Friction

Do moral truths exist independently of our attitudes, and if they don’t, why should moral reasoning and disagreement still seem so substantive?

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

1. Guest

Don Loeb is professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont, and his work has focused primarily on metaethical issues, including moral language, methodology, debating moral realism, and more.

2. Interview Summary

The interview starts by getting clear on what ‘moral realism’ amounts to: the host sketches it as (roughly) cognitivism + stance-independence + truth (and maybe an epistemic component), and Don Loeb pushes on what should count as definitional—especially whether “we know some moral facts” belongs in the definition rather than being a common realist commitment. From there, they use the “now what?” problem for error theory as a bridge to practice: even if metaethical theories differ, Loeb suggests that normative ethical deliberation can often proceed without much changing, because moral talk can serve familiar social and practical functions regardless of deep metaphysical disagreement. He illustrates this with an analogy: two people can participate in the same ritual (like saying grace) while privately attaching different theological interpretations to what they’re “doing,” and the shared activity still works for its purposes.

Building on that, Loeb defends the idea that an anti-realist can engage in ordinary moral discussion “just like anybody else,” while declining the realist’s ontological commitments—so the real action, for many everyday and philosophical purposes, is in the normative attitudes, deliberations, and patterns of responsiveness people share. The interview then digs into how we should understand reasons—especially the contrast between instrumental reasons and reasons that might apply even when you don’t antecedently have the relevant goal. That debate leads into side-discussion of broader views in contemporary ethics (including moral particularism-style disputes), with the participants noting that some influential ways of writing about reasons can feel much clearer in conversation than on the page.

A major theme of the second half is pressure-testing realism with “companion in guilt” style worries. One focal example is “gastronomic realism”: if the usual motivations for moral realism also seem to support objective facts about what foods are really good, that starts to look implausible—so the challenge is to say why moral value is importantly different. Loeb suggests there may be differences (including differences in how moral vs. gastronomic value show up in ordinary experience), even while emphasizing how the setup is meant to make the similarity feel uncomfortably close. They also discuss the “moral experience” argument for realism—roughly, the thought that moral experience presents morality as a realm of fact, and that we should accept that unless we have strong counterevidence—where Loeb is skeptical of both the experiential presumption and the inference to realism, comparing the structure to familiar arguments from religious experience and insisting that what’s needed is evidence, not just reports that “it seems that way to me (and my friends).”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Moral realism

04:39 - Anti-realism and anti-factualism

08:18 - Concern for non-factualism

11:19 - Normative vs. metaethical attitudes

12:25 - Is moral realism intelligible?

24:34 - Reasons for belief

26:20 - Gastronomic realism

29:09 - Moral realism inert?

31:07 - Moral naturalism

34:32 - Non-naturalist realism

37:13 - Reasons

38:51 - Jonathan Dancy and reasons

41:16 - Asymmetry with gastronomic realism

43:03 - Moral experience

50:00 - Philosophical and common use

57:37 - Best explanation

59:39 - Burden of proof

1:02:14 - Evidence and theory selection

1:05:04 - Strong seemings?

1:06:56 - Descartes and studying philosophy

1:10:16 - Moral disagreement

1:11:55 - Eric Sampson and responses to disagreement

1:18:24 - Realist response

1:21:11 - Michael Huemer and phenomenal conservatism

1:23:59 - Moorean shifts

1:29:04 - Argument from moral experience

1:30:50 - What is a good argument?

1:32:17 - Companions in guilt

1:37:41 - Epistemic reasons

1:40:31 - Aesthetic value and value generally

1:44:09 - Relativism and toleration

1:45:24 - Other problems for realism

1:47:29 - Moral facts vs. preferences

1:55:02 - Folk usage

2:03:19 - Value of philosophy

2:05:57 - Conclusion

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What happens when you take the idea of “nothing” seriously—can absences be real, explanatory, and even causally important?

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

1. Guest

Roy Sorensen is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a Professorial Fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland. His work has covered a wide range of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Roy Sorensen unpacks why ‘nothingness’ is both irresistible and slippery: we start with ordinary absences, but we can also seem to “subtract” objects away in thought until we reach an ‘empty world’, which makes Martin Heidegger’s question—why there is something rather than nothing—feel pressing, and puzzlingly hard given how simple the empty option looks. He also shows how talk of “nothing” can be more than wordplay, because absences can matter causally: you can be harmed by what isn’t there, and he playfully frames this with a horror-movie-style thought experiment about a “void” as a kind of menace precisely in virtue of what it lacks.

