Friction

When should evidence guide choice over causation, how can meaning emerge from signaling games, and why might utility comparisons quietly break the ethics we build on them?

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

1. Guest

Brian Skyrms is Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and an Emiritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. His work has focused on science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability.

2. Interview Summary

Brian Skyrms frames the opening around the long-running split between causal and evidential decision theory: both aim at “maximizing expected payoff,” but they compute “expectation” using different probability functions—ordinary degrees of belief for the evidentialist, versus probabilities meant to represent causal efficacy for the causal theorist. He suggests that once you’re clear on that conceptual difference, much of the remaining literature becomes a matter of pushing (and disputing) intuitions about “funny cases,” especially Richard Jeffrey–style “news value” reasoning versus causal evaluation in cases like Newcomb-style problems, which he’s surprised to see repeatedly “rise from the grave” in new philosophical (and AI-adjacent) waves of debate.

From there, the interview broadens into Skyrms’s broader picture of how decision theory connects to a cluster of topics—conditionals, causation, and modal/necessity talk—where he favors a pragmatic, human-centered treatment rather than hunting for extra “facts” supposedly delivered by raw intuition. In that spirit, he discusses Bayesian-friendly ways of handling subjunctive conditionals that preserve some “probability of a conditional” motivations while avoiding classic triviality worries, and he emphasizes that what counts as “rational” can shift with the setting: in correlated evolutionary contexts (where you reliably meet similar agents), evidential/Jeffrey-style reasoning can predict what evolves better than individualistic causal-choice reasoning, which helps motivate his interest in the evolution of cooperation.

In the second half, Skyrms highlights two big research programs. First, he explains how a naturalistic account of meaning can start from information transfer in David Lewis–style signaling games—tracking how learning dynamics can move populations toward equilibria where signals stabilize—and then treating deception as a deviation (strategic or mistaken) from an emergent equilibrium use-pattern. Second, he summarizes his recent work on utilitarianism as largely a measurement-theory project: many familiar philosophical “add up the utils” arguments implicitly assume overly strong scales, and once you respect the legitimate degrees of freedom in utility measurement, celebrated cases (including Derek Parfit-style population examples) can become formally meaningless because permissible rescalings flip the verdicts. He then connects this methodological moral to epistemology: you can’t “answer” the complete skeptic (that’s a fool’s game), but you can make progress with partial skeptics by getting precise about what “the future will be like the past” could even mean—a point associated with Nelson Goodman—and by using Bayesian tools to articulate which inductive inferences are actually supported. He closes on a deflationary note about philosophy’s value: he won’t sell it as for everyone; for him, it’s mainly that it’s fun to question what people accept without thinking.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:19 - Causal and evidential decision theory

04:05 - Maximizing expected payoff

05:27 - Correlation without causal connection

06:17 - Causation

10:41 - Deliberating over the past

13:42 - Common intuitions

16:11 - Philosophical landscape

18:05 - Predicted riches

21:27 - Transparent box case

23:55 - Normative significance of decision theory

28:33 - Subjunctive conditionals

33:33 - Closest possible worlds

35:15 - Backtracking counterfactuals

37:07 - Example

39:47 - Possible worlds

41:38 - Metaphysical possibility

44:05 - Suppositional approach

48:10 - Benefits of the approach

51:19 - Foundations of utility

56:55 - Utilitarianism and measuring utility

1:01:28 - Saving utilitarianism

1:02:43 - Vague preferences and credences

1:06:10 - Content in signalling games

1:13:48 - Not sui generis

1:15:23 - Signalling games with only one person

1:18:18 - Accounting for content more broadly

1:21:01 - Inductive skepticism

1:23:50 - Required assumptions

1:25:55 - Problem of induction

1:31:11 - Contracts and games

1:33:11 - Correlations

1:38:33 - Value of philosophy

1:39:56 - Conclusion

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When you don’t have enough evidence to believe or disbelieve, is agnosticism a rational attitude in its own right or just a temporary pause on the way to a verdict?

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

1. Guest

Avery Archer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work has focused on the philosophy of action, philosophy of mind and intentionality, moral psychology and metaethics, epistemology, and more.

