Friction

If science gets the final say about reality, should we treat intentionality and objective meaning as comforting illusions, as Alex Rosenberg argues in defense of ‘scientism’ and a sober ‘nice nihilism’?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His research focuses on the philosophy of biology and science more generally, mind, and economics.

2. Interview Summary

Alex Rosenberg opens by defending a robust ‘scientism’: he takes the standard two-part characterisation (science as our most reliable route to knowledge, and science as giving the “last or best word” about reality) and says the only mistake is calling either part “unreasonable.” He treats this as one strong species of naturalism—an approach that gives science pride of place and aims to reconcile (or, at the limit, revise) our everyday “manifest image” in light of the “scientific image,” in something like Wilfrid Sellars’s famous framing. On Rosenberg’s version, when reconciliation proves stubborn, the pressure should run mostly one way: let science “trump” common sense and be willing to treat parts of the manifest image as superstition or error.

From there, the interview turns to Rosenberg’s eliminativism about intentionality. He argues that if you start from a deep commitment to intentionality, he may not be able to “rationally disabuse” you—but he thinks that move typically over-trusts introspection, which he treats as a problem to be explained rather than a premise to build on. He also addresses the classic worry that eliminativism is self-refuting (can it even be stated as true?): his response leans on unresolved disputes about theories of truth (e.g., disquotational vs. correspondence) and the general difficulty of self-reference, suggesting it’s premature to declare the view incoherent just because it faces familiar reflexive puzzles. When the conversation shifts to naturalistic accounts of content (including views associated with David Papineau), Rosenberg grants that Darwinian/teleosemantic approaches are about as close as we can get, but he doubts they deliver the fine-grained, semantically evaluable propositional attitudes many philosophers want. Still, he resists eliminating consciousness: he thinks cognitive science has made progress by analysing consciousness in terms of attention and awareness, he rejects David Chalmers-style “hard problem” rhetoric as a shortcut to dualism, and he points to theorists like Michael Graziano and Paul Carruthers as offering more promising scientific strategies.

A later stretch engages debates around Jerry Fodor and natural selection. Rosenberg argues that natural selection is good at selecting adaptive behavior but not at selecting for true belief, so we shouldn’t assume our everyday predicates reliably carve nature at the joints; at best, selection explains why certain ways of classifying are useful for us. He recommends turning Fodor’s style of objection “backwards,” and he suggests that we shouldn’t let controversies about language or individuation hold biological explanation hostage. The closing themes are meta-philosophical and existential: Rosenberg describes philosophy as “very abstract and very general science,” valuable insofar as it helps extend human understanding and guides inquiry until the sciences can answer those questions directly. At the same time, he embraces a kind of “nihilism” about value “under the aspect of eternity”: we do have motivations and emotional drives that make us pursue inquiry, but that doesn’t add up to objective worth or cosmic meaning—and he presents that as a sober, non–self-deceiving outlook (“nice nihilism”), even when thinking about bleak long-run trajectories.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Scientism

04:22 - Naturalism

07:14 - Methodological or substantive?

08:46 - Eliminativism about intentionality

10:56 - Moorean shift

12:34 - Arguments against eliminativism

20:25 - Papineau on intentionality

24:49 - Consciousness

28:35 - Companions in guilt

30:36 - Fodor and natural selection

36:32 - No selection for?

37:22 - Properties

38:27 - Selection for/against

39:40 - Selection for long necks in giraffes

41:32 - Speaking with the vulgar?

43:32 - Selection against as intensional

46:18 - Function and selection for

48:17 - Skepticism

50:05 - Example

51:12 - Mereological nihilism

52:29 - Value of philosophy

54:28 - Nihilism?

59:09 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can Western philosophy really understand belief and rationality without emotion, or do we need the kind of “heart-mind” yin-and-yang framework that Michael Slote defends here?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Michael Slote is Professor Emeritus at the University of Miami, and his research focuses on ethics and mind, and especially on virtues, sentimentalism, and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Michael Slote argues that the standard Western philosophical picture of the mind needs a “major course correction,” because it treats cognition as able (in principle) to operate independently of emotion and motivation—whereas East Asian traditions instead assume a ‘heart-mind’ in which these are inseparable. To motivate his alternative, he reconstructs ‘yin’/‘yang’ in a modernized way: the old “oppositional forces in nature” reading (often paired with bad pseudo-explanations and sexist associations) should be discarded, while a minority tradition treats ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ as necessary complements that accommodate each other. On Slote’s proposal, ‘yin’ is receptivity and ‘yang’ is directed purpose, and he uses curiosity as an intuitive case where openness to what’s happening already involves an active, selective focus.

