Friction

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On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com

  1. 145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

    8H AGO

    145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

    What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2 https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1 2. Book Summary Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori. A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology. Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - What are intuitions? 03:06 - Absent intuition worry 06:55 - John Bengson 08:22 - Terminological dispute 12:20 - Methodological worry 14:53 - Moderate dogmatism 18:38 - Foundationalism 23:10 - Internalism 26:39 - Blindsight 30:10 - Zombie argument 36:52 - Rejoinder 43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism 45:48 - Upshot 47:47 - Another rejoinder 51:48 - Indispensability 55:46 - Are intuitions needed? 59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining 1:02:07 - Animal concepts 1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning 1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions? 1:14:14 - Ethics 1:17:29 - Perceptual experience 1:23:54 - Value of philosophy 1:27:32 - Conclusion 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

    1h 28m
  2. 144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

    MAR 10

    144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

    If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176 https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I 2. Book Summary Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations. A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel. In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:06 - Overview of element 03:39 - Methodology 09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein 13:57 - Private language 18:01 - First wave: skepticism 22:17 - Second wave: definition 27:22 - Third wave: social 34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke 37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting 49:23 - Pains and sensations 52:52 - Problem for private languages 54:23 - Difference from second wave 56:46 - Objections 1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism 1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum 1:14:17 - Infallibility 1:17:07 - Objection 1:21:55 - Upshots 1:25:15 - Value of philosophy 1:26:33 - Conclusion 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

    1h 28m
  3. 143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

    MAR 3

    143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

    Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality. Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"! https://academic.oup.com/book/61709 https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf 2. Book Summary Kevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose. The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape. Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:42 - Overview of book 05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology 10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive 14:50 - Gender binaries 20:47 - Biological binaries 25:07 - Gender norms 32:47 - Linguistic constraints 37:15 - Social accounts 47:07 - Haggling usage 53:07 - Spatial theory of gender 59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness 1:07:12 - Gender kinds 1:12:53 - Vagueness 1:23:14 - Abolitionism 1:27:15 - Social issues 1:34:47 - Making progress 1:41:01 - Value of philosophy 1:44:50 - Conclusion 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

    1h 45m
  4. 142. Dan Nicholson | What is Life?

    FEB 24

    142. Dan Nicholson | What is Life?

    1. Guest Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4 https://a.co/d/5aBcmau 2. Book Summary Daniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it. On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.” Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödinger’s emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered “order-from-order” program powerfully shaped molecular biology’s self-image—helping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., “molecular machines,” wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processes—pushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödinger’s broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isn’t that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cell—and how that image may be due for revision. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:32 - Background 03:26 - Why did he write it? 08:19 - Biological order 14:08 - Order from disorder 17:37 - Not applicable to life 20:27 - Hereditary substance 22:58 - Gene-centric view 31:35 - Entropy 39:12 - Negative entropy 41:24 - New laws 48:51 - Modern developments 51:26 - Determinism and free will 1:03:09 - Helpful aspects 1:04:42 - Lessons to learn 1:13:11 - Value of philosophy 1:20:20 - Conclusion 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

    1h 22m
  5. 141. Douglas Allchin | Scientific Error

    FEB 17

    141. Douglas Allchin | Scientific Error

    What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Author Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science. Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673 https://a.co/d/iobiDIc 2. Book Summary Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable. The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes. Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:56 - Overview of book 02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty 11:42 - Epistemology 13:33 - Vagueness 17:38 - First layer of error: raw data 29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual 50:25 - Third layer of error: social 1:10:46 - Recognizing error 1:22:34 - Resolving error 1:26:10 - Humans and history 1:29:18 - Useful biases 1:36:03 - Negative knowledge 1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction 1:47:42 - Value of philosophy 1:50:23 - Conclusion 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

    1h 53m
  6. 140. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen | Wrongful Discrimination

    FEB 10

    140. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen | Wrongful Discrimination

    What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Author Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb 2. Book Summary Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa. The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way. He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:43 - What is “discrimination”? 07:17 - Irrelevant features 10:48 - Framing the project 18:43 - Socially salient groups 23:44 - Connection with the law 26:49 - Empirical research 28:04 - Vagueness 33:12 - Political beliefs 35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination 38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination 43:35 - Statistical discrimination 46:24 - Different category? 48:41 - Structural discrimination 52:40 - Wrongful discrimination 55:09 - Rejoinder 1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts 1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts 1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts 1:19:16 - Monistic accounts 1:23:05 - Value of philosophy 1:27:10 - Conclusion 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

    1h 28m
  7. 139. Joseph Mendola | The Neural Structure of Consciousness

    FEB 3

    139. Joseph Mendola | The Neural Structure of Consciousness

    What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind. Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!" https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz 2. Book Summary Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory. A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say. The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - The hard problem 06:51 - Dualism 10:06 - Panpsychism 12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders 15:28 - Modal structure 24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology 27:22 - Description-sensitivity 32:00 - Identity 34:52 - Type identity theory 36:27 - Boltzmann brains 39:17 - Correlations vs. identity 43:54 - Phenomenal concepts 45:56 - Zombies and inverts 50:07 - A priori reasoning 51:47 - Color experience 57:38 - Are colors real? 1:02:39 - Other senses 1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness 1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states 1:12:29 - Animal consciousness 1:15:48 - Vagueness 1:16:55 - Functionalism 1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence 1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach 1:25:51 - Progress 1:27:11 - Value of philosophy 1:28:32 - Conclusion 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

    1h 29m
  8. 138. Vladimir Krstić | Deception

    JAN 27

    138. Vladimir Krstić | Deception

    What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy 1. Guest Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A 2. Book Summary Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself). His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis. On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 00:50 – Overview of the book 11:09 – Intention 17:58 – Is deception always wrong? 29:25 – Functional account 36:29 – Function 43:08 – Sci-fi case 48:13 – Vagueness 53:45 – Objections 57:51 – Self-deception 1:02:15 – Function and self-deception 1:09:12 – Semantics 1:17:27 – Value of philosophy 1:24:33 – Conclusion 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

    1h 25m
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On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com

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