2. Book Summary

In The Attitude of Agnosticism, Avery Archer aims to (i) sort out what agnosticism is (as a distinctive doxastic attitude) and (ii) defend a package of claims about when it’s rationally appropriate. The book starts by laying down seven criteria any good descriptive account should satisfy—e.g., it must require ‘cognitive contact’ with the proposition, explain agnosticism’s ‘neutrality’ and ‘commitment’ to neutrality, allow for ‘spontaneous’ agnosticism, and (controversially) preserve the possibility of ‘agnosticism-involving doxastic inconsistency’ (someone can be irrationally inconsistent by both believing P and being agnostic toward P). With those criteria in hand, Archer then surveys leading contemporary ‘attitudinal’ accounts (Russell, Crawford, Masny, Raleigh, Wagner, Friedman) and argues that each fails at least one criterion, clearing the way for a new positive view.

Archer’s positive proposal is the ‘questioning-attitude account’: to be agnostic toward P is to be in a commitment-involving mental state of sceptically questioning both the truth and the falsity of P—so agnosticism is sui generis (not just a form of belief, disbelief, desire, etc.). On this picture, agnosticism is not defined by being “in inquiry”: Archer rejects the idea that agnosticism essentially entails an inquiring state of mind, arguing instead that the core of agnosticism is its rational appropriateness when one’s competently considered evidence is insufficient to establish either P or ¬P. The book also defends a ‘bipartite’ view of doxastic neutrality: the act of ‘withholding judgement’ typically puts you into the attitude of agnosticism (roughly as judging relates to believing). And it argues there is no practical analogue of agnosticism—no third practical attitude that stands to intending X / intending not-X the way agnosticism stands to belief / disbelief—drawing out consequences for how belief differs from intention and mere “acceptance.”

In the later chapters Archer connects this framework to live debates in epistemology. He argues that pragmatic considerations can sometimes be reasons to remain agnostic (reasons not to believe), even if they cannot be reasons to believe—using this to claim that ‘transparency’-style arguments at best constrain reasons for belief, not reasons for agnosticism, and motivating distinctions like ‘weak’ vs ‘strong’ evidentialism. He also defends a modest (‘weak’) form of permissivism on which, for some evidence e, it can be rationally permissible either to believe P or to be agnostic about P (without committing to permissibility between belief and disbelief), and he argues that agnosticism is the rationally appropriate response to certain cases of revealed peer disagreement. Overall, the book’s upshot is to “give agnosticism its due”: treat it as a distinctive, norm-governed attitude whose central role is to be the fitting doxastic response when our evidence doesn’t settle matters either way.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:47 - Background to book

03:38 - Philosophical relevance of agnosticism

06:52 - Agnosticism and inquiry

08:42 - Consideration criterion

11:26 - Two notions of consideration

17:37 - Basic approach

22:24 - Criticism

25:54 - Rejoinder

27:22 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive

33:02 - Inconsistency criterion

40:00 - Believing and disbelieving simultaneously

45:04 - Attitudinal account

47:28 - Second order beliefs

52:05 - Occurrent attitudes

1:02:25 - Agnosticism and inquiry

1:11:14 - No evidence case

1:14:36 - Alternatives

1:18:57 - Normativity

1:20:47 - Instrumental

1:23:36 - Example

1:26:22 - Other sorts of rationality

1:30:27 - Belief vs. judgment

1:36:13 - Questioning account

1:37:22 - Belief

1:40:37 - Unrealized disposition

1:43:22 - Minimum threshold

1:45:00 - Upshot of account

1:49:03 - Value of philosophy

1:51:08 - Conclusion

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Can abortion be wrong even if ‘personhood’ is unsettled, and what do moral realism and parental obligations imply about bodily autonomy arguments?

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

1. Guest

Christopher Kaczor is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and his work has focused on bioethics, theology, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Christopher Kaczor argues that the abortion debate leans heavily on competing accounts of ‘personhood’, but that settling personhood isn’t strictly necessary for evaluating abortion: the discussion can proceed using arguments that don’t presuppose a verdict about fetal personhood (for example, a ‘future like ours’ approach). He also notes the lack of consensus among defenders of abortion on what personhood consists in, and he surveys influential proposals that place personhood only after birth (or later, given psychological capacities). In parallel, he presses a biological/moral baseline: embryos, fetuses, and newborns count as human beings, and Kaczor defends the claim that all human beings have basic rights, centrally including a right to life, while distinguishing that status from gametes (living cells but not human beings).