From there, Slote presses the claim that emotion is not a “mere add-on” to belief and reasoning, but shows up inside their normal structure. One argument appeals to “epistemic feelings”: if confidence is commonly treated as a kind of strong belief and as something we feel, then belief belongs on the same scale and should involve feeling too (even if not the same kind as anger or love). He also argues that belief has a built-in motivational (‘yang’) side—partly by analogy with theoretical reasoning (to believe P is to be committed to using P in inference), and partly by criticizing the tradition (e.g., David Hume and Donald Davidson) that treats belief as “causally inert”: if belief is inert, it’s hard to explain everyday instrumental action like learning there’s no food at home and then going out to find food. Slote extends the same yin/yang lens to empathy, arguing that full empathy includes taking in the intentional object of another’s feeling, and that once you share distress at a pain, some motivation to relieve it comes along “analytically,” not contingently.

Finally, Slote draws out implications for value and for diagnosing dysfunction. Because receptivity and directed purpose are both things we admire (open-mindedness, curiosity, steadiness of purpose), their inseparable unity itself becomes something we value; and the contrast between compassionate people and psychopaths can be described as the presence vs. absence of this yin/yang structure, especially in empathic perception and the motivation to help. He also addresses a key worry about saying belief involves “favoring”: a person can ‘yin-favor’ a hypothesis (treat it as epistemically supported) while not ‘yang-favoring’ it (not preferring it in the practical, desirous sense)—illustrated by the example of a husband who comes to believe his wife was unfaithful despite strongly wishing it weren’t true. Across the interview, Slote presents this as a cross-cultural corrective: not just “different concepts,” but a case where Western philosophy has mis-theorized its own mental-life concepts, and where taking the resources of Chinese philosophy seriously could reshape how we think about mind, rationality, and agency.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:58 - Yin/yang of pervasive emotion

02:17 - Updating yin/yang

07:30 - Reception of the view

08:52 - Problems with the Western view of the mind

11:25 - Argument for belief involving emotion

13:04 - Feeling of a different sort?

14:33 - Mental theorizing too simple?

18:09 - Active element as not constitutive

35:50 - Criticism of Hume

37:08 - External connection?

38:12 - Examples

40:06 - Eastern philosophy in the West

43:37 - Yin-favoring vs. yang-favoring

49:47 - Irrationality and deplorable states

56:12 - Beliefs and desires as the same sort of state

59:32 - Wider applications

1:03:52 - Depression and cultivating yin/yang

1:10:06 - Future research

1:12:03 - Degrees of yin/yang

1:14:55 - Lessons from Eastern philosophy

1:18:21 - Skeptical concern

1:20:43 - Value of philosophy

1:24:31 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the best reason to reject classical logic isn’t that it’s wrong everywhere, but that it unnecessarily rules out true theories by banning both truth-value gaps and truth-value gluts?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Jc Beall holds the O’Neill Family Chair of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and his research primarily focuses on logic and the philosophy of logic.

2. Interview Summary

JC Beall lays out a “minimalist” picture of logic: logic is the topic-neutral consequence/validity relation that governs the sparse core vocabulary shared by every true theory (negation, disjunction, quantifiers, etc.). From that starting point, he argues there’s no principled reason to rule out either gaps (sentences that are neither true nor false) or gluts (both true and false): once you recognize truth and falsity as basic statuses, four combinations are on the table, and standard truth/falsity conditions for negation don’t automatically exclude the “both” or the “neither.” On this basis he defends a “simple argument” for going sub-classical: you don’t lose any true theories (since theory-specific consequence can still add stronger principles when needed—e.g., mathematics may behave classically), but you do keep live candidate theories that classical logic would dismiss as impossible. Transcript:

A big middle section engages objections associated with Timothy Williamson. Beall pushes back on the idea that “stronger logic = more explanatory,” noting that a consequence relation can be maximally strong (even trivial) while being explanatorily useless; so “more valid inferences” doesn’t, by itself, buy genuine explanation. He also rejects the charge that sub-classical logic is less unifying: logic already unifies all theories by governing the common topic-neutral vocabulary, and demanding extra classical principles as “unification” risks begging the question. On the “simplicity” worry (more semantic statuses looks more complex), his reply is basically: if reality really exhibits more than the classical two statuses in some domains, then recognizing that isn’t a theoretical vice—it’s just accuracy; and if someone thinks those statuses aren’t real possibilities, they owe an argument, not an appeal to aesthetic economy.

Later, the discussion turns to truth and paradox: Beall distinguishes the logical operators (“it’s true that” / “it’s false that”) from truth as a predicate, and he motivates “transparent truth” by requiring that “P” and “P is true” be everywhere intersubstitutable—mirroring the operator’s behavior. But once truth is introduced as a predicate in a rich grammar, it becomes “creative” and generates unintended byproducts (“spandrels”) like liar-style sentences, which then have to be handled rather than wished away. The interview closes by sampling applications and extensions: exploratory work on whether future-tense discourse might be gap-like or glut-like, and a set of theological cases (e.g., omnipotence/stone-style puzzles) where a gappy treatment can be a serious live option—even though Beall also thinks some central Christian theology doctrines are better modeled with gluts, and he notes ongoing disagreements about how unified the overall picture should be.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Logic and subclassical logic

13:44 - Arguing for subclassical logic

23:36 - Criticism: less explanatory?

27:18 - Criticism: less unifying?

34:02 - Criticism: less simple?

42:20 - Criticism: unmotivated?

49:23 - Truth as a transparent logical property

53:34 - Truth as an emergent property

54:44 - Logical vocabulary

59:16 - Spandrels of truth

1:04:27 - Future contradictions

1:13:12 - God responsible for logical consequence?

1:16:35 - God of the “gaps”

1:17:46 - Issues with classical accounts of omnipotence

1:21:34 - Trinity as contradictory?

1:23:19 - The Contradictory Christ

1:30:49 - Kenotic view

1:33:11 - Inflated metaphysics

1:37:21 - Natures not inconsistent?

1:42:49 - Theological significance

1:49:20 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What happens to “knowing” and moral responsibility when we stop talking about vague context and start asking which alternatives actually matter?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He is core faculty in the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and has several other appointments. His work focuses primarily on ethics, epistemology, neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science.

2. Interview Summary

The interview ranges across several of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s projects, starting with his defense of ‘contrastivism’ in epistemology. After a brief intro situating him at Duke University and his public-facing work on argumentation (including material hosted through Coursera), he argues that talk of “context” in contextualism is often too underspecified to do real explanatory work: different audiences, purposes, and stakes can all be in play at once, making it unclear what “the” context even is. Instead, he recommends making the relevant ‘contrast class’ explicit—saying, in effect, “I know this rather than those alternatives,” without pretending we’ve precisely fixed a context (while noting attempts like David Lewis’s rules-based approach).

From there the conversation shifts to ethics and moral psychology: why heuristics can be both evolutionarily useful and systematically misleading, and how you can sometimes detect unreliability even without settling the “right” moral theory. In particular, he emphasizes ‘framing effects’ (including order effects) as a way to show that people’s moral verdicts are sensitive to morally irrelevant presentation differences—evidence that the underlying heuristic isn’t tracking the truth, even if moral truths exist. That general methodological theme then gets applied to large-scale collective action problems like climate change, where he presses a “timing” style argument: in many everyday cases (the “joyride,” the warm shower) it can look like an individual abstention merely shifts emissions in time rather than preventing harm, and he contrasts this with contexts (like certain votes) where a specific decision-point can matter. The same structure comes up when discussing vegetarianism: health-based reasons sidestep the collective-action worry, environmental reasons run into it, and harm-to-animals arguments raise different issues—illustrated with the “roadkill” test case and questions about whether your choice can realistically change demand.

