Friction

If humans are as irrational and “automatic” as some psychologists suggest, why does explaining what people believe and want still feel like the best way to understand what they do?

1. Guest

Emma Borg is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, although before that was for a long time Professor at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science. In this interview, we focus on her recent book, "Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology".

Check out her book!

https://academic.oup.com/book/58959

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNCYHXC5/

2. Book Summary

Emma Borg’s Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology argues that the familiar ‘common-sense psychology’ (CP) framework—explaining action via contentful mental states like beliefs and desires—remains broadly vindicated despite recent experimental and theoretical backlash. Borg characterizes CP as combining (i) a claim about action generation (typically, behaviour is caused “in the right way” by an agent’s reasons) and (ii) a claim about action understanding (typically, we explain and predict others by attributing mental states and inferring what those states should lead them to do). The book’s central aim is to resist the increasingly popular conclusion that “common-sense psychology is wrong” and to show that CP’s reach is much broader than “high days and holidays” cases of explicit deliberation.

The first half of the book takes on the Heuristics-and-Biases-inspired attacks on CP’s picture of decision-making. Borg distinguishes two strands: the No Reasons challenge, where heuristics are treated as automatic, “gut-feel” processes that bypass reasons altogether, and the Insufficient Reasons challenge, where people do consult reasons but in a biased, evidentially thin, or otherwise irrational way. She argues that defining heuristics as reasons-insensitive (or inferring that from their “fast, automatic” feel) is a mistake, and that much of the empirical case for endemic irrationality relies on contentious interpretations and methodological pitfalls (including concerns tied to replication, stability, and ecological validity). Overall, Borg’s conclusion on this side is that widespread heuristic reasoning does not by itself undermine CP’s general assumption of individual rationality and reasons-responsiveness.

The remainder of the book turns to CP’s second component—how we understand other people—and targets “deflationary” alternatives that try to explain social cognition without robust belief–desire attribution (e.g., behaviour-reading, mirror-neuron stories, “submentalizing,” or more “minimal” mentalizing). Borg argues that fully behaviour-reading approaches face serious empirical and theoretical problems, and that mid-ground views still don’t justify demoting CP to a niche role. Her final position is that deflationary resources may at most supplement CP (for certain developmental or special-purpose explanations), but they don’t supplant CP as the central, everyday framework for making sense of intentional action—so, taken together, the book concludes that common-sense psychology is broadly vindicated.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:47 - Overview of common-sense psychology

02:50 - Further consequences of view

06:38 - Intuitive view

10:51 - Kahneman and Tversky

18:35 - "No reasons" challenge

23:36 - "Insufficient reasons" challenge

29:39 - Vagueness

34:25 - Introspectable properties challenge

41:37 - Unconscious action

47:18 - Reasons-sensitivity

52:41 - Semantic issue

57:28 - Response to insufficient reasons

1:06:57 - Useful fictions

1:13:40 - Why read the book?

1:17:32 - Value of philosophy

1:19:54 - Conclusion

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How can Nyāya philosophy teach us to argue better, spot bad reasoning, and still live well amid uncertainty?

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

1. Guest

Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College. His work focuses primarily on Indian philosophy. In this interview, we focus on his book, "Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well".

Check out his book!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG5ZTTCP/

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reason-in-an-uncertain-world-9780197634257

Check out his page!

https://www.youtube.com/@UCtmzNhD4qq9HZYKkqBV3C8A

2. Book Summary

Reason in an Uncertain World argues that Nyāya philosophers offer something modern “critical thinking” usually doesn’t: a unified picture of how reasoning and argumentation connect to living well. Keating starts from the fact that we now face an overwhelming stream of claims and controversies, and while people often look to “ancient wisdom” for emotional stability, they look elsewhere for tools to sort truth from fiction. Nyāya, he argues, can do both: it treats reasoning skills and debate practices as socially embedded ways of getting to truth and as crucial for leading happy, virtuous, meaningful lives.