Friction then explores a gradualist or developmental picture, where moral status increases across gestation and reaches “full” standing at birth. Kaczor labels this the gradualist view and rejects it as implausible: physiological or psychological development is not ordinarily treated as what makes it more permissible to kill younger humans than older ones. He also challenges “cumulative-threshold” reasoning (the “rope” idea): if birth, viability, and sentience are each irrelevant to basic moral status, piling them up doesn’t generate moral standing. Kaczor allows that some rights sensibly track maturity (driving, voting), but he contrasts these with basic immunities—like not being intentionally killed, tortured, or enslaved—that don’t depend on the agent’s developed capacities. He reinforces the point with a historical warning about dividing humanity into those with basic dignity and those without, and he treats birth as an arbitrary line for that purpose.

On bodily-autonomy arguments, Friction asks about Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist-style reasoning, and Kaczor argues that the analogy breaks because parents have special obligations toward their own dependent children that don’t apply to strangers; he extends the critique to the “burglar” analogy by emphasizing the difference between an innocent dependent child and a culpable intruder. To support the idea that obligations aren’t always voluntarily assumed, he offers cases where moral responsibility arises from circumstance (for example, encountering a newborn in danger) and discusses parental responsibilities (including an adoption example) as responsibilities that can bind even without a chosen commitment. The interview also detours into metaethics: Friction articulates a stance/attitude-based way of hearing moral claims, while Kaczor diagnoses this as emotivism and defends moral realism—some acts are wrong independently of anyone’s preferences—and he argues that thoroughgoing subjectivism struggles to make sense of widespread moral condemnation (e.g., of rape or racism).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:08 - Persons

02:59 - Other categories

05:50 - Vagueness

07:27 - Choosing a precisification

09:40 - Argument from history

12:14 - Gradual view

17:23 - My preferences

22:36 - Connection to the mother

25:53 - Duties to others

28:42 - Responsibilities

34:35 - Moral realism

35:07 - Preferences and morality

39:20 - Understanding the claims

43:07 - Moral naturalism

45:18 - Subjectivist commitments

47:32 - Moral facts and motivation

51:40 - Consistency

53:40 - Variation on the violinist

56:01 - Issues for the violinist argument

59:50 - Double-effect

1:03:20 - Arbitrariness

1:07:23 - A Defense of Abortion

1:11:05 - Aggressors

1:13:51 - Framing problems

1:18:05 - Restatement of my view

1:22:51 - Value of philosophy

1:24:20 - Conclusion

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What do we really mean when we say we “know” something, and why does that confidence fall apart the moment we try to explain it?

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

1. Guest

Linda Zagzebski is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. Her work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.

2. Interview Summary

Zagzebski develops the idea of ‘omnisubjectivity’ as a divine attribute: God’s perfectly accurate, complete grasp of every creature’s conscious states “from that creature’s own perspective,” including what those states are like. She argues that omniscience requires more than knowing all true propositions—it requires knowing subjective experience itself—and that traditional accounts of omnipresence (“present in everything that exists” in a non-spatial way) naturally extend to the non-spatial aspects of reality, like pain, joy, and anxiety. This is also tied to prayer and divine justice: if judgment depends in part on the fine-grained character of our conscious lives, God must be able to grasp those lives fully. She then presses a core explanatory challenge: if omnipresence means God is “in” your anxiety the way you are, that seems to require perfect first-person grasp rather than mere observation at a distance—but it’s hard to explain how that can be true without collapsing the distinction between God and the creature.

On free will and foreknowledge, she diagnoses the fatalist pressure as driven by the ‘necessity of the past’ plus some ‘transfer of necessity’ principle: if a past fact is fixed and entails a future fact, the future looks fixed too. She suggests that progress requires getting clearer on what we really mean by “we can’t do anything about the past,” proposing that what’s at issue may be causal reach (or “causal closure”) rather than a transferable modality—and that this reframes divine-foreknowledge worries as one instance of a more general causal structure. She also highlights that theological fatalism and logical fatalism share the same argumentative shape, and that our different reactions to them should make us suspicious that something subtle is being smuggled in. In exploring responses, she discusses a line associated with William of Ockham (treating relevant truths/beliefs as not straightforwardly “in the past”) and offers her own “Thomistic optimism”: drawing on Thomas Aquinas and divine simplicity, God’s knowing could be one undivided, continuous state spanning past, present, and future, so it doesn’t sit in the past in the way the fatalist argument requires. She adds that merely appealing to timelessness doesn’t automatically help, since it can generate an analogous “necessity” problem for eternity.