A recurring thread is the contrast between treating “nothing” as a quantifier idea (“there isn’t anything”) versus treating it as a noun that names some weird thing. Sorensen explores how that noun-phrase temptation shows up historically, including a medieval figure who explicitly portrays nothingness as a kind of “substance,” even writing on darkness and shadows for Charlemagne. From there the discussion turns to religious and interpretive questions: he’s skeptical that scripture should function as a straightforward inventory of what exists (illustrated by how translations and background assumptions shift what readers take to be “in” the text). Still, he notes that “creation out of nothing” plays a distinctive role in Christian self-understanding, partly by marking a departure from more familiar “creation-from-stuff” stories. And when the interview touches contemporary “nothingness” enthusiasts like Graham Priest, Sorensen treats dialetheist talk of true contradictions as a strikingly direct way of resisting the idea that the quantifier reading is all we ever mean.

The later parts widen into a broader methodological theme: ‘parsimony’ and what kinds of “costs” metaphysical theories incur. Sorensen discusses David Lewis’s modal realism and the thought that only the types of things matter for simplicity, pushing back by stressing that sheer number can matter too (his “gratuitous extra electron” style intuition). That connects naturally to skeptical hypotheses: if you take seriously the idea that you’re “only five minutes old,” it undercuts your right to rely on complex reasoning at all; and the Ludwig Boltzmann-inspired “Boltzmann brain” worry shows how an extremely minimal explanation of your current experiences can look seductively simple, even if it’s hard to live with. He closes by defending a mainly “negative” picture of philosophy’s value—less about delivering final doctrines, more about diagnosing and clearing away bad views (like medicine eliminating disease)—and he suggests that this critical function is valuable even when positive certainty is elusive.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:35 - Nothingness

03:00 - Holes, absences, and nothingness

06:36 - Noun phrase vs. quantifier phrase

13:12 - Priest and nothingness

16:35 - Nothingness and creation

22:10 - Parsimony for empty space

36:02 - A misleading god?

37:24 - Explaining the data

46:08 - Thermodynamics and the past

48:25 - Simplicity

50:04 - Conservative ontology

54:30 - Ontological bias

57:40 - van Inwagen and why there is something

1:03:30 - Parsimony and possibility

1:07:39 - What is possibility?

1:12:53 - Logical fatalism

1:16:21 - Vagueness and Contradiction

1:23:18 - Epistemicist argument and Huemer

1:31:55 - Example

1:39:42 - Indeterminacy and ignorance

1:40:51 - Supervaluationism

1:46:22 - Terence Horgan

1:53:10 - Newcomb’s problem

1:57:49 - Well-wishing friend

1:59:31 - Infallible predictor

2:03:53 - Irrationality predictably rewarded?

2:10:44 - What is rationality?

2:13:33 - Making yourself a one-boxer

2:19:52 - Commitment and nuclear deterrence

2:24:04 - Originless Sin

2:32:09 - Scenarios not possible?

2:35:39 - Another example

2:36:59 - Priest and rational dilemmas

2:38:45 - Bringing about contradictions

2:42:06 - Also doing good?

2:42:50 - Paraconsistency?

2:43:39 - Another example

2:45:30 - Value of philosophy

2:46:46 - Conclusion

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Can probability really be a “guide to life” for individuals and groups once we take seriously risk, coordination limits, and imprecise beliefs?

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

1. Guest

Paul Weirich is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus in philosophy at the University of Missouri, and his work has focused primarily on decision theory, game theory, rationality, and logic.

2. Interview Summary

Paul Weirich Paul Weirich frames the discussion around a broadly Bayesian ideal—“probability as a guide to life”—and then uses that outlook to motivate a distinctive approach to collective rationality. Bishop Butler is invoked as the source of the “guide to life” slogan, and the thought is that advice gets sharper when it’s made explicitly probabilistic. From there, Weirich argues that groups really can act (a committee can pass a resolution) even if they don’t literally have beliefs, desires, or intentions; because they act freely and without coercion, their actions can still be assessed by standards of rationality. But the standards for groups differ from those for individuals: since collective action is realized only through the members’ actions, he proposes a “compositional” sufficient condition—if the individual actions that constitute the group act are rational, that suffices for the group act’s rationality. He also pushes back on the idea that collective rationality must meet demanding criteria like Pareto optimality, emphasizing that real-world limits on coordination and communication can lower what it’s fair to demand.