The first half of the book develops Nyāya’s epistemology as a response to uncertainty and suffering. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage and introduces the Nyāya thought that understanding (especially epistemology) can relieve pain and suffering, orienting inquiry toward an “excellent” human goal; Keating illustrates this with Nyāya reflections on duḥkha and the attraction of a final state without pain and suffering. Chapters 2–6 then build a toolkit of “ways of knowing” (including perception, inference, and testimony), highlighting the idea of “certification” (reflectively checking that one really knows), the structure and varieties of inference (and how counterfeit inferences arise through pseudo-reasons), how to evaluate testimony and handle conflicting reports, and how doubt—especially doubt arising from controversy—can be a rational trigger for further inquiry rather than a skeptical dead-end.

The second half turns from knowing to arguing: how people should (and often do) reason together when disagreements become interpersonal. Nyāya distinguishes truth-seeking “discussion” from competitive formats like disputation (aimed at victory), and Keating uses that contrast to analyze fallacies, equivocations, misleading objections, and the “points of defeat” that explain how someone can lose a debate even without directly refuting their view. The closing chapter draws the ethical lesson: because real debates often mix truth-seeking with ego, politics, and high stakes, Nyāya thinkers sometimes allow even morally serious arguers to use less-than-ideal argumentative tactics in special circumstances—while still treating reasoned discourse as a practice that shapes (and is shaped by) character and virtue.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:59 - Overview of book

02:27 - Modern relevance

10:34 - Background of Nyāya

20:00 - Perception

25:44 - Concerns with perception

31:38 - Inference

36:40 - Probabilistic inferences

42:38 - Testimony

50:04 - Reasoning errors

58:34 - Doubt

1:07:56 - Debate and argumentation

1:15:00 - Wrangling

1:18:55 - Living well

1:25:04 - Value of philosophy

1:28:56 - Conclusion

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Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk?

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

1. Guest

Amir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language.

Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intentionality-deconstructed-9780198896432

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198896433

2. Book Summary

Horowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others.

The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks naturalistic reduction strategies: even if minds/languages stand in many causal/informational relations to the world, the reductive naturalist must explain what makes one of them the semantic/intentional relation, and Horowitz argues that the needed justification is unavailable—mere stipulation (“identify R with aboutness”) won’t get realism off the ground.

Having cleared the ground, Horowitz develops intentional anti-realism in detail. The negative thesis is that content ascriptions “in themselves” lack truth conditions, but he pairs this with a practice-dependence account: relative to a scheme/practice of content ascription, such ascriptions can be true/false—e.g., “Gödel” can “refer” to Gödel under a causal-historical practice or to Schmidt under a descriptivist practice, while outside any practice the right answer is “to no one.” He then explains why content talk can still be useful and often successful: content ascriptions carry logico-syntactic messages (structural commitments) that can be true/adequate even if their semantic “aboutness” message is not, and the predictive/explanatory payoff of folk psychology can be attributed to these structural patterns rather than to real intentional properties. Finally, he addresses objections like the “success” argument and the “cognitive suicide” worry by treating “claim that/believe that” talk as rhetorical/“quoted” within a radical revisionary framework, and he closes with an Ockham-style moral: since intentional properties are dispensable and unsupported, we should reject their instantiation altogether.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:39 - Overview

03:48 - Irrealism and anti-realism

04:57 - Concrete and abstract

07:31 - What is intentionality?

14:15 - Primitivism

19:00 - Relations

23:54 - Phenomenal intentionality

28:20 - Representationalism

31:23 - Introspection and intuition

37:46 - Too skeptical?

47:40 - Empirical research

57:23 - Arguments against intentionality

1:04:09 - Another option?

1:15:58 - Truth

1:19:35 - Success of intentional theories

1:23:33 - Challenges

1:31:12 - Value of philosophy

1:33:38 - Conclusion

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Can ethics be fully naturalistic while still explaining why moral reasons genuinely have authority over us?

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

1. Guest

David Copp is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and his work has focused on moral and political philosophy.

Check out his new book, "Ethical Naturalism and the Problem of Normativity"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ethical-naturalism-and-the-problem-of-normativity-9780197601587

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPGFFK2W

2. Book Summary

David Copp frames the book around what he takes to be metaethics’ central puzzle: the ‘problem of normativity’. He wants a theory-neutral grip on what needs explaining when we say that reasons, oughts, and values are ‘normative’, and he treats this as a problem not just for ethical realism in general, but especially for ‘ethical naturalism’. The worry is straightforward: if normative facts are what would make basic moral claims true, it’s hard to see how such facts could fit into a world that we learn about through experience and science—since it doesn’t look like experience (ordinary or scientific) can simply reveal that (say) torture is wrong or compassion is a virtue.

