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)

Is understanding epistemic in nature? Does a correct account of what constitutes understanding of a concept mention epistemological notions such as knowledge, justification or epistemic rationality? We defend the view that understanding is epistemic in nature – we defend epistemological conceptions of understanding. We focus our discussion with a critical evaluation of Tim Williamson's challenges to epistemological conceptions of understanding in The Philosophy of Philosophy. Against Williamson, we distinguish three kinds of epistemological conceptions and argue that Williamson's arguments succeed against (...) only the most heavily committed kind, and leave the less heavily committed kinds untouched. Further, we argue that Williamson's elaboration of lessons from his arguments point in a direction opposite of his own conclusions and give vivid articulation and support to epistemological conceptions. We suggest also that skepticism about Williamson's larger metaphilosophical conclusions – according to which understanding plays no special role in the epistemology of philosophy – may be in order. (shrink)

Many metaphysical controversies can be understood as debates over whether some alleged entities are metaphysically possible. No doubt, with regard to these matters, we may have opinions or theories, commonsensical or sophisticated. But do we have knowledge of them? Can we really know that something is metaphysically possible, and if so, how? Several different answers have been offered in the literature, intending to illustrate how we may have knowledge of metaphysical modality. In this paper, I concentrate on a proposal by (...) Timothy Williamson. On this account, our alleged knowledge of metaphysical modality is justified by and grounded in our capacity to handle ordinary mundane counterfactual conditionals. However, I argue that Williamson’s account fails, mainly because the modality involved in ordinary mundane counterfactuals is causal, and thus our capacity to handle them still falls short of giving us any knowledge of metaphysical modality. In the end of the paper, I also provide my own answer to the question. My answer is a sceptical one: we do not really have knowledge of metaphysical modality. But such ignorance is harmless, or so I argue. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

La rinascita negli ultimi decenni di un nutrito dibattito intorno alla nozione di analiticità dopo le critiche a suo tempo mosse da Quine alla batteria di nozioni utilizzate da Rudolf Carnap (ad esempio, postulati di significato, regole semantiche, definizioni implicite, convenzioni e stipulazioni esplicite) prende le mosse da una riflessione critica sulle argomentazioni di Quine e tenta, da un lato, di approfondire meglio il legame fra analiticità e conoscenza a priori, e, dall’altro, di capire meglio il ruolo che la definizione (...) può svolgere nella costituzione del significato e nella formulazione di verità concettuali. Questa nuova concezione è detta “epistemica” ed ha fra i suoi più autorevoli fautori Crispin Wright, Bob Hale e Paul Boghossian. Boghossian, al pari di molti filosofi critici della nuova concezione epistemica, come Timothy Williamson, conviene però con Quine nel sostenere che gli enunciati analitici hanno portata fattuale e vertono anch’essi sul mondo, oltre che sul linguaggio. Anche per questa ragione essi possono rendere possibile una genuina estensione delle nostre conoscenze. Tuttavia una seconda linea di obiezioni facenti capo dapprima a Paul Horwich, e in seguito agli stessi Wright e Hale, mette in evidenza rispettivamente due difficoltà corrispondenti alle questioni dell’arroganza e dell’accettazione. In questa discussione una parte importante è svolta dalla ripresa e della discussione del condizionale di Carnap, impiegato per rendere conto del ruolo che i termini teorici svolgono nel quadro dell’intera teoria cui appartengono, senza con ciò sposare le conseguenze dell’olismo quineano. La tesi centrale che questo lavoro cerca di rendere plausibile è che una lettura attenta degli ultimi scritti di Carnap mostri come il carattere aperto che egli attribuisce ai termini teorici in ragione, sia dello loro intrinseca indeterminatezza, sia delle revisioni imposte dalle scoperte scientifiche, è perfettamente compatibile con la fattorizzazione del contenuto di una teoria scientifica data in una parte linguistica, il condizionale di Carnap, riguardante la costituzione del significato di un certo termine teorico, e nella sua controparte empirica, che consente di registrare l’impatto dell’esperienza sulla teoria in questione. Se praticabile, questa concezione può a buon diritto entrare nel novero delle teorie epistemiche dell’analiticità, senza accampare alcuna pretesa di far rivivere i fasti della conoscenza a priori classica. (shrink)