A later theme is her book The Two Greatest Ideas and a proposed “third” breakthrough: intersubjectivity—genuinely sharing perspectives and “seeing through other people’s eyes” in a way that becomes culturally transformative. She points out that the pieces already exist across fields (mirror-neuron research, empathy in psychology, applications in education, phenomenology), but they haven’t been integrated into a society-wide vision that changes how people actually think and live. Morally, she contrasts an older harmony-centered ideal (flourishing as living in harmony with the universe, in Aristotle’s sense of eudaimonia) with the modern elevation of autonomy (often traced in the culture to Immanuel Kant), and suggests many polarized disputes replay that deeper conflict. She’s skeptical that purely academic progress will reduce real-world rancor unless these insights are “imbibed” as ordinary habits of mind. She closes by defending philosophy’s value in broadly Socrates-style terms: it forces deeper reflection on what seems obvious, exposes the assumptions we live by, and cultivates intellectual humility.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:02 - Omnisubjectivity

04:52 - Omnipresence and omnisubjectivity

09:06 - Omniscience and omnisubjectivity

13:49 - Knowing that vs. knowing what it’s like

16:51 - Immoral states

25:11 - Knowing his creation

26:22 - Free will and alternative possibilities

30:00 - Is it libertarian free will?

30:53 - Foreknowledge and free will

38:00 - Necessity of the past

40:05 - Backward causation

42:30 - Theological and logical fatalism

45:37 - God’s infallibility

48:47 - God and time

52:15 - The Two Greatest Ideas

58:01 - Progress on intersubjectivity

1:02:55 - Philosophy of mind

1:04:25 - Identity over time

1:07:35 - Do souls solve the problem?

1:11:03 - Continuity of forms

1:13:33 - Value of philosophy

1:16:04 - Conclusion

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Can perception itself, grounded in vision science, explain how the mind represents the world and still gets things wrong?

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

1. Guest

Tyler Burge is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. His work has spread a wide range of topics, especially mind, language, and epistemology.

Check out his book, "Perception: First Form of Mind"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198871015/

2. Book Summary

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge argues that to understand perception properly we need a systematic account of perceptual representation: what its representational contents are, how they present the world, and how those contents figure in explanation. He stresses that (as with thought) there can be different “modes of presentation” even when the perceived object and property are the same—for example, a rectangular surface perceived straight-on versus at an angle yields different perceptual contents, because the perceptual perspective and proximal stimulation differ. These differences matter not just for phenomenology but for explaining action and epistemic success or failure, since perceptual psychology and action-explanations advert to how the world is presented to the subject. The book’s core framework treats perception as built from “perceptual attributives”: repeatable representational abilities to characterize particulars as instantiating properties and relations.

Burge’s positive picture is that perceptual contents are fundamentally iconic and highly structured: an array-like, matrix format that represents particulars and their properties/relations in a perspective-dependent way, and any neat “linear” specification of perceptual content is an abstraction from this richer iconic format. The iconic format helps explain how perception can be massively complex yet computationally manageable, and why perceptual representation is not well-modeled as merely a string of symbols. A central explanatory target is perceptual psychology’s focus on how perceivers reliably represent the same repeatable environmental types across varying stimulus conditions; Burge treats perceptual attributives as precisely these repeatable competencies, and he emphasizes that studying how such attributives are formed is “the central occupation” of perceptual psychology. He also highlights how perceptual contents both encode a specific vantage point and nevertheless track stable attributes, with law-like linkages among different perspective-bound “presentations” of the same attribute (a hallmark phenomenon behind perceptual constancies).

The later parts broaden the view into an “architecture” story: perception is not an isolated module but anchors a wider family of perceptual-level capacities—attention, conation, affect, memory, learning, anticipation, and imagining—each with a perceptual-level species that uses only perceptual attributives and operations not more advanced than those in perception-formation. Burge uses contemporary vision science to sketch how the visual and visuo-motor systems operate as large, integrated complexes unified by their function, contents, and computational processing, rather than by being easily characterized as “early vision” plus something categorically different. Along the way he pushes back on much of the philosophical debate about “cognitive penetration” and modularity (associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn), arguing that both sides have often relied on dated science and muddled notions of “cognition,” and he develops a more careful way of talking about whether perceptual-level computations need to invoke supra-perceptual representation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:10 - Audience

04:29 - Perception: First Form of Mind

16:45 - Empirical work

26:37 - Consciousness and representation

32:21 - Language of thought

39:10 - Information-registration

46:47 - Which things are representational?