To make the dispute precise, Copp develops an ‘empirical criterion’ of the natural: roughly, a property counts as natural only if no synthetic truth about its instantiation is ‘strongly a priori’—so, for the naturalist, substantive basic ethical truths (if any) must be empirically defeasible. He then maps the space of ethical naturalisms: non-reductive views (often cast in terms of grounding/supervenience) versus reductive views, and within reductionism, ‘analytic’ versus ‘non-analytic’ versions—where he explicitly favors the non-analytic, metaphysical-analysis approach. Along the way he argues that to take the normativity problem seriously, it’s not enough to say ethical facts are natural (or grounded in natural facts); we need some reductive story of what ‘robust normativity’ itself consists in.

The second half of the book tests concrete proposals: he reviews several substantive naturalist options (including Cornell-style views, the Canberra Plan, neo-Humean and neo-Aristotelian approaches, and his ‘Pluralist-Teleology’) and then answers major objections (the ‘is/ought gap’, Parfit-style challenges, and the “just too different” intuition). A recurring verdict is that non-reductive naturalisms like Cornell Realism may be compatible with naturalism, but they don’t by themselves deliver a philosophically satisfying account of robust normativity, because they don’t provide the needed reductive explanation of what normativity is. Copp presents ‘Pluralist-Teleology’ as the most promising route: very roughly, basic ethical truths are grounded in facts about which systems of standards would best help humans solve different ‘problems of normative governance’—with morality tied in particular to the ‘problem of sociality’ and an ‘ideal moral code’ understood in those terms.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:39 - Overview of book

05:59 - The problem of normativity

12:59 - Normativity

19:17 - Formal vs. robust normativity

22:53 - Robust normavity

30:41 - Authoritativeness

35:35 - Categorizing theories

41:18 - Empirical research

50:39 - Normative conceptualism

54:05 - Analytic naturalism

1:09:32 - Plausible normative theories

1:15:10 - Parity thesis

1:18:50 - Nominalism

1:24:14 - Metaphysical naturalism

1:28:51 - Non-naturalist realism

1:33:00 - Non-primitivist non-naturalism

1:37:37 - Error theory

1:41:13 - Non-cognitivism

1:46:37 - Disunified moral semantics

1:50:12 - Natural properties

1:54:26 - Metaphysical characterization

1:56:24 - Counterexamples?

2:01:10 - Nature of normative properties

2:05:54 - What are these properties?

2:07:55 - Relation between natural properties and ethical properties

2:13:47 - Supervenience

2:21:48 - Frank Jackson’s direct argument

2:27:55 - Subjectivist neo-Humeanism

2:34:39 - Is it realist?

2:38:37 - Neo-Aristotelian naturalism

2:43:37 - Potential objections

2:49:03 - Pluralist teleology

2:53:05 - Desire-dependent again?

2:59:11 - Is-ought gap

3:04:34 - Bilgrami’s pincer argument

3:16:51 - “Just too different” objection

3:23:03 - Upshots

3:26:21 - Value of philosophy

3:29:03 - Conclusion

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Craige Roberts explains how formal semantics and pragmatics model meaning by tracking context, presupposition, and modality to show why what we say depends so deeply on discourse structure.

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

1. Guest

Craige Roberts is Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University. Her work has focused on the philosophy of language, primarily on formal semantics and pragmatics.

2. Interview Summary

Craige Roberts is introduced as a leading figure in formal semantics and pragmatics, with work on topics like modal subordination, anaphora, and the way context shapes interpretation. In the interview, the emphasis is repeatedly on using explicit, formal tools (in the Montague-style tradition the host flags) to build increasingly good models of linguistic data—models that make predictions you can test and then refine.

A central thread is how Roberts thinks about the semantics/pragmatics boundary: rather than treating pragmatics as an unstructured “everything else,” the discussion treats it as something that can itself be modeled, especially once you track context, discourse goals, and what counts as an appropriate contribution in conversation. This comes out as the host contrasts “more ‘formal’ approaches” with speech-act frameworks (with John Searle as the reference point) and presses on whether there’s any deep tension here. A related point that’s explicitly highlighted is that for certain expressions—like epistemic modals—you can’t just “read off” the relevant domain without knowing the conversational setting.