What I will call “the deviant logician objection” [DLO] is one line of attack against the common and compelling tenet that our justification for logical truths is grounded in our understanding of their constituent concepts. This objection seeks to undermine the possibility of any deep constitutive connection, in the epistemology of logic, between understanding and justification. I will consider varieties of the deviant logician objection developed by Horwich and by Williamson. My thesis is that while the deviant logician objection falls (...) short of proving that this traditional tenet must be rejected, nonetheless it serves to bolster some important refinements. (shrink)

In response to Paul Boghossian's objections in ‘Inferentialism and the epistemology of logic’, this paper defends counterexamples offered by Paolo Casalegno and the author to an inferentialist account of what it is to understand a logical constant, on which Boghossian had relied in his explanation of our entitlement to reason according to basic logical principles. The importance for understanding is stressed of non-inferential aspects of the use of logical constants. Boghossian's criteria for individuating concepts are also queried.

In this paper I develop an account of petitio principii (the fallacy sometimes also called ‘vicious circularity’, or ‘begging the question’) which has two crucial features: it employs the notion of doxastic justification, and it takes circularity to be relative to an evidential state. According to my account, an argument will be circular relative to an evidential state if and only if having doxastic justification for the conclusion is necessary, for a subject in that evidential state, to have doxastic justification (...) for the premisses. I compare the account to some existing ones, and claim some advantages. I then rebut an objection which threatens to undermine the importance of one of those advantages. This account seems to shed new light on the old problem of characterizing petitio principii. It avoids the two obvious problems which any account of this phenomenon must face: being too narrow, for example by leaving out all arguments in which the conclusion does not appear among the premisses, and being too wide, making all valid arguments circular. (shrink)

Several recent epistemologists have used understanding-assent links in theories of a priori knowledge and justification, but Williamson influentially argued against the existence of such links. Here I (1) clarify the nature of understanding-assent links and their role in epistemology; (2) clarify and clearly formulate Williamson’s arguments against their existence; (3) argue that Williamson has failed to successfully establish his conclusion; and (4) rebut Williamson’s claim that accepting understanding-assent links amounts to a form of dogmatism.

Williamson ( 2007 ) argues that philosophers acquire no philosophical knowledge at all by semantic understanding alone. He further argues that the most important method used for achieving philosophical knowledge is through the ‘imaginative simulation’ process some of whose products are neither a priori nor a posteriori but ‘armchair’ knowledge. We argue in this paper that the way Williamson argues against the claim that semantic understanding alone is enough to achieve philosophical knowledge can be paralleled by an exactly similar argument (...) against his view that imaginative simulation alone is enough to achieve philosophical knowledge. Because of the parallel argument, we conclude that Williamson’s argument against semantic understanding shows at most that it is fallible, if used alone, as a method for achieving philosophical knowledge. We also point out a blind spot in Williamson’s argument for his epistemology of modality: a reliable method for achieving knowledge about subjunctive conditionals is not necessarily a reliable method for achieving knowledge about modal statements even if every modal statement is logically equivalent to some subjunctive conditional. Finally, we argue that, with a suitable understanding of ‘understanding the meaning,’ Williamson’s armchair knowledge is nothing but the a priori knowledge of those good-old-days philosophy. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that mathematical knowledge must be a priori, since mathematical truths are necessary, and experience tells us only what is true, not what must be true. This argument can be undermined either by showing that experience can yield knowledge of the necessity of some truths, or by arguing that mathematical theorems are contingent. Recent work by Albert Casullo and Timothy Williamson argues (or can be used to argue) the first of these lines; W. V. Quine and Hartry (...) Field take the latter line. I defend a version of the argument against these, and other objections. (shrink)