49:35 - Elimination and reduction

57:49 - David Papineau

1:00:03 - Perceptual states without consciousness

1:01:03 - Physicalism

1:05:20 - Vagueness

1:09:40 - Causation

1:14:36 - Lawlike correlations

1:16:26 - Tropes

1:22:42 - Perceptual constancy

1:29:36 - Value of philosophy

1:35:50 - Conclusion

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Can neuroscience and psychology really undermine free will, or do they just force us to rethink what moral responsibility is for?

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

1. Guest

Manuel Vargas is professor of philosophy at UC San Diego, and his work has focused on moral psychology, free will, agency, Latin American philosophy, and more. His book is "Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility".

2. Interview Summary

Manuel Vargas maps the “scientific threat” landscape to free will, focusing on neuroscientific results often taken to show that “the brain decides before you do.” He treats Benjamin Libet–style readiness-potential findings as interpretively underdetermined: neural activity prior to reported awareness doesn’t yet establish that a decision has already been made, since it could reflect impulses, drives, or preliminary considerations rather than settled choice. He also suggests we’re misled if we model agency on arbitrary “picking” cases (grab any identical cereal) rather than “choosing” cases where reasons genuinely matter (e.g., tradeoffs between an SUV and an electric car), since the latter are what moral responsibility disputes are really about. Relatedly, he notes how compatibilist “reasons-responsiveness” approaches can be motivated by the idea that even if the process isn’t transparent at the “high-level,” it can still count as freedom if the overall system is appropriately responsive to reasons.

On the familiar objection that compatibilism is just a “definitional gambit,” Vargas reframes the clash as a deeper methodological dispute about what philosophy is trying to do. One tradition (associated with P. F. Strawson–style descriptive metaphysics and ordinary-language approaches) treats the philosopher’s job as articulating and systematizing the categories already embedded in common thought and talk; another, more revisionist strand treats philosophy as continuous with science and open to reshaping our self-conception in light of theoretical pressure—illustrated via Nelson Goodman / John Rawls–style reflective equilibrium. To show how even widespread communal agreement can be parochial or unstable, he uses a thought experiment about 12th-century Catholics who treat sacramental status as essential to “marriage,” contrasted with a later ethnographer who points to marriage-like practices lacking sacraments—forcing the question whether “sacrament” is essential or merely a local regimentation of a broader institution.

When the discussion turns to moral responsibility, Vargas develops an explicitly instrumentalist/revisionist justification: responsibility practices (blame, praise, resentment, etc.) are defensible if they help “build better beings”—fostering and extending moral sensibility and enabling the cooperation/coordination goods that creatures like us can otherwise struggle to secure. He emphasizes that a genealogical story about emerging from norm-enforcement doesn’t by itself justify continuing the practice; justification depends on whether the practice still produces valuable goods, and he argues the distinctive structure of responsibility talk calls for explaining features like backward-looking assessment and why negligence can count as culpable. At the same time, he resists a purely forward-looking “efficient” instrumentalism: capturing our practices and making revisionism workable likely requires some role for desert-like constraints, partly because uptake matters and partly because there may be independent normative limits—an issue he notes David Brink has treated in detail. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a historically “first-pass,” often messy frontier activity that incubates later disciplines and expands human knowledge—famously tracing even the idea of the academy back to Plato.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Scientific threats to free will

05:33 - Simple vs. complex decisions

08:29 - Compatibilist response

11:47 - Epiphenomenalist threat

17:37 - Are compatibilists changing the subject?

24:13 - Terminological dispute

29:26 - Theorizing and pragmatics

33:23 - Moral responsibility

43:33 - Content of blame judgments

45:13 - Settling reference

54:27 - Definitions

59:30 - Eliminativism, revisionism, and discretionism

1:02:23 - Issues with discretionism

1:06:54 - Instrumentalism about responsibility

1:12:39 - A thinner altnerative

1:26:19 - Backward-looking practices

1:30:07 - Luck and libertarianism

1:36:09 - Practices justified even with luck

1:37:23 - Stronger opposing reasons?

1:41:59 - Justified on balance

1:45:05 - Value of philosophy

1:50:04 - Conclusion

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How should we understand the forces that shape public opinion and politics, and what do they reveal about human nature, language, and power?