From there, the conversation spotlights several of Roberts’s hallmark topics: the possible-worlds way of modeling propositional content (the host frames this in a Stalnaker-style key and asks how much metaphysics about “possible worlds” the framework really commits you to), and how that connects to context dependence in modal talk. The host also brings up her work on presupposition “triggers” and “projection,” and then pivots to the broader philosophy-adjacent question of how (or whether) we can infer ontological commitments just from the semantics of natural language—where Roberts is described as comparatively conservative about what semantics alone can settle.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:33 - Overview of field

20:01 - Pragmatic vs. formal semantics

53:59 - Searle’s taxonomy

58:29 - Speech act theory

1:06:51 - Formal pragmatics

1:13:59 - Propositions

1:23:45 - Necessary propositions

1:35:49 - Probabilities

1:41:23 - Might and must

1:56:44 - Presupposition and projection

2:20:39 - Existential language

2:25:38 - Open challenges

2:37:56 - Amazing capacities

2:42:53 - Value of philosophy

2:46:57 - Conclusion

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Can sentence meaning be built up locally from the meanings of words and their modes of combination, without positing a separate intermediate “logical form” to do the interpretive work?

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

1. Guest

Polly Jacobson is Professor of Linguistics at Brown University, where she has been a professor for many years. Her work focuses on linguistics and formal semantics, and especially on the formal tools needed to model the syntactic and semantic systems of natural languages.

2. Interview Summary

After the introductions, Polly Jacobson (Brown University) and the host of Friction move straight into compositionality: the idea (roughly) that sentence meanings are determined by the meanings of their parts plus the rules for putting those parts together. Jacobson treats some compositionality as non-negotiable, but emphasizes that the real controversies concern how much compositionality natural language exhibits, what the composition rules are, and how the topic developed into a live research program rather than a slogan.

From there, the interview centers on Jacobson’s “direct compositionality” approach by contrasting it with an “indirect” picture where syntax first generates an intermediate representation (often described as a kind of “logical form”) and semantics interprets that representation afterward. The direct-compositional alternative aims to avoid that intermediate interpretive layer and keep syntax and semantics working in tighter tandem. This leads into the “degrees” or “types” of direct compositionality: at the strong end, syntax is (in a sense) “blind” to structure and semantics does the interpretive work; at weaker ends, syntax is allowed more operations—without collapsing back into the idea that it’s merely producing a logical form for semantics to read off.

A recurring payoff claim is that direct compositionality helps preserve local interpretation—making it clearer how meaning can be built up step-by-step without global “repair.” In that spirit, they discuss why an operation like infixation (letting substrings/phrases combine in more flexible ways) might be needed to prevent a syntax–semantics mismatch where some structural piece “should” get an interpretation but can’t under stricter locality constraints—while also noting how quickly things could become unwieldy if the system allowed unlimited iterations of such operations. The conversation also links the view to processing considerations: if humans don’t wait until the end of a sentence to interpret it, a direct-compositional framework can look like a natural fit, whereas denying it may require extra theory to explain incremental understanding. The interview closes with Jacobson on open problems and on the broader value of theorizing about language—even if models idealize a messy phenomenon, there’s real intellectual and explanatory value in trying to understand complex systems better.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Direct compositionality

09:45 - Misconception

12:46 - Direct vs. indirect compositionality

22:02 - Cross-serial dependencies and infixation

32:07 - Example with infixation

35:48 - Motivation for direct compositionality

40:07 - Language without direct compositionality?

51:26 - Language processing

56:48 - Complicated syntax and direct compositionality

1:00:15 - Degrees of direct compositionality?

1:01:00 - What more might be needed?

1:06:41 - Donkey sentences

1:11:58 - More motivations for direct compositionality

1:15:08 - Analogy to logic

1:17:26 - Idioms and locality

1:26:13 - Challenges to view

1:28:17 - Value of linguistics

1:32:47 - Idealization

1:34:54 - Conclusion

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What really makes a behavior a social norm, and how can measuring people’s expectations about what others do and approve of help us change it?

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

1. Guest

Cristina Bicchieri is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program.