Later, he branches into two more “concept-clarifying” case studies. On color, he sketches a view inspired by Aristotle’s ‘healthy’ analogy: just as organisms are primarily healthy while foods and cholesterol levels are “healthy” derivatively (as causes or signs), wavelengths of light can be the primary bearers of color while objects get called red/blue in virtue of how they produce those wavelengths—while acknowledging complications like structural color in fruit and pushing back on the idea that dispositional/reflection accounts avoid the same underlying problems. On argumentation, he offers an epistemic take on ‘begging the question’: an argument is defective when it relies on premises that can’t be justified independently of assuming the conclusion, and he connects this to the broader project of teaching people to diagnose and evaluate real-world reasoning—motivated by concerns about political and moral polarization and developed in his popular book Think Again: How to Reason and Argue and related courses.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:39 - Contrastivism

04:34 - Contextualist response

06:40 - Contextualism with contrast classes

08:47 - Benefits of contrastivist view

10:17 - Stakes vs. knowledge attributions

12:40 - Purpose of theorizing about knowledge

15:10 - Moral intuitions and debunking arguments

19:49 - Heuristics

21:25 - Demonstrating moral heuristics

25:42 - Individual obligations and global warming

30:23 - Does the response overgeneralize?

33:17 - Are all contributions to warming morally wrong?

35:23 - Individual and collective rationality

37:43 - Application to animal ethics

44:43 - Difference in degree vs. kind

45:30 - Roadkill

47:34 - Light theory of color

52:40 - Criticism

58:18 - Dispositionalist approach

1:00:13 - More theory

1:01:00 - Begging the question

1:07:10 - Epistemic view

1:09:05 - Arguer vs. audience

1:12:23 - Relevance to contrast classes

1:14:33 - Begging the question a matter of degree?

1:18:09 - MOOC

1:24:25 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Is philosophy really just wordplay, or can thought experiments and counterfactuals tell us something substantive about reality?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Timothy Williamson is Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, and his research focuses primarily on epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.

2. Interview Summary

Timothy Williamson opens by pushing back on the idea that metaphysics (or philosophy more generally) is mostly verbal or merely “about language.” His main move is to emphasize how deeply philosophy overlaps with neighboring disciplines—especially in theoretical areas—so that many of the questions philosophers ask are continuous with questions scientists and mathematicians ask about reality (not just about words). He also argues that “linguistic” or “purely conceptual” approaches didn’t deliver a stable way to cordon off a special, non-substantive class of philosophical problems, since that project depends on contentious assumptions about concepts, meaning, and rules of language that were never adequately worked out.

On the frequent charge that philosophy relies on a mysterious faculty of “intuition,” Williamson tries to demystify what’s going on in thought experiments. Using a classic Gettier-style example (a person forms a justified true belief by glancing at a stopped clock that luckily reads the correct time), he says our verdicts aren’t occult or uniquely philosophical—rather, they’re ordinary judgments we’d happily make if we observed the situation in real life. He then suggests that “intuition,” in a psychologically respectable sense, is just judgment without conscious step-by-step reflection—and that all reasoning ultimately depends on lots of such judgments (including perception and even the micro-steps in calculation), so philosophy isn’t unusually “intuition-driven,” even if it makes these background judgments more explicit.

The discussion then turns to counterfactual conditionals, where Williamson resists a “pure supposition” picture on which the antecedent alone fixes whether the consequent holds. He emphasizes that counterfactual evaluation typically depends on substantial (often implicit) background information—sometimes including laws of nature in deterministic settings—and we’re frequently not in a position to state precisely what background we’re holding fixed, even if our counterfactual judgments are still stable and useful. He also notes that counterfactuals can be grounded in imaginative “fantasy” scenarios (e.g., a tiger in the room) rather than strict hold-fixed-from-actuality constraints, which highlights how context supplies assumptions that may resist full formulation. Framing all this is a broader methodological theme: we shouldn’t treat the limits of what we can vividly picture as the limits of what’s real—an attitude he recommends for logic as much as for physics.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - How substantive is philosophy

06:23 - Verbal disputes

10:24 - Intuitions

17:36 - Philosophy too reliant on intuitions?

