It is often said that belief aims at truth. I argue that if belief has an aim then that aim is knowledge rather than merely truth. My main argument appeals to the impossibility of forming a belief on the basis of evidence that only weakly favours a proposition. This phenomenon, I argue, is a problem for the truth-aim hypothesis. By contrast, it can be given a simple and satisfying explanation on the knowledge-aim hypothesis. Furthermore, the knowledge-aim hypothesis suggests a very (...) plausible account of what it takes for evidence to be sufficiently good to make belief possible. I offer several further considerations in favour of the knowledge-aim hypothesis, and deal with objections. Although the main point of the paper is not to defend the view that belief has an aim, but to adjudicate between accounts of what that aim is, my argument nevertheless requires some attention to the motivation for attributing an aim to belief in the first place. In particular, I will explain an important advantage that this view has over the view that belief is not aim-directed, but only subject to a constitutive norm. (shrink)

Two recent arguments purport to find a new and firmer foundation for evidentialism in the very nature of the concept of belief. Evidentialism is claimed to be a conceptual truth about belief, and pragmatism to be ruled out, conceptually. But can the conclusion of such conceptual arguments be regarded as the denial of pragmatism? The pragmatist traditionally conceived belief through its motivational role. Therefore, when confronted with conceptual evidentialism, the pragmatist should cede the term ‘belief,’ but insist that pragmatism be (...) understood as a claim about another attitude, a motivational duplicate of belief. Thus, the original dispute is simply relocated terminologically. (shrink)

Deontic Doxastic Constitutivism is the view that beliefs are constitutively governed by deontic norms. This roughly means that a full account and understanding of the nature of these mental attitudes cannot be reached unless one appeals to some norm of this type. My aim in this article is to provide an objection to such a conception of the normativity of belief. I argue that if some deontic norm is constitutive of belief, then the addressees of such a norm are committed (...) to a potentially infinite number of norms. Furthermore, if addressees are in the position to fulfill all such norms, they must also be able to hold a potentially infinite number of logically independent beliefs. Both these consequences are problematic if compared with limited human capacities to act and believe. (shrink)

The subject matter of this paper is the view that it is correct, in an absolute sense, to believe a proposition just in case the proposition is true. I take issue with arguments in support of this view put forward by Nishi Shah and David Velleman.

This paper presents a novel perspective on the force-content distinction making use of truthmaker semantics and an ontology of attitudinal objects, things that are neither acts (or states) nor propositions. It gives a novel norm-based definition of the notion of direction of fit, strictly linking truth and (non-action-guiding) correctness.

This chapter distinguishes between several senses of “normativity”. For example, that we ought to abstain from causing unnecessary suffering is a normative, not descriptive, claim. And so is the claim that we have good reason, and ought to drive on the right, or left, side of the road because the law requires us to do that. Reasons and oughts are normative, by definition. Indeed, it may be that “[t]he normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, (...) or provides, or is otherwise related to reasons” (Raz 1999, 67) . That is what the “reasons-first” view holds, but there are also other views, and what is by definition a normative statement, or a normative fact if you like, depends on how we define normativity. -/- It may seem that requirements are also by definition normative. But it seems that there can also be requirements that one has no reason to meet: it is less clear whether such requirements are normative in the same sense that reasons and oughts are normative. This paper will go through various further phenomena, which are candidates for being normative in some other sense than normative reasons and oughts, defending however the view that not all of them are. But arguably four or so different senses of normativity can be distinguished. -/- The paper will accept the view that the normativity of reasons and oughts, which is here called normativity1, is central. It is an open question whether all requirements or expectations or socially constructed norms are normative in that sense. Arguably it depends on the contents and content-independent authority of the legislators, whether we have good reasons, or ought, to meet the requirements, obey the law, or to follow the etiquette, or to conform to others’ interpersonal expectations, requests, demands or prescriptions. Whether and when we do have such reasons is a difficult and important substantive question, which concerns the normativity1 of requirements of law. -/- In another sense, norms (intended to guide behavior) are trivially or by definition normative, and constitute normativity: some forms of behavior are ruled as acceptable (e.g. driving on the right) and others as unacceptable (e.g. driving on the left) in light of the norm. Even in the case of a bad norm (that we have no reason to follow, and which ought to be changed, and ought not prevail) classifies behaviours as acceptable or unacceptable in light of the norm. Surely norms are by definition normative? Call this conformity to social norms and actual expectations normativity2. It is not an open question whether social norms are normative in that sense – they are by definition normative2. But importantly, it is an open question whether one has good reasons, or sufficient reason, or ought, to follow any social norm – that is, whether the norm in question is normative1. -/- The first section of the article characterizes further the difference between these two senses of normativity, and additionally introduces various other candidate senses of “normativity”. These possible senses of “normativity” may be at stake in the debates about normative requirements of rationality , about so called ought-to-be -rules , about normativity of linguistic meaning , about “directions of fit” of beliefs and desires , about subjective authority of intentions and decisions and interpersonal authority or co-authority of concrete others. -/- In later sections these cases are discussed. Do they constitute separate senses of normativity? And are the later phenomena such that they give agents good reasons: do they include normativity1 – the core sense? A “normative power -model” is suggested as a framework for examining whether actual social norms, laws, expectations provide good reasons and oughts or not. Once we understand the relation between the first two senses of normativity, do the later phenomena follow the same pattern – is the “normative powers – model” relevant for them as well? (shrink)