2. Interview Summary

Bicchieri starts by pushing back against how loose and “catch-all” talk of social norms can be—especially definitions that treat a norm as simply “what people commonly do.” Instead, she frames social norms as genuinely social rules of behavior: shared within a group (sometimes local, sometimes society-wide) and “alive” in the sense that they’re sustained by what people expect of one another. On her view, two kinds of expectations matter—empirical expectations about what others do, and normative expectations about what others think one ought to do—and a behavior counts as governed by a social norm only when people’s preference to comply is conditional on those expectations. A key selling point is that this makes norms testable: you can measure the relevant expectations and the conditionality, which in turn makes norm talk more predictive and scientifically usable.

From there she emphasizes both the psychology and the methodology. Psychologically, she notes that many everyday norms function like default rules: we often follow them automatically because they coordinate social life and spare us constant deliberation (her example is familiar “greeting” behavior like handshaking). Methodologically, she’s interested in detecting conditionality rather than just asking people what they personally endorse. So she stresses the importance of specifying the relevant reference group, then measuring empirical and normative expectations (via surveys), and then using vignette designs to reduce “experimenter demand” and to see whether predicted behavior shifts across different combinations of “most people do X” and “most people approve of X.” Those off-diagonal cases let her test what happens when descriptive and normative signals conflict—and she reports that, in her data, descriptive/empirical expectations typically “win the day”: when people believe most others do something, that tends to guide what they’ll do even if they also think most others don’t approve.

A big theme in the latter part of the interview is application: if policymakers want to shift behavior, they need a clearer picture of the “cognitive plumbing” behind how people interpret social information. She treats “norm nudging” as a kind of black box—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—and points to systematic asymmetries in the inferences people draw from descriptive vs. approval messages, depending on whether the behavior is seen as positive or negative. She also highlights how crucial it is to target the right reference network: in a successful intervention aimed at curbing antibiotic overprescribing, the message was framed around what the majority of doctors in London do, so recipients couldn’t dismiss it as irrelevant. At the same time, she warns that you can’t design good interventions if you misclassify behaviors: in work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on open defecation in India, she found it wasn’t a social norm at all but a widely shared custom, which changes what it would take to replace it with a toilet-usage norm. She also connects this to why norm change is hard: trendsetters and tipping points exist, but thresholds are difficult to know in advance, so we can often explain change better than we can predict it. Finally, she notes that messaging can backfire when it clashes with what people observe locally—prompting a “pragmatic” (suspicious) rather than “semantic” (straightforward) interpretation—before closing with a defense of philosophy’s analytic mindset as a real asset for doing this kind of careful conceptual and empirical work.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:00 - What are social norms?

05:23 - Formal definition

12:42 - Context

16:14 - Beliefs

19:52 - Empirical research

28:34 - Inferences and norm nudging

32:20 - Historical development

36:04 - Game theory

40:56 - Norms and normativity

44:28 - Changing social norms

49:49 - Too broad?

52:42 - Upshots of account

56:50 - Open questions

1:00:12 - Value of philosophy

1:01:52 - Conclusion

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A probing conversation with Graham Oppy on why classical arguments for God often fail to establish their intended conclusions, and on how pragmatics, metaphysics, and Bayesian reasoning shape debates in philosophy of religion.

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

1. Guest

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.

2. Interview Summary

Graham Oppy (a philosophy of religion professor at Monash University) begins by describing how he lost his childhood Christianity around age 12–13, then—after reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography as a teenager—decided he wanted a life in philosophy. From there, several questions press him on “existential inertia” and classical theistic arguments: he says the label covers different theses, but in the basic sense—if something exists at a time and nothing intervenes to destroy it, it continues to exist—he accepts it (not as a special force, just as the idea that things don’t pop out of existence without a cause or reason). In a related exchange about agency, he’s skeptical of “agents without mechanisms,” arguing that positing such a category is theoretically costly (it multiplies kinds of agents without clear explanatory payoff), whereas ordinary organisms act via mechanisms, and our intuitions about “mechanism-free” agency are both fallible and malleable. He also flags a physicalist/identity-theory picture on which mental states just are brain states, dissolving certain “mysteries” about mind–body correlation.

