moral framework, I will subsequently defend freedom of speech through arguing that a positive moral responsibility judgment for speech is seldom justified. If, under rare circumstances, speech responsibility can be determined, people still ought to be skeptical about the amount of blameworthiness that can be rightfully attributed to the speaker

The Counterfactual Theory of Free Will: A Genuinely Deterministic Form of Soft Determinism

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will

Responsibility Beyond Belief: The Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility

Beyond Enlightenment: The Evolution of Agency and the Modularity of the Mind in a Post-Darwinian World

Working out of the social and philosophical revolutions from the Enlightenment, contemporary action theory has unwittingly inherited several Cartesian ideas regarding the human mind: that it is unified, rational, and transparent. As a result, we have for too long conceived of action as intimately bound up with reason such that to act at all is to act for a reason, leaving us with theoretical difficulties in accounting for the behavior of non-human animals as well as irrational behavior in human beings. But rather than propose that such difficulties can be resolved by retreating to a pre-Enlightenment view of human nature, the solution is to make the philosophical turn and embrace the insights that have been secured by Charles Darwin. It is a post-Darwinian evolutionary worldview that can shed some new light on these traditional problems. Two such innovations from the theory of evolution have been evolutionary explanations, which attempt to understand the functions of organisms as having developed in response to environmental pressures, and modular theory, which views organisms as composed of parts with highly specialized functions. Taking these evolutionary ideas together along with the assumption of biological continuity—that there is a developmental history shared by living organisms—we can begin to conceive of more robust theories of action, mind, and human nature. Contrary to Enlightenment conceptions, reason emerges as just one mental process alongside many, the mind appears anything but Cartesian, and agency begins far earlier along the spectrum of life than we have been supposing

Wavelength Modulation Spectroscopic Chemical Sensing Using a Piezo-Electric Tunable Fiber Bragg Grating Laser

Real time gas sensing is paramount to numerous applications in industry as well as in the consumer sector. Many gas sensing applications such as fossil energy production require low-cost, multi-species sensors that are able to operate in high-temperature, high-pollution environments under the presence of strong electromagnetic fields. Optical remote gas sensing using tunable lasers is regarded as the best sensing technology for hostile environments. However, optical technology often suffers from high component and operational costs.In this thesis, a tunable external-cavity fiber Bragg grating (FBG) diode laser was developed for spectroscopic chemical sensing. Although FBG lasers have been reported upon, previous works have focused primarily on telecommunications applications. This thesis reports the first application, to our best knowledge, of an FBG laser in chemical sensing. This fiber Bragg grating laser was comprised of an InGaAs/InP ridge-waveguide laser diode coupled to a length of SM-28 fiber bearing an FBG. The FBG is stretched via a piezo-electric actuator to allow rapid fine tuning of the output wavelength of the laser. This tunable external-cavity semiconductor laser was demonstrated with over 10 nm of tuning range. The measured spectral width of the laser was instrument-limited at less than 50 pm over the entire tuning range. The application of such low-cost tunable FBG lasers to spectroscopic chemical sensing was demonstrated in acetylene (C2H2) gas with a wavelength modulation spectroscopy technique. Both static and wavelength modulation absorption spectra of acetylene gas were observed by the tunable laser in acetylene partial pressures from 0.1 mbar to 100 mbar; the lowest detectable pressure being limited by the ultimate vacuum pressure and length of our gas cell.In terms of other optical gas sensing devices such as Distributed FeedBack lasers, FBG lasers offer much lower manufacturing costs and better temperature stability (13pm/ºK) over DFB lasers (>100 pm/ºK). The low manufacturing cost, good temperature stability, wide tuning range, and high output power make FBG lasers excellent candidates for the application of chemical sensing in the near IR band