22:59 - Intuitions in philosophy vs. elsewhere

25:33 - Intuitions as arbitrary?

29:21 - Suppositional view of subjunctives

31:57 - Fixed background

34:50 - Evaluating counterfactuals

36:30 - Counterfactuals as context-sensitive

38:41 - Shifting contexts or shifting antecedents?

40:53 - Counterpossibles

48:36 - Explanatory weakness

50:55 - Nonclassical logics

56:52 - Theoretical virtues of logics

58:10 - Simplicity

1:00:24 - Necessitism

1:00:50 - Possible objects and logic

1:03:18 - Understanding possible objects

1:07:23 - Imagining non-concrete objects

1:09:37 - Resolving the dispute

1:13:18 - Basic intuitions

1:14:33 - Epistemic contextualism

1:19:23 - Tracking contexts

1:21:20 - Different knowledge concepts?

1:27:37 - Value of philosophy

1:33:27 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How much do we really owe people in desperate need once we take seriously both the real-world consequences of aid and what it means to be a good person?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Larry Temkin is distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and his research focuses primarily on normative ethics and political philosophy. His book is "Being Good in a World of Need".

2. Interview Summary

Larry Temkin discusses his forthcoming book Being Good in a World of Need, framed as a response to the question “What do we owe the needy?”—especially in a world where many people are born into severe deprivation through no fault of their own. Rutgers University is introduced as his home institution, and he explains that the book is written for multiple audiences at once: ordinary readers who want to help but aren’t sure how demanding morality is, students encountering these issues in ethics courses, and also policy/charity professionals. Peter Singer looms large as the key foil—Temkin is explicitly writing for readers who’ve absorbed Singer-style conclusions—and he also targets the Effective Altruism audience in particular, noting that his own thinking has shifted from earlier sympathy with that framework.

A recurring methodological thread is how to treat moral intuitions and moral theory-building. Temkin identifies as a moral objectivist, but emphasizes that the practical questions still matter even if (as some subjectivists hold) morality is ultimately a human construction: we still have to decide what kind of community and world we want to build, and what traits we should cultivate. Intuitions, on his view, function like “data points” for ethical theorizing—important to accommodate and explain, but never beyond revision in light of arguments, reflection, and historical awareness that whole societies (and even major philosophers) have had deeply misguided moral “seemings.” Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong comes up here as a touchstone for the idea that, invention or not, the project of shaping a better moral world remains urgent.

The heart of the interview is Temkin’s critique of moving too quickly from simple “rescue” cases to sweeping conclusions about global giving. He uses an updated version of the drowning-child case—now involving a sentimental, expensive watch—to argue that a decent person should save the child in front of them rather than delay in order to sell the watch and donate to an “effective” charity that could save more lives; this is meant to show that “doing the most good” can conflict with virtues and with what being a good person requires. The Life You Can Save is mentioned as emblematic of the streamlined Singer-style approach that Temkin thinks overlooks crucial complications. From there he stresses how real-world aid can generate hard-to-measure indirect harms: corruption and “perverse incentives,” the draining of scarce local talent from essential institutions, and the risk of “ethical imperialism” that disrespects autonomy and local values when outsiders push reforms. He then brings in Angus Deaton’s argument that large-scale aid can undermine governments’ accountability to their citizens, and connects this to Derek Parfit–style “each-we” dilemmas: individually sensible, compassionate choices can aggregate into collectively worse outcomes—especially when many tiny burdens are dispersed across huge populations, illustrated by his “lollipops for lives” style tradeoff. The upshot is not “don’t help,” but “help with a more realistic moral lens”: one that tracks systemic effects, collective-action structure, and the moral costs of imposing solutions from the outside.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Who the book is for

07:00 - Relevance to COVID

13:50 - Intuitions

24:42 - Ethical thought experiments

41:16 - Ethical imperialism

51:28 - Each/we dilemmas

1:07:48 - Evidentialist approach

1:14:29 - Evidentialist response

1:19:57 - Obligations to help

1:25:04 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Is reality fundamentally built from many parts, or does everything ultimately depend on the whole through a layered structure of grounding and explanation?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and also working in epistemology, mind, and language.