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

1. Guest

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

2. Interview Summary

In the interview, Chomsky reflects on Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward S. Herman), saying the “basic analysis” still holds even though the media landscape has been transformed by the explosion of digital platforms: the first edition didn’t consider digital media at all, and even the 2002 update treated the early internet as not yet changing the core picture. He argues that elites still work to “manufacture consent” by redirecting attention and “demonizing enemies,” and he uses China as a case study: in his view, the “threat” is framed as aggression, but the real concern is China’s development and expanding economic influence, met by military posturing and encirclement narratives.

A big portion turns to language and human nature. Chomsky says the distinctive human capacity for language appears extremely recent in evolutionary time—likely emerging with Homo sapiens—and he emphasizes the narrow window suggested by archaeology and genomics: humans separated into groups not long after our emergence, yet those groups shared language, implying a rapid, near-“instantaneous” development. He resists the idea that language is primarily an adaptation for communication, instead treating it as an instrument of thought whose core design often prioritizes computational elegance over communicative efficiency, and he links this to a broader picture of evolution as “disruption → simplest solution → selection,” not teleology. When asked about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rule-following worries, he pushes back that many “rules” are not sustained by social convention but by built-in biases and internal cognitive structure—pointing to how even young children acquire and use grammar without treating it like a publicly negotiated norm.

On politics and public life, Chomsky repeatedly shifts questions from surface fixes to underlying “pathologies.” On mass shootings (raised via Uvalde), he argues the central issue isn’t tactical response but preventing such events from being normal features of social life. On polarization and “patient” civic culture, he falls back on education, organization, and sustained activism as the mechanism by which norms actually improve over decades. He warns that Supreme Court of the United States’s post–Roe trajectory (as signposted by Clarence Thomas) could target contraception and same-sex relationships, and he describes a long-term legal/political project associated with Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society. He insists U.S. elections are extremely secure and treats fraud panic as a pretext for voter suppression and institutional capture—highlighting an Axios-reported civil-service reclassification push tied to Donald Trump as part of a broader authoritarian drift. He also returns to what still “surprises” him: public complacency since Hiroshima about existential risks (nuclear escalation and climate tipping points), and he condemns U.S. authorization and support for Israel’s settlement/annexation policies as unusually extreme in modern geopolitics.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:57 - Manufacturing consent

02:49 - Manufacturing consent still necessary?

08:06 - Development of language

10:54 - Capacities relevant to language

16:49 - Mentors

19:08 - A priori propositions and Quine

21:34 - Police response to Uvalde shooting

24:05 - Rule-following argument

27:30 - Social justice

29:36 - Roe v. Wade and what’s next

32:26 - Voting process

36:54 - Surprises

43:30 - Biden’s approval rating

45:17 - Israel

47:27 - Conclusion

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Can supervenience and functionalism really explain consciousness, or do Mary-style cases, illusionism, and mind uploading reveal a deeper gap in the physicalist picture?

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

1. Guest

Pete Mandik is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University of New Jersey, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. Check out his channel and website:

https://www.youtube.com/petemandik

https://petemandik.net/

2. Interview Summary

Mandik starts by situating his work in debates about how the mental relates to the physical—especially the pressure points around ‘functionalism’, ‘type-identity’ views, and what exactly ‘supervenience’ is supposed to guarantee. He recounts reacting strongly against the David Chalmers/Andy Clark extended-mind picture, and he explains a worry that shows up when you combine the Otto-notebook case with John Searle’s Chinese Room: if you accept the “systems reply,” you can end up with what looks like two minds that both “supervene on the whole room,” which he takes to be a red flag about how liberally we’re individuating minds. He then connects this to a broader “regress” concern: once you “dig deep” into supervenience, you get a demand that differences must be physically underwritten (invoking Terry Horgan’s “super-dupervenience” and related arguments), and that strengthens supervenience in a way that can change the shape of the non-reductive physicalist’s position.

A big middle stretch focuses on the knowledge argument and variations on Mary. Mandik develops the “Swamp Mary” setup: a swamp-twin of post-release Mary who (by stipulation) has never actually seen red but is intrinsically like Mary after learning “what it’s like,” and he asks what that does to the claim that phenomenal knowledge requires the right experiential history. He explores the idea that pre-release Mary could get black-and-white, purely physical access to Swamp Mary and (in effect) “deduce” what it’s like—yet he also notes that the argument can feel “too easy,” and he flags that a lot turns on what we mean by the relevant “phenomenal knowledge” and by ‘deduction’ in these debates. Along the way he links the issue back to how ‘functionalism’ is often built to allow extreme multiple realizations—e.g., Ned Block-style “Chinese nation” cases—because once those implementations are in play, it affects what counts as an admissible physical basis for the mental.