The interview then turns to how decision theory should represent what agents care about—especially risk, cooperation, and time. Weirich defends the expected-utility framework but argues that the “possible outcomes” used in calculating expected utility should be comprehensive: they should cover everything the agent cares about, including risk (for agents who care about it). He distinguishes “local” risk (a chance of a bad outcome), toward which rationality requires aversion, from “global” risk (riskiness as a trait of a life or plan), toward which rationality may permit much more tolerance—even attraction. Relatedly, in discussing familiar puzzles about correlation and choice (including Newcomb-style setups), he contrasts evidential and causal decision theory and explains why, as a causal decision theorist, he takes the point of choosing to be promoting one’s goals rather than merely producing a good sign of goal-promotion. That segues into sequential choice and planning: because you can’t “presto” perform all steps of a multi-stage course of action at once, he thinks sequences should also be evaluated compositionally—by assessing whether each step is rational at the time it’s performed—rather than by asking only whether the whole sequence maximizes utility among rival sequences.

Finally, Weirich develops his view about imprecise credences and utilities. He argues that in some circumstances—especially when information is scarce—rationality may not merely permit but even require imprecise probabilities, and this forces a generalization of the usual “maximize expected utility” rule. On his preferred generalization (associated with work going back to I. J. Good), an agent’s state of mind is represented by a set of probability/utility pairs, and rational choice can be understood permissively: choose an act that maximizes expected utility relative to some admissible pair in that set. He resists proposals that collapse imprecision into a single “median” credence, insisting that genuine imprecision should sometimes change what it’s rational to do. He then connects this to a defense of the probability axioms: rather than relying only on Dutch-book style pragmatic pressure, he favors a coherence-based rationale that (he claims) extends cleanly to the imprecise case, and he treats these coherence constraints as non-instrumental norms of rationality rather than mere tools for getting what one happens to value.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:14 - Group rationality

04:27 - Compositionality of rationality

07:12 - Rational groups with irrational members

12:53 - Each/we dilemmas

18:09 - Prisoner’s dilemma

20:17 - Risk and decision theory

23:48 - What is risk?

27:45 - Risk as consequences

31:18 - Risk as built into preferences?

34:50 - Non-linear preferences

37:30 - No constraints?

40:03 - Imprecise credence

43:57 - Modelling credence

46:28 - Permissive rationality

47:34 - Preferring median representatives?

53:11 - Vagueness

56:17 - Intrinsic epistemic goodness

1:00:35 - Instrumental vs. non-instrumental

1:02:34 - Value of rationality

1:05:42 - Rewarded irrationality

1:09:24 - Newcomb’s problem

1:19:45 - Sequential decision problems

1:22:18 - Self-torturer paradox

1:25:40 - Rationality without binding?

1:30:08 - Value of philosophy

1:32:08 - Conclusion

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What if many of metaphysics’ biggest disputes are “sophistry and illusion” because there is simply no fact of the matter about their answers, even when the debates are not merely verbal?

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

1. Guest

Mark Balaguer is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and his work has focused primarily on metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics.

His book is "Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion".

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/metaphysics-sophistry-and-illusion-9780198868361

2. Book Summary

In Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion: Toward a Widespread Non-Factualism, Mark Balaguer defends a “widespread” version of non-factualism: for many central metaphysical questions, there simply isn’t any fact of the matter about the correct answer, even when the dispute is not “merely verbal.” He situates this within a broader anti-metaphysical research program he calls neo-positivism, inspired (in spirit) by David Hume: for any metaphysical question, careful decomposition should reveal only (i) “metaphysically innocent” modal/logical questions, (ii) ordinary empirical questions (to be handled scientisticly), and/or (iii) genuinely non-factual subquestions. He stresses that this stance is “metaphysics-friendly” rather than dismissive—engaging the problems seriously, even if the upshot is anti-metaphysical.

A major part of the book is devoted to showing how non-factualism can be a live option without collapsing into triviality. One key move is to pair non-factualism with a kind of fictionalism about our object-talk: even if there’s no fact of the matter whether claims are “strictly and literally” true, our mathematical and everyday theories can still be “for-all-practical-purposes” true and useful, and Balaguer develops this strategy starting with numbers and ordinary objects like tables. He then argues for non-factualism about two famous ontological debates: whether there are composite material objects at all, and whether there are abstract objects—where the latter is tied to the idea that the relevant existential claims are so semantically imprecise that there may be no determinate truth conditions to settle them.