According to the most popular account of the a priori, which we might call Analytic Account of the A Priori, we can explain the a priori in terms of the notion of analyticity. According to the least popular account of the a priori, the explanation of the a priori proceeds by appealing to the faculties used in the acquisition of a priori knowledge, such as the faculty of rational intuition – call this Rationalist Account of the A Priori. The main (...) aim of this paper is to challenge the analytic account of the a priori to motivate a return to rationalism. To achieve this aim, I discuss and challenge two very different analytic accounts of the a priori: a concept-based account that relies on meaning-justification links, and an understanding-based account that does not rely on such links. I argue that the former is both extensionally inadequate and explanatorily deficient, and the latter can be made to work but only by employing such a rich notion of understanding that renders it a form of rationalism in disguise. I conclude by motivating a rationalist faculty-based account of the a priori. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an algorithmic impossible-worlds model of belief and knowledge that provides a middle ground between models that entail that everyone is logically omniscient and those that are compatible with even the most egregious kinds of logical incompetence. In outline, the model entails that an agent believes (knows) φ just in case she can easily (and correctly) compute that φ is true and thus has the capacity to make her actions depend on whether φ. The model thereby (...) captures the standard view that belief and knowledge ground are constitutively connected to dispositions to act. As I explain, the model improves upon standard algorithmic models developed by Parikh, Halpern, Moses, Vardi, and Duc, among other ways, by integrating them into an impossible-worlds framework. The model also avoids some important disadvantages of recent candidate middle-ground models based on dynamic epistemic logic or step logic, and it can subsume their most important advantages. (shrink)

Two-dimensional (2D) semantics is a formal framework that is used to characterize the meaning of certain linguistic expressions and the entailment relations among sentences containing them. 2D semantics has also been applied to thought contents. In contrast with standard possible worlds semantics, 2D semantics assigns extensions and truth-values to expressions relative to two possible world parameters, rather than just one. So a 2D semantic framework provides finer-grained semantic values than those available within standard possible world semantics, while using the same (...) basic model-theoretic resources. The 2D framework itself is just a formal tool. To develop a semantic theory for someone’s language, a proponent of 2D semantics must do three things: (i) explain what exactly the two possible world parameters represent, (ii) explain the rules for assigning 2D semantic values to a person’s words and sentences, and (iii) explain how 2D semantic values help in understanding the meanings of the person’s words and sentences. (shrink)

It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...) I argue that the psychological claim — that a capacity for mental simulation explains our intuitive judgements — does not, even if true, provide reasons to reject rationalism. (More generally, a simulation hypothesis, about any category of judgements, is very limited in its epistemological implications: it is pitched at a level of explanation that is insensitive to central epistemic distinctions.) I also argue that Williamson’s semantic claim — that intuitive judgements are judgements of counterfactuals — is mistaken; rather, I propose, they are a certain kind of metaphysical possibility judgement. Several other competing proposals are also examined and criticized. (shrink)

I discuss several problems for Williamson’s counterfactual-theory of modal knowledge and argue that they have a common source, in that the theory neglects to elucidate the proper constraints on modal reasoning. Williamson puts forward an empirical hypothesis that rests on the role of counterfactual reasoning for modal knowledge. But he overlooks central questions of normative modal epistemology. In order for counterfactual reasoning to yield correct beliefs about modality, it needs to be suitably constrained. I argue that what is needed is, (...) specifically, information concerning the nature or essence of things. By integrating this information, essentialist deduction arguably provides a better account of our knowledge of modality. Furthermore, I argue that essences have distinctive causal and explanatory powers—indeed, essences are superexplanatory for how things are. Compared to Williamson’s counterfactual-theory, superexplanatory essentialism clarifies what the proper constraints on modal reasoning are, and why they have such a special status. (shrink)

One way to discredit the suggestion that a statement is true just in virtue of its meaning is to observe that its truth is the subject of genuine disagreement. By appealing to the case of the unorthodox philosopher, Timothy Williamson has recast this response as an argument foreclosing any appeal to analyticity. Reconciling Quine’s epistemological holism with his treatment of the ‘deviant logician’, I show that we may discharge the demands of charitable interpretation even while attributing trivial semantic error to (...) Williamson’s philosophers. Williamson’s effort to generalize the argument from disagreement therefore fails. (shrink)

