Josh Dever
Biographic Data
| ID | 462192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Josh Dever |
| GIVEN NAMES | Josh |
| FAMILY NAME | Dever |
| SIGNATURE | DEVER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
AI safety: A climb to Armageddon
This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expecte…
J. Patout Burns, Augustine’s Preached Theology: Living as the Body of Christ
Introspective Machines: Are LLMs Better at Self‐Reflection Than Humans
This article challenges conventional boundaries between human and artificial cognition by examining introspective capabilities in large language models (LLMs). Although humans have traditionally been considered unique in their ability to reflect on their own mental states, we argue that LLMs may not only possess genuine introspective abilities but potentially excel at them compared to humans. We discuss five objections to machine introspection: (…
This paper might change your mind
Linguistic intervention in rational decision making is standardly captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non‐informational content – like epistemic modals – used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information chan…
Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters …
Context and Communication
The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person
When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. This book is an exploration and defence of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. This book opposes one of the most entrenched…
The Revenge of the Semantics‐pragmatics Distinction
The Conditional Fallacy
∗ We are grateful to Michael Fara for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. † The authors ’ names are listed in alphabetical order. c © 2006 conditionalfallacyphilreview.tex; 31/07/2006; 14:12; p.1 The thought that dispositional properties can be understood in terms of the holding of certain counterfactuals goes back at least to Ryle1: To say that this lump of sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, if submerged anywhe…
Problems of Compositionality
Book Review| April 01 2003 Problems of Compositionality Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Problems of Compositionality. New York: Garland, 2000. Pp. xi, 165. Josh Dever Josh Dever Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2003) 112 (2): 254–258. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-112-2-254 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Josh Dever; Problems of Compositi…
Believing in Words
The Revenge of the Semantics‐pragmatics Distinction
The Conditional Fallacy
∗ We are grateful to Michael Fara for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. † The authors ’ names are listed in alphabetical order. c © 2006 conditionalfallacyphilreview.tex; 31/07/2006; 14:12; p.1 The thought that dispositional properties can be understood in terms of the holding of certain counterfactuals goes back at least to Ryle1: To say that this lump of sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, if submerged anywhe…
Believing in Words
Believing in Words
Problems of Compositionality
Book Review| April 01 2003 Problems of Compositionality Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Problems of Compositionality. New York: Garland, 2000. Pp. xi, 165. Josh Dever Josh Dever Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2003) 112 (2): 254–258. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-112-2-254 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Josh Dever; Problems of Compositi…
The Conditional Fallacy
∗ We are grateful to Michael Fara for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. † The authors ’ names are listed in alphabetical order. c © 2006 conditionalfallacyphilreview.tex; 31/07/2006; 14:12; p.1 The thought that dispositional properties can be understood in terms of the holding of certain counterfactuals goes back at least to Ryle1: To say that this lump of sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, if submerged anywhe…
The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person
When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. This book is an exploration and defence of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. This book opposes one of the most entrenched…
The Revenge of the Semantics‐pragmatics Distinction
Context and Communication
This paper might change your mind
Linguistic intervention in rational decision making is standardly captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non‐informational content – like epistemic modals – used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information chan…
Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters …
J. Patout Burns, Augustine’s Preached Theology: Living as the Body of Christ
Introspective Machines: Are LLMs Better at Self‐Reflection Than Humans
This article challenges conventional boundaries between human and artificial cognition by examining introspective capabilities in large language models (LLMs). Although humans have traditionally been considered unique in their ability to reflect on their own mental states, we argue that LLMs may not only possess genuine introspective abilities but potentially excel at them compared to humans. We discuss five objections to machine introspection: (…
AI safety: A climb to Armageddon
This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expecte…
Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (5 works) · Metaphysics (4 works) · Philosophy of language (4 works) · Citation (3 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (3 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (3 works)