2. Interview Summary

Jonathan Schaffer discusses how metaphysical theorizing about “what’s fundamental” should be guided—at least in part—by our best, most unified physical theories. In the opening, he motivates a broadly monistic picture on which the cosmos as a whole is a prime candidate for fundamentality, since it is the system most directly characterized by the fundamental dynamical laws, while many other descriptions are only approximate. He also pushes back on the worry that this “privileges physics” in a question-begging way: the thought is that we can consult the most powerful, unifying scientific posits without already assuming that either parts or wholes must be fundamental, and then let that scientific picture constrain metaphysical hypotheses.

A large portion of the interview then turns to grounding: how to treat it methodologically, what its role is in metaphysical explanation, and how to adjudicate disputes about its status. Schaffer recommends a kind of methodological primitivism—grounding can be used fruitfully even if no reductive analysis is in hand—and he frames an influential debate (e.g., with Jessica Wilson) around two key axes: (i) whether grounding is a single, substantially unified relation or merely a label for a heterogeneous bundle, and (ii) whether we should take grounding as primitive and define “fundamental” as ungrounded, or instead take fundamentality as primitive and then try to reconstruct grounding. He argues that starting with grounding helps preserve the ordering structure among nonfundamental levels (e.g., chemical vs. biological), which is obscured if we only draw a fundamental/nonfundamental cut.

In the later sections, Schaffer broadens the methodological theme by looking at context-sensitivity in philosophical discourse—especially in epistemology (and by extension, causation). He treats “shifty” knowledge attributions as a real phenomenon to be explained, and sketches a contextualist/relevant-alternatives style framework on which knowledge is not merely a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition, but can depend on a contextually supplied question or set of relevant alternatives; he suggests parallel structure for causal talk (e.g., contrastive or alternative-sensitive causation). He closes with a reflective account of why metaphysics is worth doing: the puzzles feel gripping and occasionally yield fleeting moments of insight, but even more often the value lies in the wonder and reward of engaging seriously with deep questions at all.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:32 - Cosmos as fundamental

02:20 - Fundamental laws

04:26 - Why privilege physics?

07:42 - Grounding relation as primitive

10:11 - Primitives as a theoretical cost

11:32 - Communicating primitives

17:21 - Concept development

20:52 - Jessica Wilson’s view

29:30 - Losing structure with fundamental-first account

31:54 - Is the dispute substantive?

36:29 - Skepticism about metaphysics

41:26 - John Heil’s criticism

46:15 - Ground between the gaps

47:57 - Mind and brain

50:24 - Further gaps?

54:24 - Epistemic contextualism

59:57 - How relevant are common intuitions?

1:04:02 - Problems with common usage

1:07:33 - “Causation” as context-sensitive

1:12:52 - View not metaphysical?

1:15:56 - Value of philosophy

1:18:02 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the pandemic wasn’t just a shared misfortune, but a spotlight on injustice that should change how we think about politics, cooperation, and truth?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Vittorio Bufacchi is senior lecturer of philosophy at University College Cork.

2. Interview Summary

Vittorio Bufacchi frames the conversation around why he wrote Everything Must Change: Philosophical Lessons from Lockdown and what philosophy is for in a crisis. Pushing back on G. W. F. Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva”-style picture (philosophy arriving only after events), he describes his own approach as practical “puzzle solving”: using philosophical analysis to make sense of unfolding events and to help guide action, not merely to interpret history after the fact. He also emphasizes “public philosophy”—writing for non-specialists by expressing core ideas without technical jargon so that ordinary readers can follow and use them.

A major thread is the book’s organizing distinction between COVID as “misfortune” versus “injustice,” and why that framing matters for what we do next. Bufacchi argues that treating the pandemic as mere bad luck encourages a “back to normal” attitude—whereas the evidence shows it exposed and intensified pre-existing structural inequalities, with disproportionate harms falling on already vulnerable groups (including poorer people, ethnic minorities, and women). He uses this lens to discuss how societies implicitly rank people’s value—especially the elderly—connecting the pandemic’s treatment of seniors to Cicero’s reflections on old age and to the idea that we too often equate worth with economic productivity (he even cites Anthony Fauci as a counterexample to age-based dismissal).