To keep anti-metaphysicalism from forcing heavy-duty metaphysical commitments about modality, Balaguer proposes “modal nothingism”: roughly, some modal sentences are substantively true even though “there’s nothing about the world that makes them true,” yielding a metaphysically innocent way to treat modality (and certain counterfactuals) without building in contentious ontology. The later chapters then frame neo-positivism as an empirical thesis about the actual cluster of metaphysical questions in the literature—one to be supported via case-by-case analyses (and ultimately, an inductive pattern), rather than by a single “global” a priori argument. The book closes by gesturing at the broader worldview suggested by this program and urging a kind of “neo-positivist humility”: even a well-supported neo-positivist picture would remain provisional, revisable, and incomplete until the research program has been pushed much further.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:47 - Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion

02:25 - Metaphysical questions

04:06 - Scientism

04:37 - Conceptual analysis

08:01 - Free will

10:31 - Folk concepts

12:21 - Non-factualism vs. meaningless

15:13 - Huemer and vagueness

18:29 - Propositions and logic

20:31 - Plenitude of propositions

22:06 - Conceptual choices

25:00 - Mathematical objects

28:51 - Understanding platonism

31:48 - Plenitudinous platonism

38:34 - Non-factualism about abstract objects

41:48 - Platonist rejoinder

49:21 - Platonism as necessary

58:27 - Category mistake?

59:31 - For all intents and purposes true

1:02:05 - Does the world need abstracta?

1:06:19 - Indispensability arguments

1:07:34 - Truth as not the primary goal

1:11:17 - Atom example

1:20:05 - Counterfactuals and causal relevance

1:22:32 - Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

1:23:48 - First additional surprising fact

1:27:05 - Second additional surprising fact

1:29:07 - Composition

1:32:32 - Language of composite objects

1:36:00 - Privileging simples

1:39:52 - Conceptual pluralism

1:43:29 - Thin language

1:45:45 - Modality

1:49:58 - Analytic truths

1:52:09 - Metaphysical vs. logical modality

1:56:22 - Rigid designators

1:57:59 - Basic modal truths

1:59:42 - Conventions

2:04:07 - Modal nothingism

2:05:37 - Understanding brute modal truths

2:08:03 - Modal conventionalism

2:13:17 - Neo-positivism

2:20:27 - Supporting neo-positivism

2:21:02 - Different views of metaphysical modality

2:26:35 - Application to metaethics

2:30:37 - Non-factualism

2:32:37 - Value of philosophy

2:35:36 - Conclusion

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How much of constitutional meaning is fixed by the past, and how much is inevitably shaped by judges, precedent, and evolving standards of fairness?

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

1. Guest

Brian Bix is Frederick W. Thomas Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and his work has focused on legal philosophy, contract law, family law, and the philosophy of language.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Brian Bix explains why debates about constitutional interpretation quickly turn into debates about what legitimate legal decision-making should look like. He sketches the shift from older “original intent” views to “public meaning” originalism, and notes that very general constitutional language (e.g., equality, due process) can be read as a delegation to later judges to apply their best current understanding—making the line between originalism and “living constitution” approaches thinner than it’s sometimes presented. Larry Solum’s interpretation/construction distinction comes up as a way to say you “start with meaning” but may need additional materials (like precedent or avoiding absurd results) to get to an all-things-considered legal outcome. He also emphasizes that legal language in a normative setting often behaves differently than in ordinary semantics—“no” and “never” typically function more like strong presumptions with principled exceptions (war memorials, emergency vehicles, etc.), despite the temptation to read them as absolute.

A major theme is how messy “truth in law” becomes once you mix vagueness, institutional authority, and the possibility of judicial mistake. Bix argues it’s coherent (even if often implausible) to say that everyone for centuries was wrong about what an authoritative text requires—he uses the idea of constitutional “discoveries” and shifting understandings (e.g., equality) to motivate that point. At the same time, he stresses that authoritative court decisions can make something function as “the law of the land” even when we later judge the decision deeply mistaken; the result can be that a legal claim feels “both true and false” depending on whether you’re tracking best interpretation or final institutional say-so (illustrated with Plessy). This connects to Ronald Dworkin: if you think every disputed legal question already has a determinate right answer, you’ll treat many pre-decision propositions as straightforwardly true/false; but many lawyers and philosophers instead treat hard cases as unsettled until (and sometimes even after) a supreme court resolves them. He then discusses the “Radbruch formula” as best read primarily as a prescriptive stance about what judges should do in the face of extreme injustice, rather than a clean piece of conceptual analysis that refutes positivism by definition.

The interview closes by shifting from constitutional theory to contract law and a broader methodological caution: many sweeping “theories of contract/tort/property law” are implicitly presented as universal, even though their authors often know one (or at most a couple) jurisdictions well—and even then may not know how the doctrine actually operates in day-to-day practice. Bix likens this to the “WEIRD sample” worry in psychology and uses the ultimatum game to show how strongly results can depend on which subpopulation you’re generalizing from; likewise, legal categories and remedies vary significantly across systems, so global claims need either much more comparative grounding or a clear argument for why one structure is the “real” essence (as in theories like corrective justice in tort or promise-based views of contract). Still, he resists overcorrecting: there are real convergences across jurisdictions because legal systems respond to similar pressures (reliance, exchanges, commercial stability), so theorizing can be valuable as long as it’s modest about scope. He ends by defending the practical value of legal philosophy as a way of training lawyers to think critically and live more reflectively about what they’re doing inside institutions—while drawing on multiple critical perspectives (e.g., feminist legal theory, critical race theory, law & economics) to evaluate what law is for and how it should change.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - Originalism and Stanley Fish