Later, the conversation shifts to theories of consciousness and to some “meta” questions about how we should even frame the disputes. Mandik discusses Keith Frankish-style illusionism: the idea that many of us are under an illusion that there’s ‘phenomenal consciousness’ over and above access/functional notions, and he presses the challenge that the view is only interesting if that “illusion” is widespread and not just a philosopher’s artifact. He then contrasts illusionism with a more radical “qualia quietism,” where the thought is that the term ‘qualia’ is so damaged that we should refuse to assert or deny claims using it and instead talk in other vocabularies (like access consciousness). He also touches on Daniel Dennett-inspired themes—using a “retrospective judgment” analogy to frame how we might later come to say the transhumanists were right about mind uploading, drawing on Diaspora by Greg Egan—and closes with a defense of public-facing philosophy: philosophy needs to be made culturally “cool” and accessible, not treated as valuable only when it looks like journal-driven academic success.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:22 - Non-reductive physicalism

08:35 - Regress

14:57 - Benign regress?

17:07 - Another problem for supervenience physicalism

21:14 - Deviant phenomenal knowledge

30:40 - Phenomenal knowledge

35:05 - Answering Mary’s Room

46:24 - Primitiveness

50:22 - Varying the experiment

56:30 - Phenomenal concepts

1:06:24 - What is it like?

1:23:10 - Meta-illusionism

1:35:23 - Characterization and attribution

1:45:11 - Qualia quietism

1:49:33 - Use for qualia terminology?

2:01:03 - Quietism vs. abolitionism

2:08:08 - Keith Frankish and quietism

2:11:08 - Pragmatic use

2:13:52 - Color sensations

2:27:17 - Use for “sensation”

2:33:25 - Mind uploading

2:40:14 - Personal identity as vague

2:53:43 - Value of philosophy

3:02:27 - Conclusion

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Is rationality mainly about keeping your beliefs coherent with each other, or about believing what your evidence really supports—even when the two come apart?

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

1. Guest

Alex Worsnip is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on rationality, epistemology, and more. His book, "Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality", was published by OUP in 2021.

2. Interview Summary

Alex Worsnip Alex Worsnip defends a ‘dualism’ about rationality: structural rationality is (broadly) coherence among one’s attitudes, while substantive rationality is having attitudes that are actually supported by one’s reasons/evidence. He motivates the split with a Superman case: someone can be substantively irrational for holding an unreasonable belief (“I’m Superman”), yet become additionally irrational when their beliefs clash (e.g., “Superman can fly” plus “I can’t fly”), where the new problem is incoherence rather than a fresh evidential mistake. Comparing this person to a “coherent twin” highlights the intuitive pull: coherence can make you more rational in one respect even while you remain (or become) less rational in another, purely evidential respect.

A major theme is how this distinction interacts with evidence. Worsnip argues that someone can be substantively irrational (failing to believe what their evidence really supports) without being structurally irrational, so long as they have a coherent “story” by their own lights—illustrated with a person who knows about expert consensus on climate change but dismisses it via a conspiracy hypothesis or a principled anti-testimony stance. That leads to a clean characterization: structural rationality pressures you to believe what you take your evidence to support, whereas substantive rationality pressures you to believe what your evidence actually supports. He then uses probabilistic reasoning to discuss the preface paradox and argues that “deductive closure” (believing all logical consequences of what you believe) is too strong to be a genuine requirement of structural rationality: probabilistic coherence can force low credence in a long conjunction, and it’s structurally incoherent to outright believe what you regard as more likely false than true.

Later, the discussion widens to normativity and reasons, especially instrumentalism (the idea that reasons are always tied to one’s goals/desires). Worsnip pushes back using epistemic cases where we plausibly have reasons to believe things even absent any relevant goal (his “unicycles in Mexico City” example), and he argues that instrumentalism doesn’t really “demystify” normativity because it must still take some fundamental normative principle for granted (roughly, that goal-advancement itself generates reasons). He also clarifies how ‘reasons’ relate to ‘ought’: reasons are pro tanto contributors toward what one ought to do all-things-considered, and he sees no special added suspiciousness in goal-independent reasons once we’re already comfortable with goal-independent ‘ought’ claims. The interview closes with a defense of philosophy’s value: engaging these questions is part of being reflective about ourselves and the world, and it also has practical payoff by improving clarity, critical thinking, and reasoning—especially through teaching.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Dualism about rationality

07:33 - Substantive rationality

12:21 - Reasons and evidence

22:39 - Evidential support

29:01 - Unclear terms

36:05 - Brute vs. unclear

43:19 - Instrumental norms

51:06 - Demystifying by stipulation

1:00:13 - Nihilism and metaethics

1:07:09 - Analytic naturalism

1:11:11 - Avoiding false metalinguistic claim

1:12:47 - Preface paradox

1:28:09 - Deductive closure too strong?

