Friction

Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures?

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

1. Guest

Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more.

Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768

https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP

2. Book Summary

In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures.

The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life.

In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Overview of book

04:51 - Unity of norms

09:08 - Further source?

14:11 - Transcendent views

19:38 - Why listen to God?

22:28 - Religious communities

25:58 - David Hume

33:23 - Language and norms

34:33 - Other animals

37:16 - Authority of norms

43:04 - Worry

44:53 - Moral intuitions

50:52 - Moderate relativism

54:37 - Open question argument

57:41 - Political norms

1:03:53 - Normative skepticism

1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work

1:10:46 - Trust

1:14:16 - What is a norm?

1:15:04 - Value of philosophy

1:15:59 - Conclusion

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What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge?

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

1. Guest

Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2

https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1

2. Book Summary

Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori.

A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology.

Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - What are intuitions?

03:06 - Absent intuition worry

06:55 - John Bengson

08:22 - Terminological dispute

12:20 - Methodological worry

14:53 - Moderate dogmatism

18:38 - Foundationalism

23:10 - Internalism

26:39 - Blindsight

30:10 - Zombie argument

36:52 - Rejoinder

43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism

45:48 - Upshot

47:47 - Another rejoinder

51:48 - Indispensability

55:46 - Are intuitions needed?

59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining

1:02:07 - Animal concepts

1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning

1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions?

1:14:14 - Ethics

1:17:29 - Perceptual experience

1:23:54 - Value of philosophy

1:27:32 - Conclusion

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If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is.

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

1. Guest

Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language.

Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176

https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I

2. Book Summary

Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations.

A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel.

In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:06 - Overview of element

03:39 - Methodology

09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein

13:57 - Private language

18:01 - First wave: skepticism

22:17 - Second wave: definition

27:22 - Third wave: social

34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke

37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting

49:23 - Pains and sensations

52:52 - Problem for private languages

54:23 - Difference from second wave

56:46 - Objections

1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism

1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum

1:14:17 - Infallibility

1:17:07 - Objection

1:21:55 - Upshots

1:25:15 - Value of philosophy

1:26:33 - Conclusion

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Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind?

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

1. Guest

Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality.

Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/61709

https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf

2. Book Summary

Kevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose.

The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape.

Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Overview of book

05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology

10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive

14:50 - Gender binaries

20:47 - Biological binaries

25:07 - Gender norms

32:47 - Linguistic constraints

37:15 - Social accounts

47:07 - Haggling usage

53:07 - Spatial theory of gender

59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness

1:07:12 - Gender kinds

1:12:53 - Vagueness

1:23:14 - Abolitionism

1:27:15 - Social issues

1:34:47 - Making progress

1:41:01 - Value of philosophy

1:44:50 - Conclusion

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1. Guest

Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences.

Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4

https://a.co/d/5aBcmau

2. Book Summary

Daniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it.

On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.”

Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödinger’s emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered “order-from-order” program powerfully shaped molecular biology’s self-image—helping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., “molecular machines,” wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processes—pushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödinger’s broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isn’t that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cell—and how that image may be due for revision.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:32 - Background

03:26 - Why did he write it?

08:19 - Biological order

14:08 - Order from disorder

17:37 - Not applicable to life

20:27 - Hereditary substance

22:58 - Gene-centric view

31:35 - Entropy

39:12 - Negative entropy

41:24 - New laws

48:51 - Modern developments

51:26 - Determinism and free will

1:03:09 - Helpful aspects

1:04:42 - Lessons to learn

1:13:11 - Value of philosophy

1:20:20 - Conclusion

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What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them.

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

1. Author

Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science.

Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673

https://a.co/d/iobiDIc

2. Book Summary

Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable.

The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes.

Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:56 - Overview of book

02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty

11:42 - Epistemology

13:33 - Vagueness

17:38 - First layer of error: raw data

29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual

50:25 - Third layer of error: social

1:10:46 - Recognizing error

1:22:34 - Resolving error

1:26:10 - Humans and history

1:29:18 - Useful biases

1:36:03 - Negative knowledge

1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction

1:47:42 - Value of philosophy

1:50:23 - Conclusion

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What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful?

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

1. Author

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb

2. Book Summary

Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.

The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way.

He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:43 - What is “discrimination”?

07:17 - Irrelevant features

10:48 - Framing the project

18:43 - Socially salient groups

23:44 - Connection with the law

26:49 - Empirical research

28:04 - Vagueness

33:12 - Political beliefs

35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination

38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination

43:35 - Statistical discrimination

46:24 - Different category?

48:41 - Structural discrimination

52:40 - Wrongful discrimination

55:09 - Rejoinder

1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts

1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts

1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts

1:19:16 - Monistic accounts

1:23:05 - Value of philosophy

1:27:10 - Conclusion

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What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem?

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

1. Guest

Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind.

Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!"

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz

2. Book Summary

Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory.

A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say.

The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - The hard problem

06:51 - Dualism

10:06 - Panpsychism

12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders

15:28 - Modal structure

24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology

27:22 - Description-sensitivity

32:00 - Identity

34:52 - Type identity theory

36:27 - Boltzmann brains

39:17 - Correlations vs. identity

43:54 - Phenomenal concepts

45:56 - Zombies and inverts

50:07 - A priori reasoning

51:47 - Color experience

57:38 - Are colors real?

1:02:39 - Other senses

1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness

1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states

1:12:29 - Animal consciousness

1:15:48 - Vagueness

1:16:55 - Functionalism

1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence

1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach

1:25:51 - Progress

1:27:11 - Value of philosophy

1:28:32 - Conclusion

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What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself?

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

1. Guest

Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception.

Check out his book with Cambridge Elements!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A

2. Book Summary

Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself).

His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis.

On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 – Introduction

00:50 – Overview of the book

11:09 – Intention

17:58 – Is deception always wrong?

29:25 – Functional account

36:29 – Function

43:08 – Sci-fi case

48:13 – Vagueness

53:45 – Objections

57:51 – Self-deception

1:02:15 – Function and self-deception

1:09:12 – Semantics

1:17:27 – Value of philosophy

1:24:33 – Conclusion

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If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory?

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

1. Guest

Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/

2. Book Summary

Emily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible.

The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes.

Stepping back, Adlam’s through-line is that you don’t get to quarantine these issues inside “interpretation”: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for “sceptical” hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stances—e.g. “intersubjective QBism” that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequencies—would drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - The measurement problem

05:14 - Shut up and calculate

07:00 - Different senses of "measurement"

09:11 - Bootstrapping

10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice

13:18 - Quantum bayesianism

17:46 - Many worlds

20:05 - Recovering the Born rule

32:21 - Bohmian mechanics

36:09 - Probability

37:58 - All-at-once laws

42:54 - Anti-Humeanism

45:12 - Superdeterminism

48:56 - Naturalness

50:15 - Retrocausality

54:33 - Primitive ontology

57:51 - Fundamentality

1:01:41 - Consistent histories

1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics

1:07:25 - Making progress

1:08:38 - Value of philosophy

1:10:20 - 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