How to Make Reflectance a Surface PropertyOne of the commonest properties in science and everyday experience is 'reflectance', the property of car doors, mirrors, and luxury fountain pens that allows you to see your face in them (and radar systems to detect them, for that matter). Philosophers like David R. Hilbert (1987) define this property as Surface Spectral Reflectance (SSR), 1 and in this essay I contend that SSR as currently defined is not a surface property, but a combination property of surface-and-medium or surface-and-light. 2 What I mean by calling Hilbertian SSR a surface-and-medium property is that Hilbertian SSR is an extrinsic disposition (McKitrick 2003) of surfaces, contrary to Hilbert's (1987) claim that SSR "is an intrinsic, illumination-independent" (1177) disposition. 3 To deny that Hilbertian reflectance is intrinsic will strike some as unintuitive (e.g. Isacc 2018: 521, 524; Byrne and Hilbert 2003): mirrors are supposed to remain 'reflective' objects even in the dark, just as a vase remains 'fragile' even if never dropped. By calling Hilbertian SSR an extrinsic disposition, however, I mean that light partially bestows upon mirrors their (Hilbertian) reflective capacity or reflectance profile. To the degree that this metaphysic of reflectance seems wrong,

To justify inductive inference and vanquish classical skepticisms about human memory, external world realism, etc., Richard Fumerton proposes his “inferential internalism,” an epistemology whereby humans ‘see’ by Russellian acquaintance Keynesian probable relations (PRs) between propositions. PRs are a priori necessary relations of logical probability, akin to but not reducible to logical entailments, such that perceiving a PR between one’s evidence E and proposition P of unknown truth value justifies rational belief in P to an objective degree. A recent critic of inferential internalism is Alan Rhoda, who questions its psychological plausibility. Rhoda argues that in order to see necessary relations between propositions E and P, one would need acquaintance with too many propositions at once, since our evidence E is often complex. In this paper, I criticize Rhoda’s implausibility objection as too quick. Referencing the causal status effect (CSE) from psychology, I argue that some of the complex features of evidence E contribute to our type-categorizing it as E-type, and thus we do not need to ‘see’ all of the complex features when we see the PR between E and P. My argument leaves unchanged Fumerton’s justificatory role for the PR, but enhances its psychological plausibility.

To teach the ethics of science to science majors, I follow several teachers in the literature who recommend "persona" writing, or the student construction of dialogues between ethical thinkers of interest. To engage science majors in particular, and especially those new to academic philosophy, I recommend constructing persona dialogues from Henri Poincaré's essay, "Ethics and Science" (1963/1913), and the non-theological third chapter of Pope Francis's (2015) encyclical on the environment, Laudato si. This pairing of interlocutors offers two advantages. The first is that science students are likely to recognize both names, since Poincaré appears in undergraduate mathematics and physics textbooks, and because Francis is an environmentalist celebrity. Hence students (in my experience) show more interest in these figures than in other philosophers. The second advantage is that the third chapter of Laudato si reads like an implicit rebuttal of Poincaré's essay in many respects, and so contriving a dialogue between those authors both facilitates classroom discussion, and deserves attention from professional ethicists in its own right. In this paper, I present my own contrived dialogue between Francis and Poincaré, not for assigning to students as a reading, but as a template for an effective assignment product, and as a crib sheet for educators to preview the richly antiparallel themes between the two works. Main Text: I. NAME-DROPPING FOR NON-MAJORSOften a science student's introduction to philosophy begins by their enrolling in an ethics class required for graduation. I have taught that class several times, and as a degreed engineer myself, I feel at home among the intensely analytical students who have zero tolerance for "fluff," a key indicator of "fluff" being a subject matter's lack of governing equations, 1 or its imperviousness to experimentation and measurement. To break the ice, then, I sometimes attempt to engage my students under the guise of not-doing-philosophy. One form of this guise, profitably exploited in advertising, is name-dropping. I sometimes notice eye-contact from the most aloof of students when I mention names that they know, and which their own peers and major professors respect.

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