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes. The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. The approach develops truthmaker semantics for attitudinal and modal objects and has a wide range of applications to issues in philosophy of (...) language, semantics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This anthology of the very latest research on truth features the work of recognized luminaries in the field, put together following a rigorous refereeing process. Along with an introduction outlining the central issues in the field, it provides a unique and unrivaled view of contemporary work on the nature of truth, with papers selected from key conferences in 2011 such as Truth Be Told, Truth at Work, Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation and Axiomatic Theories of Truth. Studying the nature of (...) the concept of ‘truth’ has always been a core role of philosophy, but recent years have been a boom time in the topic. With a wealth of recent conferences examining the subject from various angles, this collection of essays recognizes the pressing need for a volume that brings scholars up to date on the arguments. Offering academics and graduate students alike a much-needed repository of today’s cutting-edge work in this vital topic of philosophy, the volume is required reading for anyone needing to keep abreast of developments, and is certain to act as a catalyst for further innovation and research. (shrink)

Semantic normativism, which is the view that semantic properties/concepts are some kind of normative properties/concepts, has become increasingly influential in contemporary meta-semantics. In this paper, I aim to argue that semantic normativism has difficulty accommodating the causal efficacy of semantic properties. In specific, I raise an exclusion problem for semantic normativism, inspired by the exclusion problem in the philosophy of mind. Moreover, I attempt to show that the exclusion problem for semantic normativism is peculiarly troublesome: while we can solve mental-physical (...) exclusion by adopting the so-called ‘autonomy approach’, a similar autonomy solution to semantic exclusion is implausible if semantic properties are understood as normative properties. (shrink)

Contemporary views of truth-directedness endorse what I shall call the Common-Element Argument. According to this argument, there is something in common between judgment and other attitudes like assumption and imagination: they all regard their contents as true. Since this regarding-as-true feature is not distinctive of judgment - the argument goes - it can’t explain its truth-directedness. On this ground, theorists have been motivated to endorse an inflationary view that tries to capture truth-directedness by appealing to some further feature: intentions, second-order (...) representations, sub-personal mechanisms, or subjugation to norms are the most discussed candidates for fulfilling this role. In this paper I will argue that the Common-Element Argument is unsound. It rests on a false premise, namely that there is some common element such as a regarding-as-true component between judgment and other cognitive attitudes. I shall reject Velleman’s and Railton’s defenses of the Common-Element-Argument. Then I will discuss three influential inflationary accounts of truth-directedness: Railton’s account, Velleman’s teleological account, and Shah and Velleman’s conceptualist account. I shall argue that they all face a phenomenological and an explanatory challenge. Finally, I shall sketch a deflationary view of truth-directedness that evades these challenges. (shrink)

The distinction between objective and subjective reasons plays an important role in both folk normative thought and many research programs in metaethics. But the relation between objective and subjective reasons is unclear. This paper explores problems related to the unity of objective and subjective reasons for actions and attitudes and then offers a novel objectivist account of subjective reasons.

Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi's criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those (...) Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth. (shrink)

Belief is said to be essentially subject to a norm of truth. This view has been challenged on the ground that the truth norm cannot provide guidance on an intuitive inferentialist model of guidance and thus cannot be genuinely normative. One response to the No Guidance argument is to show how the truth norm can guide belief-formation on the inferentialist model of guidance. In this paper, I argue that this response is inadequate in light of emerging empirical evidence about our (...) system of belief-formation. I will then motivate an alternative response and present, in rough outline, a viable, reason-responsive model of epistemic guidance on which the truth norm can guide. (shrink)

Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then (...) argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know. (shrink)

Radical scepticism contends that our knowledge of the external world is impossible. Particularly, radical scepticism can be motivated by the closure principle. Several commentators have noted that a straightforward way to respond to such arguments is via externalist strategies, e.g., Goldman, Greco, Bergmann. However, these externalist strategies are not effective against a slightly weaker form of the argument, a closure principle for rationally grounded knowledge, closureRK.\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${closure}_{RK.}$$\end{document} The sceptical argument, framed around the (...) closureRK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {closure}_{\mathrm{RK}}$$\end{document} principle, targets rationally grounded knowledge. Although externalist strategies are ineffective against this form of argument, its conclusion can nonetheless be resisted by combining, in a novel way, the resources of Wittgenstein and Davidson. In particular, I argue that the sceptic is assuming an unrestricted way of using the closureRK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {closure}_{\mathrm{RK}}$$\end{document} principle, which is incorrect. Alternatively, I argue for The Conditionality of Rational Support Thesis, i.e., the thesis that rational support via competent deduction is conditional. In particular, rational support must be provided within an evaluative system in which hinge propositions are presupposed and contentful beliefs are being evaluated. In the end, we can resist the closureRK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {closure}_{\mathrm{RK }}$$\end{document}-based sceptical argument while retaining the closureRK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {closure}_{\mathrm{RK}}$$\end{document} principle. (shrink)

Adherents as well as detractors of the normativity of mental content agree that its assessment crucially depends on the assessment of a principle for believing what is true. In this paper, I present an alternative principle, which is based on possession conditions for pure thinking or mere entertaining. I argue that the alternative approach has not been sufficiently emphasised in the literature and has two important merits. First, it yields a direct analysis of the normativity of mental content, which is, (...) furthermore, independent of arguably non-normative notions such as truth. Second, the approach suggests new and challenging lines of response to central non-normativist objections. (shrink)

Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a (...) dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the (...) set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer’s linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. (shrink)

Some authors have called into question the normativity of logic, using as an argument that the bridge principles for logical normativity (MacFarlane, In what sense (in any) is logic normative for thought, 2004 )? are just by-products of general epistemic principles for belief. In this paper, I discuss that suggestion from a formal point of view. I show that some important bridge principles can be derived from usual norms for belief. I also describe some possible ways to block this derivation (...) by modifying the epistemic norms or weakening the bridge principles. Finally, I discuss different philosophical interpretations of these results. (shrink)

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.— Quine (1969).

Many philosophers working today on the normativity of language have concluded that linguistic activity is not a matter of rule following. These conversations have been framed by a conception of linguistic normativity with roots in Wittgenstein and Kripke. In this paper I use conceptual resources developed by the classical American pragmatists and their descendants to argue that punctate linguistic acts are governed by rules in a sense that has been neglected in the recent literature on the normativity of language. In (...) the course of arguing for this conclusion I defend a Kantian conception of rationality as rule-obeying activity, and I argue that this conception is compatible with a naturalistic understanding of ourselves as rational beings governed by rules of thought and action. (shrink)

Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative, since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also show that (...) since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative. (shrink)

In a recent paper (2008), I presented two arguments against the thesis that intentional states are essentially normative. In this paper, I defend those arguments from two recent responses, one from Nick Zangwill in his (2010), and one from Daniel Laurier in the present volume, and offer improvements of my arguments in light of Laurier’s criticism.