From there, the interview develops a more constructive agenda: the pandemic’s lessons point toward cooperation, better politics, and stronger epistemic habits. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes, Bufacchi argues that even if we start from self-interest, it still rationally pushes us toward cooperation—illustrated by vaccination as a shared sacrifice with both local and global stakes. He connects that cooperative ideal to worries about populism and “post-truth,” urging a healthy skepticism that checks sources rather than dismissing facts, and even suggesting earlier philosophy education as training in critical analysis. He contrasts political leadership styles by praising New Zealand (and Jacinda Ardern) versus failures he associates with leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson; and he also notes that crises can worsen hidden harms, pointing to rises in domestic violence during lockdowns and tying this to his broader conception of violence as violations of a person’s integrity. The discussion closes on civic responsibility: if we need a capable state, citizens also have duties to sustain it (including, straightforwardly, paying taxes) and to participate responsibly in democratic life.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:46 - Motivations for writing the book

08:11 - Relevance of philosophy

11:44 - Making philosophy accessible

13:56 - Misfortune vs. injustice

26:39 - COVID and seniors

36:50 - Hobbes and history recurring

45:29 - Populism

55:41 - Post-truth

1:01:45 - Experts

1:05:55 - Teaching philosophy

1:08:59 - Violence

1:17:26 - Irrationality of voters

1:32:02 - States

1:40:32 - Who this book is for

1:45:02 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What happens to skeptical arguments once we treat them as credibility comparisons, and can higher-order theories really explain why some mental states feel conscious?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

William Lycan is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has focused on a range of philosophical issues, but especially on mind, epistemology, and language.

2. Interview Summary

Based on the transcript , the interview ranges across G. E. Moore-style “common sense” replies to skepticism and broader questions about philosophical method, before turning to consciousness and intentionality. Lycan (introduced as a philosopher emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of books including Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction and Consciousness and Experience) explains that his aim isn’t to declare common sense “incorrigible,” but to distill a more modest Moorean technique and apply it one issue at a time. Central to that technique is a claim about how deductive arguments function: they force a “credibility comparison” between the premises and the negation of the conclusion, so that skeptical arguments can be answered by weighing their premises against everyday knowledge claims (“I know my name,” “I have hands,” etc.) rather than pretending the skeptic will be dialectically “refuted” once and for all.

A second thread concerns why so many philosophical disputes feel like stalemates. Lycan is sympathetic to the thought that we often end up talking past each other—partly because the subject matter is complicated and ordinary language “runs out,” making verbal disputes and equivocations hard to avoid. He treats familiar debates (like internalism vs. externalism about justification) as cases where different, importantly connected notions may be traveling under a single label, and he suggests that real progress sometimes requires sharpening vocabulary rather than insisting there must be a single “fact of the matter” that one side uniquely captures. He also defends a fairly traditional role for intuitions—framed as “intellectual seemings”—arguing that if they count for nothing, then much of philosophy loses its evidential foothold, even while conceding that particular intuitions can be explained away (confusion, bias, etc.). Relatedly, he gestures at contextualist/interest-relative pressures on “knows”: raising the practical stakes (how much you’d bet, how severe the consequences of being wrong are) can legitimately change which knowledge attributions sound right, without this automatically vindicating the skeptic’s strongest conclusion.

In the philosophy of mind portion, Lycan defends a higher-order approach to consciousness: a lower-level mental state counts as conscious in part because it is represented by a higher-order state, and he discusses how this differs from nearby views that locate consciousness “in” the higher-order state itself. He also describes refining his own view by separating higher-order “introspection” from mere attention—an adjustment prompted by work with a student, and by how attention is treated in neuroscience. On adjacent theories, he treats Bernard Baars’s global workspace idea as broadly friendly to higher-order representation (though he’s cautious about the current state of the empirical literature), and he sketches global workspace as an “accessibility” story about availability for reasoning and control. Finally, he reiterates a broad intentionalist inclination—inclined to treat mental states (even affective ones like anxiety, and paradigmatic sensations like pain) as having representational content—then briefly contrasts this with David Papineau’s more recent view of sensory experience as only contingently representational (a view Lycan hadn’t yet read in its newest form).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Moorean response

05:53 - Applications of the response

07:04 - Arguments and common-sense

08:49 - Skeptical rejoinder

17:20 - Bradley's argument against time

19:48 - Permissive epistemology?

