Why Do We Run Basic Income Experiments? From Empirical Evidence to Collective Debate

There are two major possible responses to the question: what (if anything) can justify a basic income experiment? An experiment might be justified either because it gathers positive empirical evidence supporting rolling out a basic income, or because it justifies the moral desirability of such a measure. This paper critically explores both responses, the “empirical” and “ethical claim” in light of the Barcelona B-MINCOME pilot, alongside other similar experiments. We sustained that although the empirical claim is necessary, there seems to be sufficient data to easily predict that all future experiments are to gather positive results too. Consequently, we argue that experiments are particularly well-equipped to foster debates on the work ethics and on the ethical dimension of social policies and welfare regimes in general.

The Place of Confucianism in Pluralist East Asia

In this commentary on Shaun O’Dwyer’s Confucianism’s Prospects, I raise three challenges to the arguments presented in the book. First, against his empirical claim that East Asian societies have already become pluralistic, I show that there are important empirical studies supporting the “Confucian heritage” thesis that O’Dwyer rejects. Second, against his anti-perfectionist position, I argue that there are some significant perfectionist connotations in his use of the capabilities approach which are in tension with his critique of Confucian and liberal perfectionisms. Third, against his argument that contemporary Confucians have good reasons to embrace a liberal democracy and pluralistic public culture, I argue that the reasons he offers are not solid enough to convince his Confucian rivals.

Can a Bodily Theorist of Pain Speak Mandarin?

According to a bodily view of pain, pains are objects which are located in body parts. This bodily view is supported by the locative locutions for pain in English, such as that “I have a pain in my back.” Recently, Liu and Klein (Analysis, 80(2), 262–272, 2020) carry out a cross-linguistic analysis, and they claim that (1) Mandarin has no locative locutions for pain and (2) the absence of locative locutions for pain puts the bodily view at risk. This paper rejects both claims. Regarding the philosophical claim, I argue that a language without locative locutions for pain only poses a limited challenge to the bodily view. Regarding the empirical claim, I identify the possible factors which might have misled Liu and Klein about the locative locutions for pain in Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has a wide range of locative locutions for pain by conducting a corpus analysis. I conclude that compared to English, Mandarin lends no less, if not more, support to the bodily view of pain.

A Formal Investigation of Q-Theory in Comparison to Autosegmental Representations

We use model theory to rigorously evaluate Q-Theory as proposed in Shih and Inkelas 2019 as an alternative to Autosegmental Phonology. We find that Q-Theory is remarkably similar to Autosegmental Phonology, contra some of Shih and Inkelas's claims. In particular, Q-Theory does not eschew the association relation, in Q-Theory the tone-bearing unit is the vowel, and Q-Theory and Autosegmental Phonology are equivalent in terms of the constraints they can express. However, this formal analysis clarifies the truly novel contribution of Q-Theory, which is the empirical claim that all segments are tripartite.

Reducing Long-Distance Binding to Logophoric Exemption

This chapter re-examines the hypothesis that some anaphors can be long-distance bound independently of their discursive conditions. All analyses of long-distance anaphora, whether they assume binding domain parameterization or covert movement, rely on the existence of a specific type of anaphors that can be bound out of the Condition A domain and are further characterized by monomorphemicity, subject orientation, sloppy readings, and blocking effects. The goal of this chapter is to question this empirical claim and examine the hypothesis that such purported long-distance anaphors can in fact be reduced to exempt anaphors subject to logophoric conditions. Some tests are proposed and applied to Icelandic sig, Mandarin ziji, French soi, and Norwegian seg/sin using online questionnaires. The results suggest that the hypothesis that long-distance binding should be eliminated from the theory and reduced to logophoric exemption is viable—pending further cross-linguistic studies.

Explainable, Normative, and Justified Agency

In this paper, we pose a new challenge for AI researchers – to develop intelligent systems that support justified agency. We illustrate this ability with examples and relate it to two more basic topics that are receiving increased attention – agents that explain their decisions and ones that follow societal norms. In each case, we describe the target abilities, consider design alternatives, note some open questions, and review prior research. After this, we return to justified agency, offering a hypothesis about its relation to explanatory and normative behavior. We conclude by proposing testbeds and experiments to evaluate this empirical claim and encouraging other researchers to contribute to this crucial area.

Thin empirics

In the Target Article Relative Plausibility and Its Critics, Ron Allen and Michael Pardo set out to make the empirical claim that Relative Plausibility provides the best account of juridical proof. While I tend to agree with this conclusion, the article suffers from notable weaknesses. Allen and Pardo do not define a unit of analysis, they offer no testable hypotheses, and they present no data–all of which render the empirical claim befuddling. The empirical claim cannot be salvaged by the recruitment of the Story Model. For all its brilliance, the Story Model provides too narrow a foundation to sustain a general model of legal fact-finding. Allen and Pardo’s reliance on holistic processing stands on sounder scientific grounds, but the casual referencing cannot amount to empirical proof. More importantly, Allen and Pardo refrain from reckoning with the implications of holism, and thus ignore both the promise and perils of the cognitive process they espouse. The experimental paradigm of Coherence Based Reasoning reveals a number of such implications. Notably, holism cannot deliver the objectivity and accuracy that Allen and Pardo seem to ascribe to it. Moreover, holistic processing entails a distortion of the evidence, which could lead to dismissing evidence that would otherwise raise a valid doubt, and inflate a hesitant fact-finder’s confidence up to a firm conviction in the defendant’s guilt. Holism also entails vast interconnectivity among the evidence items, which can trigger non-normative inferences and enable extra-evidential information to alter the fact-finder’s perception of correctly-admitted evidence.

Tonal Structure

The concept of tonal structure is intimately associated with the person of Heinrich Schenker, but ultimately in order to enter dialogue with Schenker the theory of tonal structure must take the place of “Schenkerian analysis” in our discourse. A number of useful principles of tonal structure may be derived from Schenker’s theory: Schenkerian notation agrees with the network representation for temporal structure, and linear progressions are a good starting point for a tonal structure discovery procedure. The theory of the Ursatz, however, cannot be understood as an empirical claim but rather as a collection of grammatical norms. Also, Schenker’s dismissal of the concept of key is disputed, and a theory of tonal structure to which keys and modulation are integral is presented.

Conceptual Engineering without Bedrock and without Fixed Points

This chapter considers whether there are any limits to conceptual engineering, developing the idea that there are no safe spaces from conceptual change. First, it considers Chalmers’s argument for bedrock concepts. It argues that Chalmers’s claim that there is an asymmetric structure in the space of disputes is an (implausible) empirical claim. Second, it considers Eklund’s claim to the effect that our thinnest normative concepts are irreplaceable, and this is a limit to conceptual engineering, and shows that Eklund doesn’t establish this. It ends by revisiting some old worries, defending the choice of the term ‘conceptual engineering’, and responding to the claim that by making conceptual engineering inscrutable and out of control, it has been debunked rather than defended. However, conceptual engineering is very hard for us to do, but so is (almost) everything that is important to us.

Metastudies for robust tests of theory

We describe and demonstrate an empirical strategy useful for discovering and replicating empirical effects in psychological science. The method involves the design of a metastudy, in which many independent experimental variables—that may be moderators of an empirical effect—are indiscriminately randomized. Radical randomization yields rich datasets that can be used to test the robustness of an empirical claim to some of the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of experimental protocols and enhances the generalizability of these claims. The strategy is made feasible by advances in hierarchical Bayesian modeling that allow for the pooling of information across unlike experiments and designs and is proposed here as a gold standard for replication research and exploratory research. The practical feasibility of the strategy is demonstrated with a replication of a study on subliminal priming.