1:33:49 - Inconsistency constraint

1:39:17 - Strengthening the hypothetical

1:42:24 - Epistemic contextualism

1:51:23 - Pascal’s wager

1:52:53 - Reasons and well-being

1:53:54 - Is well-being normatively loaded?

1:55:49 - Value of philosophy

2:00:19 - Conclusion

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What moral limits should bind warfare—on terrorism, civilian risk, and humanitarian intervention—if ‘just war’ is meant to be a real constraint rather than a slogan?

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

1. Guest

Michael Walzer is a political theorist and public intellectual, and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and editor emeritus for the magazine Dissent.

2. Interview Summary

Michael Walzer sketches ‘just war theory’ as a long tradition (classically shaped by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) that separates judgments about going to war (‘jus ad bellum’) from judgments about how war is fought (‘jus in bello’), and he defends treating those two assessments as independent. From that standpoint, he defines terrorism as the deliberate killing of innocents for political/military (and sometimes expressive) purposes, and argues it is always morally wrong—whether carried out by non-state groups or by states (he cites Hiroshima as an example). He then turns to the moral pressures of asymmetric conflict—when insurgents such as the Taliban fight from civilian cover against a high-tech force like the United States Army—and focuses on the hard question of what risks soldiers should be required to take to reduce civilian casualties, illustrating the dilemma with concrete battlefield scenarios and historical bombing tradeoffs.

A recurring theme is that moral thinking about war has to stay “close to the ground”: Walzer emphasizes learning from military history, literature, and veterans, and he criticizes approaches that treat the subject as a purely intra-philosophical debate detached from the lived realities of combat. On postwar justice, he argues that the Nuremberg trials worked as well as they did because (temporarily) they combined something like legislative, executive, and judicial authority—whereas standing institutions like the International Criminal Court lack enforcement power and can create perverse incentives or retaliation without offering protection. Relatedly, he defends the view that ordinary soldiers shouldn’t be blamed simply for fighting in an unjust war: the key is holding people responsible for violations in conduct (war crimes), while recognizing that young conscripts are typically acting under strong social and political pressure and cannot reasonably be expected to adjudicate the justice of the war for themselves.

On intervention, Walzer positions himself as generally noninterventionist but argues for humanitarian intervention to stop massacres (with “mixed motives” acknowledged) and stresses that interveners should leave as soon as local decision-making can be reestablished; he rejects using military force solely to install democracy, while noting that after total wars victors sometimes inherit duties of reconstruction (he points to Japan after WWII). He also distinguishes a state’s foreign policy from what he calls a “foreign policy for the left”: unions, NGOs, and civic organizations can support democratic struggles abroad through solidarity, resources, and participation without turning that into state-led military adventurism. Finally, he previews a more personal forthcoming book on “liberal” as an adjective—arguing it usefully constrains and pluralizes deeper commitments (e.g., majority rule bounded by rights, a contrast he illustrates via Viktor Orbán)—and he closes by defending political theory’s value as clarifying and organizing arguments for citizens and leaders, citing his satisfaction that Just and Unjust Wars has been used at United States Military Academy at West Point even by readers who disagree with him.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:59 - Just war

05:13 - Non-combative immunity and terrorism

07:49 - Combating terrorism and asymmetric warfare

16:02 - Rules of engagement and WW2

19:08 - Theorizing about war

21:35 - Metaethics

26:15 - Lessons from Nuremberg

32:40 - Problems with a world state

34:41 - ICC

37:04 - Responsibility of soldiers in war

40:58 - Pragmatic concern?

43:55 - Excuse vs. innocence

45:12 - Less risky option?

47:50 - Possible improvements

49:30 - Handling Russia/Ukraine

52:00 - Promoting democracy

58:35 - Non-interventionism

1:01:51 - Foreign policy for the left

1:06:55 - ‘Liberal’ as an adjective

1:12:31 - Examples

1:16:29 - Political relevance of political philosophy

1:20:32 - Conclusion

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