Many think that expressivists have a special problem with negation. I disagree. For if there is a problem with negation, I argue, it is a problem shared by those who accept some plausible claims about the nature of intentionality. Whether there is any special problem for expressivists turns, I will argue, on whether facts about what truth-conditions beliefs have can explain facts about basic inferential relations among those beliefs. And I will suggest that the answer to this last question is, (...) on most plausible attempts at solving the problem of intentionality, ‘no’. (shrink)

Jurado: Mario Gómez-Torrente (presidente), Miguel Ángel Fernández Vargas (vocal), Santiago Echeverri Saldarriaga (secretario). [Graduado con Mención Honorífica.].

The view that contradictions cannot be true has been part of accepted philosophical theory since at least the time of Aristotle. In this regard, it is almost unique in the history of philosophy. Only in the last forty years has the view been systematically challenged with the advent of dialetheism. Since Graham Priest introduced dialetheism as a solution to certain self-referential paradoxes, the possibility of true contradictions has been a live issue in the philosophy of logic. Yet, despite the arguments (...) advanced by dialetheists, many logicians and philosophers still hold the opinion that contradictions cannot be true. -/- Rather than advocating the truth of certain contradictions, this thesis offers a different challenge to the classical logician. By showing that it can be philosophically coherent to propose that true contradictions are metaphysically possible, the thesis suggests that the classical logician must do more than she currently has to justify her confidence in the impossibility of true contradictions. Simply fighting off the dialetheist’s putative examples of true contradictions at the actual world isn’t enough to justify the classical logician’s conclusion that true contradictions are impossible. -/- To aid the thesis dialectically, we introduce a new position, absolutism, which hypothesises that it’s metaphysically possible for at least one contradiction to be true, contrasting with the dialetheic hypothesis that some contradictions are true in the actual world. We demonstrate that absolutism can be given a philosophically coherent interpretation, an appropriate logic, and that certain criticisms are completely toothless against absolutism. The challenge put to the classical logician is then: On what logical or philosophical grounds can we rule out the metaphysical possibility of true contradictions? (shrink)

The historical consensus is that logical evidence is special. Whereas empirical evidence is used to support theories within both the natural and social sciences, logic answers solely to a priori evidence. Further, unlike other areas of research that rely upon a priori evidence, such as mathematics, logical evidence is basic. While we can assume the validity of certain inferences in order to establish truths within mathematics and test scientifi c theories, logicians cannot use results from mathematics or the empirical sciences (...) without seemingly begging the question. Appeals to rational intuition and analyticity in order to account for logical knowledge are symptomatic of these commitments to the apriority and basicness of logical evidence. This chapter argues that these historically prevalent accounts of logical evidence are mistaken, and that if we take logical practice seriously we fi nd that logical evidence is rather unexceptional, sharing many similarities to the types of evidence appealed to within other research areas. (shrink)

What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...) thinkers have general abilities to respond to support and tension among their thoughts. And these abilities are constituted by following logical rules. So thinkers have to follow logical rules. But there isn’t just one correct logic for thinking. I show that my view is consistent with logical pluralism: there are a range of correct logics, any one of which a thinker might follow. A logic for thinking does, however, have to contain certain minimal principles: Modus Ponens and Non-Contradiction, and perhaps others. We follow logical rules by exercising logical capacities, which display a distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry: a subject can find the instances of a rule compelling without seeing them as instances of a rule. As a result, there are two limits on illogical thinking. First, thinkers have to tend to find instances of logical rules compelling. Second, thinkers can’t think in obviously illogical ways. So thinking has to be logical – but not perfectly so. When we try to think, but fail, we produce nonsense. But our failures to think are often subjectively indistinguishable from thinking. To explain how this occurs, I offer an account of nonsense. To be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. Our use of nonsense within the pretence relies on the role of logical form in understanding. Finally, while the normativity of logic doesn’t fall directly out of logical constitutivism, it’s possible to build an attractive account of logical normativity which has logical constitutivism as an integral part. I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing, and that this is the source of logical normativity. (shrink)