06:32 - Vagueness in law

09:33 - Legal deference

11:15 - Semantic deference vs. instruction

16:56 - Meaning as public

18:15 - Textual interpretation and current law

20:17 - Meanings and norms

23:21 - Vagueness in language

25:05 - Approach to law

29:46 - Global error and legal truth

34:05 - Legal contradictions

39:51 - True contradictions in law?

47:23 - Conceptual analysis

51:47 - Illegitimate laws

55:06 - Double life of laws

58:47 - Universal theories in law

1:01:41 - Problematic studies

1:03:29 - Generalizing to past and future

1:08:53 - Understanding contract law

1:13:09 - Use of general theories

1:14:32 - Value of philosophy

1:16:49 - Conclusion

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Can anger be morally tamed and shame morally rehabilitated when different cultures teach us radically different “scripts” for what these emotions are for?

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

1. Guest

Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on mind, ethics, moral psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy.

Check out his book, "How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691220972

2. Book Summary

In How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures, Owen Flanagan argues that moral emotions aren’t just things that “happen” in us; they’re things we do under culturally learned norms and scripts—and those norms can be renegotiated, especially in multicultural societies. He develops a method he calls philosophical anthropology: using cross-cultural psychology/anthropology to expand moral imagination and to critique parochial assumptions about what’s “normal” or “necessary” in our emotional lives. Applied to anger, this approach targets especially “payback” and “pain-passing” styles (where anger aims at making the offender suffer), and it treats cross-cultural variation—e.g., striking differences in how anger is felt, expressed, and regulated—as evidence that our own default scripts may be neither inevitable nor ethically defensible.

The middle of the book pivots to shame and tries to rescue it from its “bad rap.” Flanagan argues that some influential psychological tools and theories—often developed on WEIRD populations and shaped by contested assumptions—have helped cement an overly narrow picture of shame as globally self-crushing and socially toxic. He presses this critique using concerns about WEIRD generalizability and the replication crisis, and he claims that shame looks very different (and can function very differently) across cultural ecologies. Against the “shame is always destructive” view, he sketches an evolutionary and social-functionalist story in which “protoshame” and later “cultured” shame can help agents learn local norms quickly and avoid social devaluation/ostracism; the problem is not shame per se but what values it is recruited to protect and how it gets deployed—since it can also be weaponized in oppressive systems. He then argues, with sustained attention to cross-cultural cases (including cultures that explicitly endorse shame as a primary socializing emotion), that shame can be refined into a stable, internalized moral capacity rather than a tool of humiliation.

In the conclusion, Flanagan asks what emotional education should look like in “multicultures,” where people with different inherited scripts must live together and justify themselves to one another. He suggests that, compared to guilt, shame can reach deeper because it addresses habits, dispositions, and value-commitments—not just discrete deeds—and so it can support serious self-cultivation rather than mere box-checking moral repair. The ideal he recommends is a mature sense of shame: largely internal (not dependent on being watched), autonomous in a broadly Immanuel Kant-inspired sense (one has inspected and owned the values at stake), and both retrospective and prospective (guiding remorse, amends, and pre-emptive restraint), while also remaining open to criticism and revision. The upshot is a practical ethical proposal: in diverse modern settings, we should deliberately rework the dominant anger and shame scripts—discouraging pain-passing anger and rehabilitating a non-humiliating, self-improving form of shame that can help sustain shared moral life.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Who the book is for

03:40 - What are emotions?

12:04 - Cultural differences

25:49 - Anger

36:43 - Instrumental anger

41:29 - How to use emotions

46:40 - Methodological concern

55:25 - Concern about anger

56:36 - Shame

1:05:53 - Mature shame

1:11:29 - Metaethics

1:17:24 - The self

1:23:27 - Value of philosophy

1:26:19 - Conclusion

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Do paradoxes reveal deep truths about reality, or do they mostly expose the hidden ways our language and concepts misfire?

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

1. Guest

Michael Huemer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his work has focused on ethics, epistemology, paradoxes, politics, and a variety of other issues.

2. Interview Summary

The interview centers on Paradox Lost and uses it as a springboard to walk through several classic philosophical puzzles. The opening section focuses on the liar paradox, where Huemer argues that the apparent contradiction is a symptom of inconsistent “instructions” in ordinary language: in the liar case, the language seems to tell us to assign a proposition that would be true iff false, but there simply is no such proposition—so the sentence fails to express a proposition at all. He contrasts this with dialetheist approaches (e.g., Graham Priest), and defends a broadly classical picture on which genuine contradictions can’t be true once you understand how negation works.

From there, the conversation turns to vagueness and Huemer’s more radical “semantic nihilism” proposal: while classical logic and bivalence still apply to propositions, a huge proportion of everyday declarative sentences don’t manage to express a determinate proposition in the first place, so they aren’t straightforwardly true-or-false. To explain why such language can still be useful, he sketches an alternative way of thinking about meaning and mental content: our intentional states can be satisfied to degrees (not merely satisfied vs. unsatisfied), illustrated with simple desire-cases (cookie vs. brownie) and then extended—more controversially—to belief-like states.

A later stretch is devoted to decision/probability puzzles. On Newcomb’s problem, Huemer defends two-boxing by appealing to a dominance-style argument (if the opaque box has $0, both is better; if it has $1M, both is still better), while the interviewer pushes back about what you should do given the predictor story. They also discuss whether you should “defer” to a more informed version of yourself, and how Simpson’s paradox-style reversals complicate that intuition. The final portion moves into self-locating/probabilistic reasoning: in the “shooting room” case, Huemer’s diagnosis is that once you learn that a particular person (“Vic”) was called in, you gain evidence about how late in the process you’re conditioning on, which undercuts the simplistic 50% reasoning. The interview closes by zooming out to broader anthropic-style arguments (including a Bayes-y case for reincarnation given infinite time, under explicit assumptions) and the background metaphysical commitments those arguments quietly rely on.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - Liar paradox

03:47 - Propositions

10:15 - Logic

14:43 - Truth

16:36 - Other contradictions

18:02 - Non-existent objects

20:46 - Vagueness

25:59 - Semantic uses

29:14 - External factors

31:09 - Terence Horgan

34:43 - Newcomb’s problem

37:19 - Transparent box case

39:12 - Well-wishing friend

42:32 - Simpson’s paradox

47:08 - Deference

49:32 - Valuing evidence vs. reward

56:33 - Rationality

59:18 - Predictably rewarded

1:01:41 - Preparation

1:07:54 - Perfect predictor

1:10:29 - Free will

1:11:57 - Rationality

1:17:11 - Shooting room

1:22:39 - Variations

1:27:24 - Simulation

1:28:44 - Infinite expectations

1:29:44 - Possible in some other sense

1:35:32 - Immortality

1:38:27 - Names

1:46:10 - Old evidence

1:49:17 - Meaning of names

1:52:27 - Personal identity

1:54:33 - Moral relevance

1:56:38 - Moral realism and phenomenal conservatism

2:00:08 - Stance-dependent norms

2:02:48 - Ordinary English

2:05:51 - Value of philosophy

2:09:04 - Conclusion

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

What do our moral experiences, our best theories of meaning, and our stubborn intuitions about Newcomb-style puzzles reveal about truth, rationality, and the limits of conceptual analysis?

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

1. Guest

Terence Horgan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, and his work has covered a wide range of topics, in metaphysics, epistemology, mind, metaethics, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Horgan lays out (with Mark Timmons) a picture in metaethics that tries to take moral experience seriously without rushing to heavyweight metaphysics. A central theme is the felt “authority” of moral judgment—how it can seem to bind you independently of your desires—and how that motivational grip might be explained within an expressivist-friendly framework. To make the phenomenology vivid, he discusses Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam example (set in Amsterdam) where a character feels pulled by what he takes himself to “have to do,” even when it clashes with his projects. This sets up what he calls a “neutrality” idea: introspection alone doesn’t reliably settle whether moral experience itself commits us to robust, mind-independent moral properties.

The interview then turns to philosophical method—especially conceptual analysis—and Horgan pushes back on the idea that it’s a purely armchair, a priori enterprise. He treats many disputes about “what a concept really amounts to” as closer to an empirical project: you gather intuitions and usage-patterns as data, test them against cases, and aim for a kind of reflective equilibrium with broader theoretical virtues. In that context he draws on familiar externalist pressure (e.g., Hilary Putnam-style Twin Earth lessons) to argue that competence and meaning aren’t always “in the head,” which complicates simplistic pictures of analysis. Along the way he suggests that some tempting metaphysical intuitions are better explained away than treated as decisive, and he frames that as continuous with how theorizing works in other disciplines.

A long final stretch focuses on practical rationality and Newcomb-style decision problems, where Horgan thinks the persistence of “one-boxer vs. two-boxer” camps is evidence of a deep antinomy: there are competing rational principles that each has a serious claim on us. He connects this to an older tradition of “antinomy” talk (invoking figures like Immanuel Kant and Robert Nozick) and explains why, temperamentally, he’s drawn to one-boxing even while recognizing the intellectual pull of the opposite verdict—especially when uncertainty and stakes get dialed up. The discussion then widens to metaphysics of vagueness and truth: he’s skeptical of “ontological vagueness” and is sympathetic to a looser, indirect-correspondence way of understanding many ordinary truths (about everyday objects and institutions) without treating them as fundamental ontological commitments.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - Liar paradox

03:47 - Propositions

10:15 - Logic

14:43 - Truth

16:36 - Other contradictions

18:02 - Non-existent objects

20:46 - Vagueness

25:59 - Semantic uses

29:14 - External factors

31:09 - Terence Horgan

34:43 - Newcomb’s problem

37:19 - Transparent box case

39:12 - Well-wishing friend

42:32 - Simpson’s paradox

47:08 - Deference

49:32 - Valuing evidence vs. reward

56:33 - Rationality

59:18 - Predictably rewarded

1:01:41 - Preparation

1:07:54 - Perfect predictor

1:10:29 - Free will

1:11:57 - Rationality

1:17:11 - Shooting room

1:22:39 - Variations

1:27:24 - Simulation

1:28:44 - Infinite expectations

1:29:44 - Possible in some other sense

1:35:32 - Immortality

1:38:27 - Names

1:46:10 - Old evidence

1:49:17 - Meaning of names

1:52:27 - Personal identity

1:54:33 - Moral relevance

1:56:38 - Moral realism and phenomenal conservatism

2:00:08 - Stance-dependent norms

2:02:48 - Ordinary English

2:05:51 - Value of philosophy

2:09:04 - Conclusion

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Can ordinary moral talk really tell us whether morality is objective, or are surveys and “disagreement” questions mostly measuring pragmatics, ambiguity, and shifting interpretations?

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

1. Guest

Lance Bush is a lecturer at Cornell University in psychology., and his research focuses on moral psychology, metaethics, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy.

2. Interview Summary

In the interview, Lance discusses why empirically studying “folk” metaethical commitments matters for philosophical theorizing, especially because some moral realists appeal to a burden-of-proof move: if ordinary moral thought treats claims like “torturing babies for fun is wrong” as stance-independent, then anti-realists owe an explanation for departing from “common sense.” He also emphasizes that questions about what moral discourse is about can turn on what ordinary speakers mean, in the same way that “witches don’t exist” can shift truth-value depending on whether “witch” refers to demon-consorting sorceresses or (later) to mean old women—an idea he connects to Don Loeb’s discussion of how you can “pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat.”

A central theme is that popular empirical approaches can badly mis-measure what people actually mean. He argues that many tidy semantic theses built into noncognitivism, error theory, and relativism lean on what Michael Gill calls the ‘uniformity and deterministic assumption’—roughly, that there’s a single, stable story about what “moral claims” mean across contexts—when real-world moral judgment is messier and heterogeneous. He then uses the “disagreement paradigm” to show how survey answers can be driven by pragmatic reinterpretation rather than deep metaethical commitment: to treat “Alex says X is wrong; Sam says X is not wrong; can both be correct?” as a realism/anti-realism probe, participants have to construe it as a bona fide moral disagreement, which is far from guaranteed. The most vivid illustration is the Julius Caesar “wine on his 21st birthday” case, where a large share of respondents say both parties “can be correct”—something that’s implausible if read as relativism about historical facts—so he proposes that ‘modal operator scope ambiguity’ and “epistemic” reinterpretations (could either one turn out to be right?) are doing the work.

He closes by separating two claims that are often run together: (i) what ordinary speakers mean can matter for whether a position really targets ordinary morality, but (ii) whether stance-independent moral facts exist doesn’t straightforwardly depend on how people talk—if everyone suddenly spoke like anti-realists, that wouldn’t by itself erase any stance-independent facts (if such facts exist). Along the way he flags recurring confusions, like mixing up appraiser vs. agent relativism, and mistaking a metaethical thesis about truth-relativity for a normative thesis about tolerance. Methodologically, he stresses that even good studies face generalizability problems because psychology heavily samples WEIRD populations, and he suggests that getting clearer on what people mean may require more philosophically rich methods—structured, ‘Socratic interviewing’–style probing and other hybrid approaches—while avoiding the ‘mind projection fallacy’ of assuming everyone shares the same moral phenomenology.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:37 - Relevance of folk psychology

07:44 - Semantic theses

20:46 - Empirical findings

29:07 - Issues with research

37:36 - Epistemic misinterpretation

46:45 - Modal misinterpretation

54:22 - Representativeness of samples

1:05:42 - Term usage

1:12:51 - Direct paradigms

1:19:27 - Other issues

1:28:11 - Background beliefs and misinterpretation

1:33:45 - Uncertainty and substitution

1:38:32 - Normative disagreement vs. metaethical disagreement

1:46:47 - Realism

1:52:24 - Language

2:00:27 - General usage and moral phenomenology

2:10:50 - Conclusion

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Can we really use persistent moral disagreement to undermine moral realism, or do the most popular disagreement-based arguments end up undercutting their own reliability?

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

1. Guest

Eric Sampson is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. His research has focused on morality and metaethics, especially in regards to defending moral realism.

2. Interview Summary

Eric Sampson frames the interview around how “arguments from disagreement” are supposed to pressure moral realism—either by suggesting moral talk is really just attitude-expression, or by casting doubt on whether we have epistemic access to stance-independent moral truths. He sketches moral realism as combining (at least) cognitivism, stance-independence, and an epistemic accessibility claim, and he emphasizes that disagreement can be deployed against each of these in different ways. The discussion then centers on his paper arguing that several prominent disagreement-based objections have a common flaw: once you make their key epistemic principles explicit, those principles end up undercutting themselves.

From there, he walks through versions of this “self-undermining” diagnosis. For conciliationist views (in the style of David Christensen / Adam Elga peer-disagreement principles), the worry is that trying to declare the conciliation principle “special” requires leaning on additional controversial claims—exactly the sort of thing the principle itself tells you not to treat as secure. He then discusses Brian Leiter’s Nietzschean “inference to the best explanation” move: persistent expert disagreement is explained by psychological needs (e.g., certain personalities being drawn to utilitarian vs. Kantian styles), and the conclusion is that there’s no fact of the matter. Sampson argues that this style of reasoning rebounds on itself, because the relevant explanatory/inferential standards (and even metaethics itself) are also domains of entrenched expert disagreement—so the argument’s own method and conclusion become targets of the same debunking principle. He closes this portion by considering “ideal conditions” arguments: if you deny a strong “uniqueness/convergence” thesis, then ideal reasoners could disagree while one still knows the truth; but if you insist on uniqueness, that thesis itself is highly contentious, so again the disagreement-based argument struggles to get traction without controversial extra assumptions.

In the second half, Sampson turns to practical reasons and the internalism/externalism debate, defending a stance-independent (externalist) picture while criticizing sophisticated “idealized internalist” accounts. He uses cases like the “party with hired assassins” to show why internalists are tempted to idealize away ignorance or defective desires, but argues that idealization invites “advice conflicts”: once you “clean up” an agent by making beliefs/desires coherent, there may be multiple equally eligible ideal counterparts, and coherence can be restored in different ways—so there may be no unique ideal advisor to ground what you have most reason to do. The interview then shifts to queerness/parsimony objections to non-naturalist realism, starting from J. L. Mackie’s complaint (from Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) that objective moral facts would be metaphysically and epistemically “weird,” and perhaps implausibly motivating; Sampson unpacks what “queerness” would have to amount to for a parsimony-style argument to go through. He ends on a broader methodological note: philosophy won’t eliminate disagreement, but it remains one of our best tools for thinking carefully about how to live and what to believe.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:35 - Arguments from disagreement

05:01 - General response

06:36 - First argument: conciliationism

08:16 - Defense of conciliationism?

10:49 - Second argument: unreliability of methods

13:01 - Difference in degree, if not kind?

15:27 - Third argument: inference to best explanation

19:52 - Does argument overgeneralize?

23:31 - Fourth argument: disagreement under ideal conditions

27:12 - Uniqueness condition

29:49 - Ideal reasoners

34:25 - Idealizing accounts of practical reasons

38:52 - Actual vs. ideal reasons and decision theory

43:33 - Decision theory not the full story of rationality?

48:07 - No unique ideal counterpart

53:39 - Ways to find a unique counterpart

58:34 - Idealized versions less relevant to your reasons

1:00:24 - The average ideal counterpart

1:03:19 - Just more theory

1:08:00 - Strengths of reasons

1:10:07 - Concern about reasons of ideal reasoners

1:13:00 - Scanlon and strengths of reasons

1:15:53 - Difficulties with counterfactuals

1:17:20 - Value

1:20:09 - Queerness arguments

1:22:52 - Naturalism

1:25:27 - Low priors

1:27:18 - Parsimony

1:35:14 - In defense of parsimony

1:38:36 - Resolving the dispute

1:41:58 - Mark Balaguer and nominalism

1:44:48 - Value of philosophy

1:46:28 - 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