I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

I present a novel position vis-à-vis the views in the Latin American philosophy literature regarding whether subjects more aptly use "Hispanic" or "Latinx" to refer to Hispanic- or-Latinx people. To this end, I will argue (C) the term "Afro-Latinx" is more apt than "Hispanic" or "Latinx" in a significant number of cases. This conclusion is based on three premises. The first premise (P1) is that use of "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US (...) society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The second premise (P2) is that that neither the term "Hispanic" nor the term "Latinx" provide subjects with this understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The third premise (P3) is that the term "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with more understanding of these events than the terms, "Hispanic" and "Latinx.” I present three cases which feature the experiences of Afro-Dominican people. The 1992 murder of Dominican man Kiko García by New York Police officer O’Keefe is first case. The second case is the Washington Heights Uprising that ensued Kiko García’ murder. An instance where a nightclub bouncer in the Dominican Republic denies a Dominican women entry because of her hair texture composes the third case. (shrink)

I argue that Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda differed in their conclusions regarding the status of Indigenous persons at least partly because las Casas had significant, yet incomplete, understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies and Sepúlveda had mere knowledge of them. To this end, I show that the epistemic state of understanding explains why Las Casas properly concluded that Indigenous persons deserve the same moral status afforded to Europeans. And I show how las Casas’ understanding (...) of Indigenous persons, culture and societies related to what he got wrong about Indigenous persons. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

Some, if not most, philosophy program admissions committee members assume that they can determine that one applicant will likely manifest a higher degree of philosophical skill than another applicant on the basis of differences between their materials. I challenge this assumption by explaining how applicants’ materials in significant measure reflect the racially unjust environment in which they manifest their philosophical skill. I explain how applicants’ racial-group membership in similar measure determines what these materials consist in.

Mallon and Kelly claim that hybrid constructionism predicts, at least, that (1) racial representations are stable over time and (2) that racial representations should vary more in mixed-race cultures than in cultures where there is less racial mixing. I argue that hybrid constructionism’s predictions do not obtain and thus hybrid constructionism requires further evidence. I argue that the historical record is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism, and I suggest that humans may not be innately disposed to categorize people by race even (...) though we are likely disposed to categorize people into in and out groups. So, in this paper, I show that there is an evidence set that is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism. (shrink)

I present distinctness conditions that an epistemic-injustice phenomenon should meet to count as distinct from other such phenomena and I use these conditions to evaluate anticipatory-epistemic injustice’s distinctness in relation to testimonial smothering. Even though I argue that the phenomenon that Lee helpfully describes may not be distinct from testimonial smothering, I argue that the notion of distinctness itself should not be the primary or most important criterion that epistemic-injustice theorists use to determine whether such phenomena should feature in the (...) literature. This implies that anticipatory-epistemic injustice and other phenomena like it should indeed feature in the epistemic-injustice literature because they promote epistemic-injustice theorists’ development of remedies and prescriptive theses in relation to epistemic injustice. (shrink)

I submit that the critical epistemology of race and standpoint literature has not explicitly focused on the properties of information about, say, racial or gender injustice in a way similar to how epistemologists have focused on propositions and information when they describe propositional justification. I describe information in the racial-injustice-information domain in a way similar to how epistemologists describe propositional justification. To this end, I argue (C1) that if subjects in racially unjust societies tend to violate norms that promote a (...) community’s reliable information flow because racial prejudice is widely held in racially unjust societies, then racial injustice can make information flow less reliably in a community. I also argue (C2) that if racial prejudice can make information flow less reliably in a community, then information that non-dominant subjects are more likely to have will less reliably flow to community members who lack it. (shrink)

I argue that according to Kristie Dotson, non-epistemic motives such as social, ethical and material harm can motivate a speaker to smother her testimony. I present this exegesis of Dotson's view of testimonial smothering in response to J. L. Lee's and Trystan Goetze's reply to my commentary of Lee's view that anticipatory epistemic injustice is distinct from testimonial smothering.

I will argue that just and accurate assessment must involve taking into account how racial injustice affects students’ performance in their work. To this end, I will motivate what I call the RACIAL-INJUSTICE-ASSESSMENT THESIS. According to this thesis, instructors must account for how racial injustice affects a student’s work for an instructor’s judgment of her work to count as just. To motivate the RACIAL-INJUSTICE ASSESSMENT THESIS, I will defend the ACCURACY THESIS and the JUSTICE THESIS. According to the ACCURACY THESIS, (...) the accuracy of an instructor’s judgment of a student’s work will covary with the degree to which she considers how racial injustice affects the performance enshrined in the student’s the work. According to the JUSTICE THESIS, the justness of instructors’ judgments of student work covary with the degree to which instructors consider racial injustice’s effect on student work. (shrink)

When you expect something bad to happen, you take action to avoid it. That is the principle of action that underlies J. Y. Lee’s recent paper (2021), which presents a new form of epistemic injustice that arises from anticipating negative consequences for testifying. In this brief reply article occasioned by Lee’s essay, I make two main contributions to the discussion of this idea. The first (§§2–3) is an intervention in the discussion between Lee and Eric Bayruns García (...) regarding the relationship between anticipatory epistemic injustice and Kristie Dotson’s concept of testimonial smothering. The second (§§4–5) is to expand the concept of anticipatory epistemic injustice into the educational context, and to illuminate yet another form of anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I call anticipatory zetetic injustice (§6). (shrink)

Here I consider the two most venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Obviously, both arguments cannot be sound. But I argue here that they are (...) both unsound for the very same reason. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Michael Loux’s important distinction between “tropes” and “tropers”. First, I argue that the distinction throws into relief an ambiguity and discrepancy in the literature, revealing two fundamentally different versions of trope theory. Second, I argue that the distinction brings into focus unique challenges facing each of the resulting trope theories, thus calling into question an alleged advantage of trope theory—that by uniquely occupying the middle ground between its rivals, trope theory is able to recover and (...) preserve the insights of these views. Ultimately, the distinction suggests that trope theory is a divided house. (shrink)

The general concept of a trope – that of a non-shareable character-grounder – admits of a distinction between modifier tropes and module tropes. Roughly, a module trope is self-exemplifying whereas a modifier trope is not. This distinction has wide-ranging implications. Modifier tropes are uniquely eligible to be powers and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes are uniquely eligible to play a direct role in perception and causation. Moreover, each type of trope theory faces unique challenges concerning character- grounding. Modifier trope theory (...) faces challenges concerning the inscrutability of predication and the incompatibility with bundle theory, whereas module trope theory faces challenges concerning character overdetermination and a collapse into austere nominalism. These differences indicate that the modifier/module distinction divides the advantages of general trope theory and thus presents the trope theorist with a pivotal choice. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic (...) idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

Defends a version of the Davidsonian Demonstrative Theory of quotation against proponents of the Fregean Identity Theory.

Hacemos una lectura del “Tratado sobre los principios de la teología” de Guillermo de Occam, y echamos un vistazo a la Escolástica tardía que esta obra representa tan bien, revisando diferentes referencias bibliográficas, que me han permitido conocer y analizar diferentes conceptos y enfoques acerca de este singular tema. De hecho, se trata de una obra mayor, de gran calibre, pero de autor incierto, generalmente atribuida a Occam, aunque la autoría real está en disputa. Lo cierto es que se trata (...) de un momento culminante de una época de la historia del pensamiento occidental; una en la que su autor, con briosa arquitectura, levanta un edificio que perenniza el pensar occamista, comentándolo, glosándolo y dándole forma enciclopédica, minuciosa, como la que uno esperaría encontrar en un diccionario o un manual del Nominalismo naciente. (shrink)

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-orless normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for ‘animalism’, the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning (...) is no more comfortable for those who think we’re not organisms than for those who think we are. We may have to accept that a single person could have two separate mental lives. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of the puzzle posed by Greenberg’s failure to come to terms with the explosion of postmodernist experimentation in the 1960’s. Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the immediately preceding period and a strong supporter of New York abstract expressionism and color field painting, is indelibly associated with modernist schools of painting. His short essay, “Modernist Painting”, valorized precisely these movements and was a tour de force catapulting Greenberg into critic superstar status; it is still (...) one of the central documents in debates about modernism. Because Greenberg there makes references to Kant’s aesthetics in identifying the virtues of modernism his account is usually interpreted in terms of the formalism of the period and Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. This offers a reading of Greenberg as a formalist and as identifying modernism with a concern for the formal properties of art, the flatness of the picture frame and the formal relations between the aesthetic properties. Greenberg was also celebrated as having a legendary acuteness of aesthetic appreciation—a critical eye penetrating immediately to a work’s aesthetic depth. (shrink)

For the philosopher of Rotterdam, religious coercion has two essential sources of illegitimacy: the linking of religious and ecclesiastical belief and the use of politics for religious purposes. Bayle responds to it, with his doctrine of freedom of conscience, on one hand and by means of the essential distinction between voluntary religious affiliation and political obligation, on the other hand. From my perspective, his doctrine of tolerance does not involve an atheist state, nor does it mean the rejection of the (...) presence of religion in the public space or its displacement to the intimate sphere of the conscience. This paper proposes a reading of Baylean tolerance as a political doctrine that allows the articulation between freedom of conscience, minority confessions, and official religion. Thus, the Baylean theoretical model could be considered a proposal to provide a normative form to the practice of toleration present in the seventeenth -century Netherlands. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning (...) or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual-process models of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career. has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus---contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

In some recent works, Crupi and Iacona have outlined an analysis of ‘if’ based on Chrysippus’ idea that a conditional holds whenever the negation of its consequent is incompatible with its antecedent. This paper presents a sound and complete system of conditional logic that accommodates their analysis. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a general method elaborated by Raidl, which applies to a wide range of systems of conditional logic.

A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a (...) mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy 's inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy 's future. (shrink)

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that (...) number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting. (shrink)

Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 55-96, February 2014.

There is a prevalent notion among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind that computers are merely formal symbol manipulators, performing the actions they do solely on the basis of the syntactic properties of the symbols they manipulate. This view of computers has allowed some philosophers to divorce semantics from computational explanations. Semantic content, then, becomes something one adds to computational explanations to get psychological explanations. Other philosophers, such as Stephen Stich, have taken a stronger view, advocating doing away with semantics (...) entirely. This paper argues that a correct account of computation requires us to attribute content to computational processes in order to explain which functions are being computed. This entails that computational psychology must countenance mental representations. Since anti-semantic positions are incompatible with computational psychology thus construed, they ought to be rejected. Lastly, I argue that in an important sense, computers are not formal symbol manipulators. (shrink)

Consider the following three claims. (i) There are no truths of the form ‘p and ~p’. (ii) No one holds a belief of the form ‘p and ~p’. (iii) No one holds any pairs of beliefs of the form {p, ~p}. Irad Kimhi has recently argued, in effect, that each of these claims holds and holds with metaphysical necessity. Furthermore, he maintains that they are ultimately not distinct claims at all, but the same claim formulated in different ways. I find (...) his argument suggestive, if not entirely transparent. I do think there is at least an important kernel of truth even in (iii), and that (i) ultimately explains what’s right about the other two. Consciousness of an impossibility makes belief in the obtaining of the corresponding state of affairs an impossibility. Interestingly, an appreciation of this fact brings into view a novel conception of inference, according to which it consists in the consciousness of necessity. This essay outlines and defends this position. A central element of the defense is that it reveals how reasoners satisfy what Paul Boghossian calls the Taking Condition and do so without engendering regress. (shrink)

On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention to what matters most in thinking (...) about belief. (shrink)

What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are involved in the dispute. We (...) argue that powerful motivations have been offered in support of both frameworks. This suggests the possibility of combining the two. Unlike Frege, we hold that the resulting position is perfectly coherent and well worth considering. Nonetheless, we argue that it should be rejected along with the view that concepts are abstract objects. (shrink)

Aristotle's treatment of the choice between the political and contemplative lives (in EN I 5 and X 7-8) can seem awkward. To offer one explanation of this, I argue that when he invokes self-sufficience (autarkeia) as a criterion for this choice, he appeals to two different and incompatible specifications of "lacking nothing." On one specification, suitable to a human being living as a political animal and thus seeking to realize his end as an engaged citizen of a polis, a person (...) lacks nothing by possessing a wide range of goods that directly require other people. On the other, more suitable to a god or a beast, a person lacks nothing by having no need of goods that directly require other people. The ambiguity of this criterion renders the choice between the political and contemplative lives difficult. (shrink)

To study conscious experience we must, to some extent, trust introspective reports; yet introspective reports often do not merit our trust. A century ago, E.B. Titchener advocated extensive introspective training as a means of resolving this difficulty. He describes many of his training techniques in his four-volume laboratory manual of 1901- 1905. This paper explores Titchener's laboratory manual with an eye to general questions about the prospects of introspective training for contemporary consciousness studies, with a focus on the following examples: (...) introspective knowledge of the combination tones that arise when a musical interval is played; the 'flight of colours' in the afterimage of a field of bright, broad- spectrum light; and the possibility of non-obvious visual illusions. Introspective training appears to have some merit, but also to involve significant hazards. (shrink)

After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.

Resumen: Este trabajo se propone revisar la tesis de la proliferación de alternativas, expuesta por Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a la luz de algunas críticas a la tesis de la proliferación de teorías, expuesta por Paul Feyerabend. Se defiende que, aunque no de modo explícito, hay una afinidad entre ambas tesis y, en consecuencia, las debilidades de la segunda afectan a la primera. No obstante, el objetivo básico consiste en mostrar cómo propuestas emergentes, como la ecología de los saberes, antes (...) que insistir en su carácter contraepistemológico, podrían beneficiarse de una discusión epistemológica amplia.: In this paper I review the thesis about the proliferation of alternatives by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, from some criticisms to the thesis of the proliferation of theories by Paul Feyerabend. I claim that, though not in explicit way, there is an affinity between them, therefore the weakness from the second one affects the first one. However, the point is to show how some emergent proposals, as the ecology of knowledges, could benefit from a full epistemological discussion, instead of insisting on its counter-epistemological nature. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

This article investigates multi-species relations in a group of science fiction narratives featuring extraterrestrial beings, paying particular attention to the Alien movie series. The concept of “cosmopolitical ecology” is elaborated as a tool to map relations between the different kinds of beings that populate the modern imagination in SF, especially those between humans, machines, animals and alien entities. Two apparently opposing modes of relation are highlighted in the narratives: domestication and predation. But those modes, intrinsically connected to a broader colonial (...) imaginary, seem to be themselves entangled in complex ways. If modernity is marked by what Ghassan Hage calls “generalized domestication,” then what is the place of predation in modern metaphysics? An ambiguous position often attached to a dangerous other, the role of the predator also emerges as a feature of modern humans, a trace that they sometimes recognize in themselves when they look at an alien mirror. (shrink)

I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the (...) deferred ostension view deals with a problem I pointed out for the identity proposal in my earlier work, that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens (see the examples on p. 261 of García-Carpintero 1994). (shrink)

This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...) parts. (1) We characterize nativism’s core commitments relative to the contemporary debate between empiricists and nativists, (2) we present the positive case for nativism in terms of two central nativist arguments (the poverty of the stimulus argument and the argument from animals), (3) we respond to a number of influential objections to nativist theories, and (4) we explain the nativist approach to the conceptual system. (shrink)

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from (...) psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs. (shrink)

This paper has two main aims. The first is to present a general approach for understanding “dispositional” and “categorical” properties; the second aim is to use this approach to criticize Russellian Monism. On the approach I suggest, what are usually thought of as “dispositional” and “categorical” properties are really just the extreme ends of a spectrum of options. The approach allows for a number of options between these extremes, and it is plausible, I suggest, that just about everything of scientific (...) interest falls in this middle ground. I argue that Russellian Monism depends for its plausibility on the unarticulated assumption that there are no properties in the middle ground. (shrink)

The advanced division of cognitive labor generates a set of challenges and opportunities for professional philosophers. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy in light of these challenges and opportunities. In part 1, I’ll remind you of the centrality of the division of labor to Plato’s Republic, and why this is especially salient in his banishment of the poets from his Kallipolis. I’ll then focus on the significance of an easily overlooked albeit rather significant character, Damon, mentioned (...) in that dialogue. I’ll argue that if we take the relationship between Socrates and Damon seriously, we’ll notice that in modeling imperfect polities, Plato inscribes Socrates within the advanced division of cognitive labor who defers to Damon as an expert on a key feature of the art of government. In fact, I’ll argue that in Republic, Plato offers us at least two ways to conceptualize philosophy’s relationship to the sciences, and that he alerts us to the social significance of this. In part 2, I’ll re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. Back in 2019 I published a short paper on it that went viral and was immediately used by others. Reflection on their use instructed me about an ambiguity in my position. Building on the material in parts 1-2, in part 3, I’ll contrast my account with a number of ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy in order to make more precise the version promoted here. (shrink)

Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practical knowledge characteristic (...) of intentional action. This masking takes roughly the following form: when we are deceiving ourselves about what we are intentionally doing, we don't think about our action because it's painful to do so. (shrink)

Rationalization, in our intended sense of the term, occurs when a person favors a particular conclusion as a result of some factor (such as self-interest) that is of little justificatory epistemic relevance, if that factor then biases the person’s subsequent search for, and assessment of, potential justifications for the conclusion. Empirical evidence suggests that rationalization is common in people’s moral and philosophical thought. We argue that it is likely that the moral and philosophical thought of philosophers and moral psychologists is (...) also pervaded by rationalization. Moreover, although rationalization has some benefits, overall it would be epistemically better if the moral and philosophical reasoning of people, including professional academics, were not as heavily influenced by rationalization as it likely is. We discuss the significance of our arguments for cognitive management and epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Whole Brain Emulation has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project makes it appear to be feasible in practice. Computationalism is a popular, independently plausible theory, (...) and Connectomics a well-funded empirical research program, so optimism about WBE is understandable. However, this optimism may be misplaced. This article argues that WBE is, at best, no more compelling than any of the other far-flung routes to achieving superintelligence. Similarly skeptical conclusions are found regarding immortality. The essay concludes with some positive considerations in favor of the Biological Theory of consciousness, as well as morals about the limits of Computationalism in both artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind more generally. (shrink)

I argue that transference is, ultimately, identity over time, and that identity over time can't possibly be causation. Transference, then, fails as an analysis of causation.