On religious language and theological discourse, he dismisses A. J. Ayer–style verificationism as self-undermining, and he’s likewise unconvinced by some later “Wittgensteinian” moves in philosophy of religion. A concrete example he uses is Norman Malcolm’s famous line that it can be conversationally odd to say “I believe” when one knows; Oppy follows H. P. Grice in treating this as pragmatics (a norm of being maximally informative), not as evidence that knowledge fails to entail belief. He also notes that the thought that God-talk is “meaningless” because “God” lacks meaning is now rarely defended in academic philosophy, though he mentions Michael Martin as flirting with the idea. And he emphasizes that theological traditions diverge sharply over whether we can form any positive conception of divine attributes: he contrasts approaches associated with Thomas Aquinas (and some early Muslim thinkers) with post-Reformation Protestant traditions that treat “omnipotence,” “omniscience,” and “perfect goodness” as more literally and directly graspable. Stepping back, he suggests philosophy of religion is plural and somewhat siloed: he points to both analytic and continental work (including colleagues and Jacques Derrida–influenced strands), but doubts there will be much integration given how far apart the subfields’ aims and methods can be.

When the discussion turns to what counts as a “good case” for theism, he recommends thinking in a cumulative-evidence style associated with Richard Swinburne: rather than expecting a single knockdown proof, you weigh a wide range of considerations (evil, the existence of the universe, and so on), and many of the relevant “data” will overlap across different theistic religions. On specific doctrines, he argues that even if one claims God’s omniscience is “non-propositional,” it still appears to commit you to the truth of a vast range of propositions, so the maneuver may not change as much as advertised. On classical arguments, he distinguishes (i) whether a conclusion is actually a logical consequence of the premises from (ii) whether the premises are true; and he reiterates his view (from Arguing About Gods) that, at least for the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways, the intended conclusion does not follow from the stated premises (and he’s unsure, on the spot, how much he said about the fourth and fifth). Finally, in a later exchange about Bayesian reasoning, he voices familiar worries about “subjective Bayesianism”: in empirical domains with lots of data, priors (within limits) tend to wash out, but in data-poor areas, demanding precise numerical credences can feel arbitrary because we lack the kind of evidence that would drive convergence.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:14 - What got you into philosophy

01:11 - Existential inertia

04:53 - Ultimate causal explanations

15:34 - Psychophysical harmony

22:11 - Religious language

27:05 - Religious epistemology

35:48 - God's knowledge

37:46 - Validity of the five ways

40:01 - Understanding God

42:20 - Ignosticism

48:04 - Continental philosophy of religion

53:02 - Fracturing of academia/education

57:45 - Fine-tuning

1:03:40 - Subjective bayesianism

1:06:46 - General model of inquiry

1:10:02 - Münchhausen trilemma

1:15:43 - Conclusion

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Can getting more information ever make a rational agent worse off, not better, once you factor in real-world costs, group disagreement, and the way inquiry can change the very decision you face?

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

1. Guest

Ted Seidenfeld is Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and his work focuses on decision theory, statistics, and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Seidenfeld frames the conversation around a classic decision-theoretic result associated with Jack Good: in a simplified Bayesian/expected-utility setting, if there is an experiment whose possible outcomes would rationally lead you to act differently, then (given a “free” chance to learn) it is instrumentally rational to delay and gather that information, since it has expected value precisely by guiding action. But his main aim is to stress that this is a mathematical theorem with substantive assumptions, and once you relax them the “value of information” conclusion can flip: additional information can, by your current lights, predictably make decision-making worse rather than better.

He then walks through several ways those assumptions fail. One route is social: if the “agent” is really a group with multiple probability/utility perspectives, new evidence can surface latent disagreements and turn prior unanimity into polarization, forcing compromises that both parties regard as worse than the pre-inquiry choice, which raises the question of whether inquiry is worth it when it predictably destabilizes collective action. Another route concerns what counts as ‘cost-free’ information: if your utilities include valuing uncertainty (the theater mystery example), information can be costly simply by spoiling an experience. He also emphasizes ‘moral hazard’ and ‘act–state dependence’, where the very act of setting up or pursuing inquiry changes the relevant state of the world (or your future dispositions), so dominance-style reasoning breaks down and the Good-style theorem no longer applies.