A number of authors have recently developed and defended various versions of ‘normative essentialism’ about the mental, i.e. the claim that propositional attitudes are constitutively or essentially governed by normative principles. I present two arguments to the effect that this claim cannot be right. First, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional attitude ascriptions would require non-normative justification, but since this is not a requirement of folk-psychology, propositional attitudes cannot be essentially normative. Second, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional (...) attitude ascriptions could not support normative rationality judgments, which would remove the central appeal of normative essentialism. (shrink)

In "Assertion," Geach identified failure to attend to the distinction between meaning and speech act as a source of philosophical errors. I argue that failure to attend to this distinction, along with the parallel distinction between attitude and content, has been behind the idea that meaning and content are, in some sense, normative. By an argument parallel to Geach's argument against performative analyses of "good" we can show that the phenomena identified by theorists of the normativity of content are properties (...) in the first instance of speech act and propositional attitude types, rather than content as such. (shrink)

Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder argue that invariantist accounts of disagreement are incompatible with the phenomenon of reversibility. In this essay I develop a non-standard theory of propositional attitudes, which I call attitudinal relativism. Using the resources of attitudinal relativism, I articulate an invariantist account of disagreement that is compatible with reversibility.

I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to (...) the familiar claim that zombies are conceivable, and I argue that this claim entails that there can be no positive characterizations of borderline cases of ‘phenomenally conscious’. By the Positive Characterization Thesis, it follows that ‘phenomenally conscious’ can not have any borderline cases. (shrink)

As Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, the thought that someone is thinking is true anytime anyone thinks it. Furthermore, thinking it makes it true. Conversely, anytime anyone thinks that it is not the case that someone is thinking, this thought is false, and thinking it makes it false.l will argue that the propositions ‘There is at least one true normative proposition’ and ‘There are no true normative propositions’ have very similar properties. The proposition ‘There is at least (...) one true normative proposition,’ like the proposition ‘Someone is thinking,’ is true anytime anyone believes it, and, in an important sense, it is made true by someone's believing it. Conversely, anytime anyone believes that there are no true normative propositions, the proposition he believes is false and his believing it makes it false. (shrink)

A paradox is presented that the poses new problems for both the truth norm and the knowledge norm of belief.

Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue (...) that the second half of this claim, according to which the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness, is required to explain the fact that the deliberative question whether to believe that p is transparent to the question whether p. This argument raises various questions. Is there such a thing as deliberating whether to believe? Is the transparency of the deliberative question whether to believe that p the same as the transparency of the factual question whether I do believe that p? We will begin by answering these questions and then turn to a series of possible objections to our argument. (shrink)

When we deliberate whether to believe some proposition, we feel immediately compelled to look for evidence of its truth. Philosophers have labelled this feature of doxastic deliberation 'transparency'. I argue that resolving the disagreement in the ethics of belief between evidentialists and pragmatists turns on the correct explanation of transparency. My hypothesis is that it reflects a conceptual truth about belief: a belief that p is correct if and only if p. This normative truth entails that only evidence can be (...) a reason for belief. Although evidentialism does not follow directly from the mere psychological truth that we cannot believe for non-evidential reasons, it does follow directly from the normative conceptual truth about belief which explains why we cannot do so. (shrink)

The thought that truth is valuable for its own sake is obvious, yet difficult to explicate in a precise and vindicating way. The paper tries to explicate and vindicate this thought with an argument for the conclusion that truth is an epistemic value. Truth is an epistemic value in the sense that a commitment to the value of truth plays a role in the justification and explanation of a fundamental aspect of our epistemic practice, namely, critical reflection. The paper also (...) argues that this feature of truth is inconsistent with deflationary accounts of truth. The ideas are set against the backdrop of criticism of some recent work by Paul Horwich. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that beliefs are constitutively normative from two kinds of objection. After clarifying what a “blindspot” proposition is and the different types of blindspots there can be, I show that the existence of such propositions does not undermine the thesis that beliefs are essentially governed by a negative truth norm. I argue that the “normative variance” exhibited by this norm is not a defect. I also argue that if we accept a distinction between subjective and objective norms (...) there need be no worrying tension between doxastic norms of truth and doxastic norms of evidence. I show how a similar approach applies to the attitude of guessing. I then suggest that if we distinguish between practical and theoretical rationality, we will prefer a negative form of norm that does not positively oblige us to form beliefs. I finish by considering an alternative possible subjunctive form of norm that would also avoid problems with blindspots but suggest this has a non-intuitive consequence. (shrink)

From the dictum "ought implies can", it has been argued that no account of belief's normativity can avoid the unpalatable result that, for unbelievable propositions such as "It is raining and nobody believes that it is raining", one ought not to believe them even if true. In this article, I argue that this move only succeeds on a faulty assumption about the conjunction of doxastic "oughts.".