24:21 - Disputes as not substantive

34:15 - Verbal disputes still important

35:45 - Updating language

36:45 - Philosophical progress

41:50 - Philosophical issues as pervasive

44:35 - Intuitions

49:08 - Intuitions as evidence

54:51 - Epistemic contextualism

57:58 - Epistemic contextualism and Moore

1:01:25 - Higher-order representation

1:05:00 - Ways to reject the argument

1:06:58 - Alternative conceptions of higher-order theories

1:09:56 - Global workspace theory

1:12:12 - All consciousness as representational

1:14:04 - Papineau on representation

1:17:27 - Can perception be reflexive?

1:19:15 - Value of philosophy

1:21:11 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How far can you get in ethics by focusing on the concrete reasons in each case, rather than relying on moral principles to tell you what you ought to do?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Jonathan Dancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and Research Professor at the University of Reading.

2. Interview Summary

Jonathan Dancy (introduced as a professor at University of Texas at Austin and a research professor at University of Reading) begins by laying out ‘moral particularism’: actions are made right or wrong by the concrete features of the situation, and moral principles—at least of any familiar “rule-like” sort—don’t add anything explanatory or justificatory beyond what those features already do. Principles, at best, function as after-the-fact generalizations from cases, not as premises from which we derive what to do. The interview keeps returning to that idea by stressing how a principle can feel redundant: once you’ve described the salient wrong-making aspects of (say) a self-serving lie and its effects, the added claim “and all such actions are wrong” doesn’t seem to do further work.

From there, the discussion turns to ‘reasons’ and how they connect to ‘ought’-judgments. Dancy resists the thought that every consideration that counts in favor automatically generates a deontic verdict, and he’s especially interested in the ‘favoring relation’ itself—without constantly translating it into “right,” “wrong,” “must,” or “should.” This leads into the contrast between ‘peremptory reasons’ (the ones that genuinely bear on what you should do) and ‘enticing reasons’ (which may still count in favor in some looser way without settling an obligation), plus the worry that the naïve “balance of all reasons = what you ought to do” picture may be too quick. Alongside this, he defends a realist stance: reasons aren’t manufactured out of an agent’s beliefs, desires, or commitments, and a person can have reasons “before them” even if they fail to recognize them. That realism shapes his view of acting in ignorance too: in explaining what someone’s reason was, we often cite the thing they believed (even if it turns out false), rather than treating the reason as a mere psychological state.

Later, the interview revisits the familiar ‘Humean’ theme about desire and motivation: Dancy grants that wants can be part of a causal story about why you acted, but he pushes back on the idea that your desire is therefore the reason—often, he suggests, the reason is the outcome you were aiming at, not the wanting itself. The conversation then shifts to method: prompted by a remark from Dancy’s appearance with Craig Ferguson, he downplays the idea that philosophy’s job is to produce definitions—he’s more interested in understanding than in ending with a tidy definition, and he doubts that defining terms is, by itself, a particularly worthwhile goal. He closes with a crisp picture of philosophy’s value: even when it doesn’t “solve” a problem, it can bring clarity about what’s difficult and help you genuinely see the puzzle—like the basic question, “How could there be such a thing as value?”

2. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Moral particularism

04:08 - Are there some principles?

06:53 - Uninteresting principles

10:57 - Different types of reasons

15:43 - All reasons generating oughts?

19:28 - Not recognizing reasons

20:36 - Reasons for acting

23:53 - Motivating reasons as not psychological states

25:47 - Example

31:10 - Problem with the psychological view

32:36 - Peremptory vs. enticing reasons

33:35 - Skepticism of enticing reasons

37:38 - Are all reasons deontic?

40:34 - Mild oughts and wrong vs. silly

44:05 - Favoring relation

45:40 - Humean view of desires

49:52 - Humean response

52:03 - Definitions

59:01 - Value of artifacts

1:01:55 - Value of philosophy

1:04:35 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe