Deliberative Democracy and the European Union: The Aims of Transnational Constitutionalism (I-B)
James Bohman (St. Louis University)
The European Union is often described as having a “democracy deficit.” This deficit goes deeper than even its harshest critics suppose. Its current treaties fail to provide a way in which “the peoples of Europe”can be the source of democratic renewal and change. Lacking a constitution (for the foreseeable future) to solve this problem, a paradox ensues: the EU may not be democratically legitimate enough to initiate its own democratic reform. I argue that there are three necessary conditions for legitimate institutions for such reform: these include formal, deliberative, and popular conditions. Even in the absence of fully constitutionalized conditions of formal legitimacy, it is still possible for the European Union to initiate democratic reform with deliberative and popular legitimacy, first and foremost in addressing the need for a democratic constitution. Second, I argue that the fundamental reflexive aim of any transnational constitution must be to create fuller conditions of legitimate democratic reform. Central to the reform of the EU is the development of a more robustly deliberative citizenship, in which citizens have the minimum normative powers necessary for genuine democratization. Even if there are abundant reasons why any EU constitution should concern itself with the complex organization of democratic authority across its various levels and iterated institutions, these formal issues cannot be addressed until the vicious circle of the democratic illegitimacy of the European Union is overcome. Finally, I suggest some ways in which these deliberative and popular deficits can be overcome through the process and aims of constitution making itself. The aim of this argument is to show the central importance of deliberative democracy in emerging transnational polities.

On Making the Fine-Tuning Design Argument Rigorous (III-B)
Robin Collins (Messiah College)
One important version of the design argument for theism is based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life. The central claim of this version is that the smallness of the life-permitting range for the values of the fundamental constants of physics provides significant evidence for theism. This argument is commonly cast into a broadly quasi-Bayesian inference pattern, in which it is claimed that the existence of a life-permitting universe is much more epistemically probable under theism than under the hypothesis that the universe exists as an inexplicable brute fact. In this paper, I will propose a resolution to two major difficulties that quasi-Bayesian versions of the argument face. The first difficulty is that the claim that the life-permitting range is small only makes sense relative to some comparison range. Thus, a non-arbitrary method is needed specify a sensible comparison range of possible values for the constants. The second difficulty involves justifying an epistemic probability measure—or some other measure that serves the same function—over this comparison range. This is needed to ground the claims of epistemic probability.

Partisanship and Inquiry in Philosophy of Religion (V-B)
Paul Draper (Florida International University)
It is widely believed, especially by philosophers of religion, that philosophy of religion is flourishing. This paper challenges that belief, exploring how partisanship pervades and impedes inquiry in philosophy of religion. The paper has two main parts. In the first part, a sub-discipline of philosophy of religion called “philosophy of theism is described. The distinction between philosophy of theism and natural theology is emphasized and the special value of the former is explained. The second part of the paper argues that philosophy of theism does not currently exist, partly because partisanship is deeply entrenched in contemporary philosophy of religion. In so-called “analytic” philosophy of religion, this partisanship manifests itself in two very different ways, depending on which of two epistemological frameworks plays host to it: internalist evidentialism or externalist perspectivilism (aka Reformed Epistemology). Evidentialist philosophers of religion who investigate the coherence and justification of theistic belief are typically not philosophers of theism although they should be, while Reformed Epistemologists not only are not but cannot be philosophers of theism.

Democracy and the Jury Theorem: New Skeptical Reflections (I-B)
David Estlund (Brown University)
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem establishes that individual voters that are better than random at making good or correct decisions will, under majority rule, be much better as a group than the average (or even the best) individual. As intriguing as this is for theories of democratic legitimacy or authority that emphasize the quality of democratic decisions, it turns out to be of very little use. One well-known difficulty is that the theorem is classically proven with only two alternatives. I critically discuss recent efforts to apply it to three or more alternatives. I introduce a new difficulty, the disjunction problem. Political alternatives, such as whether to build a system of roads, often (even normally) comprise a disjunction of more specific alternatives, such as which exact system of roads to build. This indeterminacy about the number of alternatives ruins the easy assumption that voters are better than random, since that means better than 1/n where n is the number of alternatives. Finally, there are Bayesian methods that seem to establish results similar to the Jury Theorem. I briefly argue that the disjunction problem applies equally to these. Some have thought that epistemic approaches to democracy must stand or fall with these formal approaches. This often seems to be based on the assumption that these methods are our most promising way of understanding the way in which democratic discussion might bring differing perspectives to bear on a problem. It is important to see that this is a mistake, as can be made clear by emphasizing the utter absence of deliberation or communication from these statistical models. If there is epistemic value to democratic arrangements, it must be owing to communication and reasoning together, a set of mechanisms the Jury Theorem and the Bayesian approach do not begin to explore.

Enç on Action (I-E)
Fred Dretske (Duke University/Stanford University)
Enç identifies actions with external changes (e.g., bodily movements) caused by reasons. I have argued that actions should be understood not as the movements reasons cause, but as a temporal (causal) process—reasons causing such movements. I discuss the relative merits of these two conceptions.

Inductive Logic and Probabilistic Explanation (II-A)
Branden Fitelson (University of California–Berkeley)
In this paper, I will aim to do three things: (1) review two well-known “Hempelian” accounts of single-case probabilistic explanation due to Peter Railton and James Fetzer, (2) discuss David Lewis’s reasons for preferring Railton’s account over Fetzer’s, and (3) explain how something similar to Fetzer’s account can be salvaged (and even seen to be superior to Railton’s) by adopting a different (non-Lewisian) standard for the “goodness” (or strength) of an inductive argument. The main upshot of this paper will be that working with a proper conception of inductive logic opens the door to more plausible “Hempelian” accounts of single-case probabilistic explanation.

Truth Supervenes on Being (I-A)
Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia)
Truthmaker says that, for each truth, there is something or other that-by its mere existence-makes that truth true. Truthmaker is controversial, most obviously because of negative existentials. A claim like that there are no hobbits does not seem to be made true by the existence of anything.
Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) says, roughly, that any two possible worlds alike with respect to what their contents are like are alike with respect to what is true. TSB has been defended by David Lewis, among others, as a way to capture the intuitions behind Truthmaker without inheriting Truthmaker’s problems.
I argue that TSB is no better than Truthmaker. That is, I argue that if TSB is to accommodate the motivations that drive Truthmaker, it must be recast in such a way that it inherits virtually all of Truthmaker’s problems. While I think this means that we should reject both Truthmaker and TSB, this paper argues only that the two stand or fall together.

Polygeny and Pleiotropy: How to Get Causes from Powers (II-E)
Stephen Mumford (University of Nottingham)
One advantage of a causal powers ontology is a possible solution to, or dissolution of, the problem of causation. At its most radical, the powers ontology suggests a radical re-conceptualization of the problem. Hume had unconnected existences that required a connecting causal relation, which was contingent and external. The powers ontology accepts necessary connections between distinct existences. Instead of contingent cause and effect, we have power and manifestation with a necessary connection between. Powers need not, however, show themselves in paradigmatic Humean events. Following Bhaskar, we can think of powers sometimes acting transfactually. I will be attempting to make sense of this claim.
Does a theory of causation fall unproblematically from the theory of powers? Not quite. The simple theory is that causation is a universal instantiated whenever a power is manifested. But it is implausible that every event is the manifestation of a power. Powers sometimes work with each other, and sometimes against each other, to produce an event.
Events are polygenic, produced by many powers with small additive effects. Powers are pleiotropic, contributing to many events. How then can the identity of a power be determined by its manifestation if a power’s manifestation varies in different contexts? Molnar’s solution: a power always makes exactly the same contribution to any event for which it is a part of the generative mechanism. Such a contribution is not usually to be found at the factive level of Humean events but at the underlying level of generative mechanisms.
I offer the following as new paradigms of causation:
(a) Two books lean against each other at 60º angles.
(b) A planet maintains a regular orbit around a star.
(c) A fridge magnet sits on a fridge, motionless.
Although there is little going on in the world of events, much is going on transfactually.

Cosmological Arguments (I-D)
Graham Oppy (Monash University)
In this paper, I start from the assumption that no cosmological argument that has been produced thus far is successful. The aim of my paper is to explain why it seems to me to be most unlikely to be that case that there is some other successful cosmological argument that remains to be discovered.

Material Coincidence (IV-B)
L. A. Paul (University of Arizona)
Material constitution and coincidence are widely discussed but poorly understood. This paper is an attempt to make progress on understanding material coincidence by developing an account of how numerically distinct material objects coincide when one constitutes the other. I address two central issues: first, do material coincidents A and B share their proper spatiotemporal parts, and if so, do they share all of them? Second, how can A and B share their spatiotemporal location and matter, so share material properties such as having mass m, shape s, and location l, but not share all their qualitative properties? My answers provide a map of the spatiotemporal mereological landscape and explain the underlying ontology of coincidence. This is important, since if we can adequately explicate coincidence, we can begin to answer questions about material constitution and related questions about de re modality, persistence, supervenience, redundant causation, event individuation, personal identity, nonreductive materialism in mind, and reference.

Extended Cognition as a Framework for Empirical Psychology: The Costs Outweigh the Benefits (IV-F)
Robert Rupert (University of Colorado–Boulder)
The hypothesis that human cognition extends into the environment can be understood as a claim about the subjects of cognitive states or, instead, as a claim about the implementation or realization of cognitive states. In this paper, I argue that neither approach offers a promising theoretical framework within which to pursue empirical psychology.
Considered as a theory of the subjects of cognitive states—i.e., as a claim about the systems that instantiate cognitive properties—the extended framework does substantial violence to productive research programs and methods in cognitive psychology. Fruitful psychological research compares systems’ reactions across different experimental conditions, constructs theories to account for subjects’ various responses, and designs new experiments to test those theories. Such methods require that the same systems (or the same kinds of system) be present through variations in conditions and experiments. The extended approach, however, treats each instance of the organism-plus-stimulus as a distinct cognitive system and offers no reason to think that the human organism plus one type of stimulus is of the same kind of system as the human organism together with a different type of stimulus.
The extended view fares no better as a theory concerning the realizers of cognitive states. Not just anything causally related to a cognitive state can count as part of the realizer of that state. The causal role of the realizer of a personal-level cognitive state must mirror the causal profile of the personal-level state so realized. Extended realizers typically do not satisfy this requirement, and for principled reasons.
In the final portion of the paper, I respond to arguments in favor of the extended framework, showing how the systems-based critique outlined above either outweighs or belies the benefits of adopting the extended view.

In Praise of Instance Confirmation (II-A)
Michael Strevens (New York University)
The idea that the source of confirmation in science is the instantiation relation—that hypotheses are confirmed by their instances, and that everything else is confirmed indirectly by way of transmission rules such as Hempel’s Consequence Condition—is now considered utterly inadequate.It is therefore time to revive it. I will argue that the relation of instance confirmation has a role to play in scientific methodology that complements, rather than competing with, a modern account of inductive support such as Bayesian confirmation theory. When an instance confirms a hypothesis, it provides inductive support, but it also provides two things that other inductive supporters normally do not: first, a connection to ‘empirical data’ that makes science epistemically special, and second, inductive support not only for the hypothesis as a whole, but for its parts. On top of this, the importance of instance confirmation provides the foundation for an appealing account of the connection between scientific inference and explanation.
I then show that, when it is conceived in the right way, instance confirmation can duck the arguments most often thought to refute it, and I conclude by suggesting a causal account of instantiation, thus of instance confirmation, that looks to deliver on all of the foregoing promises.

Justification of Religious Belief (V-B)
Richard Swinburne (University of Oxford)
Philosophy of religion in the 21st Century should continue to investigate more fully not merely the coherence and justification of the claim that there is a God, but also the coherence and justification of the detailed credal and moral claims of particular religions including Christianity. In recent years there has emerged a crucial division among epistemologists generally and philosophers of religion in particular between internalist (evidentialist) theories and externalist theories of justification. The practice of religion has certain goals—salvation for oneself and others and (for many religions) the worship of the true God. True beliefs about religion will help us attain these goals, or show them to be unattainable. So we should aim at beliefs with as high a degree of probability as we can attain. The higher the probability, the better justified the beliefs. But only on an internalist theory is there a procedure by which we can set about getting better justified beliefs. So it is the internal justification of beliefs which matters for the pursuit of religion. 21st Century Philosophy of Religion should seek to articulate the criteria of internalist justification and apply them to beliefs about religion.

The Importance of De-Centering Deliberative Democracy (I-B)
Iris Marion Young (University of Chicago)
Conceptions of deliberative democracy frequently assume a centered conception of deliberation. That is, theories frequently assume that processes of deliberative democracy involve a single body deliberating together in a single encounter. This paper reviews arguments by Jurgen Habermas and James Bohman that a centered understanding of deliberative democracy is problematic, and it offers additional reasons why this is so. Centered conceptions of deliberative democracy fail to theorize the mediations of politics and they tend to take insufficient critical distance from existing liberal democratic practice.