I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and being (...) part of those groups depends on having certain beliefs (e.g. about welfare spending). Even if a decrease in welfare spending would be bad for me, I might still benefit by believing in and, consequently, voting for a decrease since my vote is unlikely to make a difference but getting to see myself as a rugged individualist will make a noticeable difference to my wellbeing. It is sometimes argued that this hypothesis fails for empirical reasons. I will argue that things are worse: it is conceptually incoherent. I will do so by first showing that it is a rationalizing explanation and then argue that rationalizing explanations must be reflectively stable from the agent's perspective. The rational irrationality hypothesis is not. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: SATS Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 1 Seiten: 55-77.

According to the Group Mind Hypothesis, a group can have beliefs over and above the beliefs of the individual members of the group. Some maintain that there can be group mentality of this kind in the absence of any group-level phenomenal consciousness. We present a challenge to the latter view. First, we argue that a state is not a belief unless the owner of the state is disposed to access the state’s content in a corresponding conscious judgment. Thus, if there (...) is no such thing as group consciousness, then we cannot literally ascribe beliefs to groups. Secondly, we respond to an objection that appeals to the distinction between ‘access consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. According to the objection, the notion of consciousness appealed to in our argument must be access consciousness, whereas our argument is only effective if it is about phenomenal consciousness. In response, we question both parts of the objection. Our argument can still be effective provided there are reasons to believe a system or creature cannot have access consciousness if it lacks phenomenal consciousness altogether. Moreover, our argument for the necessary accessibility to consciousness of beliefs does concern phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

According to doxastic normativism, part of what makes an attitude a belief rather than another type of attitude is that it is governed by a truth-norm. It has been objected that this view fails since there are true propositions such that if you believed them they would not be true, and thus the obligation to believe true propositions cannot hold for these. I argue that the solution for doxastic normativists is to find a norm that draws the right distinction between (...) those true propositions we are obliged to believe (“ordinary non-tricky propositions”) and those we are not (“tricky propositions”). I develop a norm which I argue does exactly this, and further argue that it can be used to salvage the idea that belief is constitutively normative. (shrink)

Abstract This paper discusses the semantic theory presented in Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit . I argue that it is best understood as a special version of dynamic semantics, so that these semantics by themselves offer an interesting theoretical alternative to more standard truth-conditional theories. This reorientation also has implications for more foundational issues. I argue that it gives us the resources for a renewed argument for the normativity of meaning. The paper ends by critically assessing the view in both (...) its development and motivations. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-22 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9768-4 Authors Bernhard Nickel, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

This paper argues that truth predicates in natural language and their variants, predicates of correctness, satisfaction and validity, do not apply to propositions (not even with 'that'-clauses), but rather to a range of attitudinal and modal objects. As such natural language reflects a notion of truth that is primarily a normative notion of correctness constitutive of representational objects. The paper moreover argues that 'true' is part of a larger class of satisfaction predicates whose semantic differences are best accounted for in (...) terms of a truthmaker theory along the lines of Fine's recent truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

This paper argues that attitudinal objects, entities of the sort of John's judgment, John's thought, and John's claim, should play the role of propositions, as the cognitive products of cognitive acts, not the acts themselves.

In this paper, I argue that the “Ought Implies Can” (OIC) principle, as it is employed in epistemology, particularly in the literature on epistemic norms, is open to counterexamples. I present a counterexample to OIC and discuss several objections to it. If this counterexample works, then it shows that it is possible that S ought to believe that p, even though S cannot believe that p. If this is correct, then OIC, considered from an epistemic point of view, is false, (...) since it is supposed to hold for any S and any p. (shrink)

Much of the recent literature on the normativity of belief has focused on undermining or defending narrow scope readings of doxastic norms. Wide scope readings are largely assumed to have been decisively refuted. This paper will oppose this trend by defending a wide scope reading of the norm of belief. We shall argue for the modest claim that if it is plausible to regard belief as constitutively normative (in the minimal sense that false belief is eo ipso defective), then a (...) modified version of the wide scope reading of the norm of belief should be preferred to the narrow scope reading. (This is subject to certain attractive conditions relating to the holism involved in the fixation and confirmation of belief.). (shrink)