Fixing Belief

This thesis is concerned with self-ascriptive belief. I argue that one’s lower-order belief can be fixed from the reflective level. One reasons about whether p is the case and it is on the basis of one’s endorsement of p that one comes to believe p. I argue that one’s self-ascriptive belief can also be fixed from the reflective level. One reasons about whether p is the case and it is on the basis of one’s endorsement of p that one comes to self-ascribe the belief p. I further suggest that it is possible for the reflective way of fixing lower-order belief to fail but the reflective way of fixing self-ascriptive belief to succeed. When this happens, one is in a state of believing that she believes p when in fact one does not believe p. This suggests that the state of believing that one believes p and the state of believing p are distinct states and that the state of believing that one believes p does not necessitate the state of believing p. It also raises a sceptical worry about whether one’s self-ascriptive belief amounts to knowledge. In Chapter 1, I situate my discussions in the existing literature, focusing on the constitutive view of self-ascriptive belief. In Chapter 2, I use an everyday case in which a subject self-ascribes the belief that p and is later surprised that p to motivate the possibility that there are different levels at which beliefs are fixed. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of ratiocination and argue that the conclusion of ratiocination is in the form of I ought to believe p. Hence, at the end of ratiocination, one is in a state of believing that I ought to believe p. In Chapter 3, I discuss how one’s belief that I ought to believe p initiates a top-down fixation of the corresponding lower-order belief. I also discuss why it is possible for the top-down fixation process of a rational subject to terminate before it fixes the lower-order belief. In Chapter 4, I discuss the transparency account of self-knowledge. I first criticise the transparency account’s claim that a rational subject’s endorsing p necessarily leads to believing p. Someone who ratiocinates and concludes that p but does not believe p because the top-down fixation process terminates early is an example of how a rational subject can endorse p without believing p. I then draw on the transparency account to argue that from a rational subject’s first-person perspective, if she self-ascribes a belief to herself and if she endorses that p, she will self-ascribe the belief that p. If this is right, then one can self-ascribe the belief that p because one endorses p but in fact does not believe p because one’s endorsement fails to fix the lower-order belief. In Chapter 5, I return to the constitutive account, explaining why its central claim should be rejected. I also reject the incorrigibility thesis, which holds that a self-ascriptive belief that p entails the lower-order belief that p. Finally, I raise a number of puzzles concerning the epistemic status of self-ascriptive belief

Novels and Ideas: Conceptions of Agency in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

“Novels and Ideas” examines the representation of moral agency in Victorian fiction. A major strain of criticism portrays the investment in ethics in Victorian fiction as a way to avoid more serious political issues, creating a separate discourse that emphasizes the particular and emotional over the general and the rational. Recently, however, critics have seen a more complex dynamic, identifying the way literary texts develop their own accounts of traditionally philosophical topics like reflective awareness and moral psychology. Noting what Stefan Collini has called the “unreflective Kantianism” of Victorian ethics, “Novels and Ideas” continues this avenue of research, arguing that Victorian writers depict a sophisticated relationship between reason and emotion in moral deliberation. George Eliot shows how sympathy refigures the key commitments of Kantian respect in affective terms: in her novels, sympathy responds to the value of personhood as such. Charles Dickens’s contrast between admirably bland protagonists and eccentric minor characters reformulates the tension between obligations that stem from mere humanity and those that stem from a concrete identity. George Meredith’s analysis of egoism challenges the assumption of self-controlled selfishness in utilitarian psychology, suggesting that the egoist manifests an inability to carry out long-term projects and thus a breakdown in rational agency. Finally, Anthony Trollope challenges the assumption that rationality consists in deliberative judgment, suggesting that emotions can be more responsive to reasons than conscious thought. Alongside these readings, the project reflects on what it means to read so openly for the ideas in what are, admittedly, artistic texts. Through an analysis of the arguments that support the “anti-cognitivist” belief that art does not make assertions, the project develops an approach that emphasizes reading for the content. Since reading for the intellectual content involves bringing texts from the past into conversation with current debates, the project additionally defends interpretive anachronism, advocating a modified “presentism” that combines rational and historical reconstruction. It concludes by turning to philosophical aesthetics, arguing that the compelling ideas within a text can give it literary value

Letting the Truth Out: Children, Naive Truth, and Deflationism

In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a naïve understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a state of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deflationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or “the truth” is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deflationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher’s approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin’s findings