The discussion later uses Newcomb’s paradox as a case study: Seidenfeld notes that two-boxing looks dominant unless you are prepared to endorse choice-dependent conditional probabilities (the “reverse” conditionals), and he argues that a predictor’s track record by itself does not automatically justify those probabilities. He presses the point with a market/auction thought experiment about selling ownership of the “one-box” outcome, meant to test whether the purported conditionals genuinely guide action. From there he pivots to a deeper worry about agency: too much self-knowledge (for example, knowing you are an expected-utility maximizer with fixed probabilities/utilities) threatens the idea that you face live options at all, and he is skeptical about assigning probabilities to your own acts in a decision problem. He finally situates these tensions historically via Kenneth Arrow and Leonard J. Savage, suggesting that attempts to generalize Bayesian rationality from individuals to cooperative groups (even under a unanimity constraint) run into impossibility-style pressures that leave “compromise” looking unstable unless you relax parts of the Savage framework.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Is ignorance bliss?

11:22 - Cost-free information

16:22 - Sample case

19:27 - Moral hazard

27:20 - Newcomb’s problem

38:25 - Dominance argument

44:07 - Deliberation and prediction

48:32 - Causalist rejoinder

50:32 - Variation

55:27 - Paying to avoid cost-free information

59:19 - Simpson’s paradox

1:07:57 - Group decisions

1:22:58 - Imprecise preferences

1:25:21 - Imprecise credences

1:27:52 - Other models

1:39:01 - Causal bayesian networks

1:43:49 - What does caustion add

1:48:57 - Relevance

1:51:27 - Backward intervention

1:54:02 - Application to groups

1:59:27 - Sleeping beauty problem

2:10:02 - Thirder argument

2:14:12 - Halfer solution

2:15:55 - Ambiguity of ‘’now’‘

2:18:00 - Betting odds

2:26:00 - Value of philosophy

2:29:57 - Conclusion

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Can we keep everything that makes mathematics rigorous by treating it as the study of possible structures, without committing to a mysterious realm of abstract objects?

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

1. Guest

Geoffrey Hellman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and metaphysics.

2. Interview Summary

Geoffrey Hellman frames the philosophy of (pure) mathematics as a contest between a default “objectivist” or Platonist picture—where mathematics is about abstract objects—and a structuralist impulse that treats mathematics as primarily about patterns of relations rather than special entities. They note how, after Richard Dedekind and David Hilbert, this structuralist thought was often sidelined by approaches that re-centered “definite objects,” most notably in Principia Mathematica and related work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Hellman’s guiding complaint is the familiar epistemic worry: if mathematical objects are outside space, time, and causation, what could ground our knowledge of them—so the philosophical pressure is to keep what’s powerful in mathematics without buying a mysterious ontology.

Against that background, the Hellman reconstructs the route to “modal structuralism” by weaving together historical foundations work and a modal turn. They highlight the need for a rigorous account of the structuralist idea that axioms characterize any system of objects interrelated in the right way (rather than a single privileged domain), an idea they connect to Howard Stein and especially to Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that foundations should explicitly use necessity/possibility talk—mathematics as the study of possible structures. They then use set theory as the main case study, sketching the standard ZFC story associated with Ernst Zermelo (plus choice) and Abraham Fraenkel (replacement), and motivating an “indefinite extensibility” picture: any given model can be extended to a bigger one, so there’s no coherent “standing outside” all of them at once.

Finally, Hellman contrasts this with “face-value” Platonist structuralisms—especially Stuart Shapiro’s ante rem approach—and argues that they inherit a version of Paul Benacerraf’s permutation/uniqueness worries: even if you grant abstract positions, you can permute them (e.g., swap 2 and 3) and get an equally good “number structure,” with no non-arbitrary fact to pick the intended one. On the Hellman’s modal view, the point of arithmetic, set theory, etc. is preserved by talking only about what could exist (structures satisfying the axioms), not about a realm of abstract objects—making the view attractive to nominalist-leaning philosophers and close in spirit to functionalist attitudes about theoretical commitments.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Overview

08:41 - History and development

59:21 - Motivating the view

1:25:38 - Modal structuralism

1:48:53 - Proposed semantics

1:54:30 - Other abstracta

2:03:20 - Logical possibilities

2:11:08 - Logical truths and nominalism

2:20:36 - Compatibility with other views

2:23:50 - Indispensability arguments

2:37:47 - Non-classical mathematics

2:58:30 - Classical mathematics with non-classical logic

3:01:56 - Value of philosophy

3:13:30 - 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