Toby Handfield
Biographic Data
| ID | 218507 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Toby Handfield |
| GIVEN NAMES | Toby |
| FAMILY NAME | Handfield |
| SIGNATURE | HANDFIELD T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2995-2067 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Regulating Social Media as a Public Good
The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective k…
Academic Journals, Incentives, and the Quality of Peer Review
We model the impact of different incentives on journal behavior in undertaking peer review. Under one scheme, the journal aims to publish the highest-quality papers; under the second, the journal aims to maintain a high rejection rate. Under both schemes, journals prefer to set very high standards for acceptance despite allowing significant error in peer review. Under the second scheme, however, in order to encourage more submissions of mediocre …
The Open Society and Its Complexities
Explaining costly religious practices
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theore…
Resolutions provide reasons or
Why should we typically act in accordance with our resolutions when faced with the temptation to do otherwise? A much-maligned view suggests that we should do so because resolutions themselves provide us with reasons for action. We defend a version of this view, on which resolutions provide second-order reasons. This account avoids the objections typically taken to be fatal for the view that resolutions are reasons, including the prominent bootst…
Awareness of ethical dilemmas enhances public support for the principle of saving more lives in the United States
The evolution of the endowment effect
The coevolution of sacred value and religion
Sacred value attitudes involve a distinctive profile of norm psychology: an absolutist prohibition on transgressing the value, combined with outrage at even hypothetical transgressions. This article considers three mechanisms by which such attitudes may be adaptive, and relates them to central theories regarding the evolution of religion. The first, “deterrence” mechanism functions to dissuade coercive expropriation of valuable resources. This me…
Honor and Violence
Rational Choice and the Transitivity of Betterness
If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which em…
A Philosophical Guide to Chance
It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physica…
Philosophical Guide to Chance
Absent Desires
What difference does it make to matters of value, for a desire-satisfactionist, if a given desire is absent , rather than present ? I argue that it is most plausible to hold that the state in which a given desire is satisfied is, other things being equal, incommensurate with the state in which that desire does not exist at all. In addition to illustrating the internal attractions of the view, I demonstrate that this idea has attractive implicatio…
Order and Affray
Unfinkable dispositions
Armstrong and the Modal Inversion of Dispositions
D.M. Armstrong has objected that the dispositionalist theory of laws and properties is modally inverted, for it entails that properties are constituted by relations to non‐actual possibilia. I contend that if this objection succeeds against dispositionalism, then Armstrong's nomic necessitation relation is also modally inverted. This shows that at least one of Armstrong's reasons for preferring a nomic necessitation theory is specious
Counterlegals and Necessary Laws
Necessitarian accounts of the laws of nature meet an apparent difficulty: for them, counterlegal conditionals, despite appearing to be substantive, seem to come out as vacuous. I argue that the necessitarian may use the presuppositions of counterlegal discourse to explain this. If the typical presupposition that necessitarianism is false is made explicit in counterlegal utterances, we obtain sentences such as ‘If it turns out that the laws of nat…
Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle
An objection to dispositional essentialism has been that it yields an implausible semantics for counterfactuals if determinism happens to be true. I claim that an adequate remedy to this objection would be to endorse the metaphysical possibility of ‘law‐abiding miracles’, i.e., uncaused spontaneous events. This proposal entails that determinism de jure is meta‐physically impossible; I argue that this is not a serious disadvantage. I discuss conse…
Honor and Violence
Rational Choice and the Transitivity of Betterness
If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which em…
Unfinkable dispositions
Counterlegals and Necessary Laws
Necessitarian accounts of the laws of nature meet an apparent difficulty: for them, counterlegal conditionals, despite appearing to be substantive, seem to come out as vacuous. I argue that the necessitarian may use the presuppositions of counterlegal discourse to explain this. If the typical presupposition that necessitarianism is false is made explicit in counterlegal utterances, we obtain sentences such as ‘If it turns out that the laws of nat…
Armstrong and the Modal Inversion of Dispositions
D.M. Armstrong has objected that the dispositionalist theory of laws and properties is modally inverted, for it entails that properties are constituted by relations to non‐actual possibilia. I contend that if this objection succeeds against dispositionalism, then Armstrong's nomic necessitation relation is also modally inverted. This shows that at least one of Armstrong's reasons for preferring a nomic necessitation theory is specious
Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle
An objection to dispositional essentialism has been that it yields an implausible semantics for counterfactuals if determinism happens to be true. I claim that an adequate remedy to this objection would be to endorse the metaphysical possibility of ‘law‐abiding miracles’, i.e., uncaused spontaneous events. This proposal entails that determinism de jure is meta‐physically impossible; I argue that this is not a serious disadvantage. I discuss conse…
Order and Affray
Explaining costly religious practices
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theore…
Resolutions provide reasons or
Why should we typically act in accordance with our resolutions when faced with the temptation to do otherwise? A much-maligned view suggests that we should do so because resolutions themselves provide us with reasons for action. We defend a version of this view, on which resolutions provide second-order reasons. This account avoids the objections typically taken to be fatal for the view that resolutions are reasons, including the prominent bootst…
Absent Desires
What difference does it make to matters of value, for a desire-satisfactionist, if a given desire is absent , rather than present ? I argue that it is most plausible to hold that the state in which a given desire is satisfied is, other things being equal, incommensurate with the state in which that desire does not exist at all. In addition to illustrating the internal attractions of the view, I demonstrate that this idea has attractive implicatio…
Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle
An objection to dispositional essentialism has been that it yields an implausible semantics for counterfactuals if determinism happens to be true. I claim that an adequate remedy to this objection would be to endorse the metaphysical possibility of ‘law‐abiding miracles’, i.e., uncaused spontaneous events. This proposal entails that determinism de jure is meta‐physically impossible; I argue that this is not a serious disadvantage. I discuss conse…
Counterlegals and Necessary Laws
Necessitarian accounts of the laws of nature meet an apparent difficulty: for them, counterlegal conditionals, despite appearing to be substantive, seem to come out as vacuous. I argue that the necessitarian may use the presuppositions of counterlegal discourse to explain this. If the typical presupposition that necessitarianism is false is made explicit in counterlegal utterances, we obtain sentences such as ‘If it turns out that the laws of nat…
Armstrong and the Modal Inversion of Dispositions
D.M. Armstrong has objected that the dispositionalist theory of laws and properties is modally inverted, for it entails that properties are constituted by relations to non‐actual possibilia. I contend that if this objection succeeds against dispositionalism, then Armstrong's nomic necessitation relation is also modally inverted. This shows that at least one of Armstrong's reasons for preferring a nomic necessitation theory is specious
Unfinkable dispositions
Order and Affray
Absent Desires
What difference does it make to matters of value, for a desire-satisfactionist, if a given desire is absent , rather than present ? I argue that it is most plausible to hold that the state in which a given desire is satisfied is, other things being equal, incommensurate with the state in which that desire does not exist at all. In addition to illustrating the internal attractions of the view, I demonstrate that this idea has attractive implicatio…
A Philosophical Guide to Chance
It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physica…
Philosophical Guide to Chance
Rational Choice and the Transitivity of Betterness
If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which em…
Honor and Violence
The evolution of the endowment effect
The coevolution of sacred value and religion
Sacred value attitudes involve a distinctive profile of norm psychology: an absolutist prohibition on transgressing the value, combined with outrage at even hypothetical transgressions. This article considers three mechanisms by which such attitudes may be adaptive, and relates them to central theories regarding the evolution of religion. The first, “deterrence” mechanism functions to dissuade coercive expropriation of valuable resources. This me…
Resolutions provide reasons or
Why should we typically act in accordance with our resolutions when faced with the temptation to do otherwise? A much-maligned view suggests that we should do so because resolutions themselves provide us with reasons for action. We defend a version of this view, on which resolutions provide second-order reasons. This account avoids the objections typically taken to be fatal for the view that resolutions are reasons, including the prominent bootst…
Awareness of ethical dilemmas enhances public support for the principle of saving more lives in the United States
Explaining costly religious practices
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theore…
The Open Society and Its Complexities
Regulating Social Media as a Public Good
The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective k…
Academic Journals, Incentives, and the Quality of Peer Review
We model the impact of different incentives on journal behavior in undertaking peer review. Under one scheme, the journal aims to publish the highest-quality papers; under the second, the journal aims to maintain a high rejection rate. Under both schemes, journals prefer to set very high standards for acceptance despite allowing significant error in peer review. Under the second scheme, however, in order to encourage more submissions of mediocre …
Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Mathematics (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (5 works)