We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the (...) content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sentences and you proceed to the content of words.” Brandom’s official view seems to be that he’s talking about explanatory priorities (see the preceding quote); but we think that can’t really be what he has in mind, and we can’t find any alternative interpretation that seems plausible. Speaking just for ourselves, we’re inclined towards a relatively pragmatic view of explanation; what explanation we should “start with” depends, inter alia, on what it’s an explanation of and whom it’s an explanation for. But, in any case, we would have thought that explanatory priority is of more than heuristic interest only if it reflects a priority of some other kind: ontological, semantical, psychological, or whatever. In talking about what one “starts with”, Brandom must be claiming more than. (shrink)

This work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community‐oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments that we might consider sound and commitments that we might consider delusional, both in terms of how they arise and in terms of how (...) they may be reinforced. Delusions are accordingly rendered in perspectival and normative terms, which is elaborated through a number of examples. The picture of how a delusional commitment may be understood, how it may be reinforced, and its character as community internal or external provide some interesting perspectives on delusions in shared social contexts, as well as how they may originate intractable conflicts and disconnects between sub‐groups within a broader linguistic community. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of truthmaking has flourished in recent times, but what exactly does it mean to ‘make’ a truth-bearer true? I argue that ‘making’ is a concept with modal force, and this renders it a problematic deployment for truthmaker theorists with nominalist sympathies, which characterises most current theories. I sketch the outlines of what I argue is a more genuinely realist truthmaker theory, which is capable of answering the explanatory question: In virtue of what does each particular truthmaker make its (...) particular truthbearer(s) true? I do this by drawing on recent work by Frederik Stjernfelt on Charles Peirce’s account of the proposition as having a ‘particular double structure’, according to which a proposition not only depicts certain characters of an object, it also depicts itself claiming those characters to pertain to the object. This double structure, I shall argue, also resolves important issues in analytic philosophers’ truthmaker theory, including the proper distinction between reference and truthmaking, and a dilemma concerning an infinite regress of truthmaking. (shrink)

Mental representations—like many other things—seem to have parts. However, it isn’t clear how to properly understand the idea of a part of a representation. In this paper I shed new light on how representations can have a mereology. In particular, it has been recognized that there is a mereological element to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of representations: intuitions and concepts. A concept depends upon its parts, whereas an intuition is prior to its parts. The paper thus focuses on an (...) exploration of how to make sense of the parts and wholes of intuitions and concepts. (shrink)

On Brandom’s view, we can understand objectivity in terms of the view that what is objectively correct potentially transcends any given attitude. But Levine challenges this view. He distinguishes between two questions of objectivity: ‘How do we grasp the concept of objectivity?’ and ‘What determines the difference between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct?’ And he argues that Brandom’s account of objectivity fails to address the second question of objectivity. Furthermore, based on classical pragmatist views, (...) he defends an alternative account, which he calls ‘an experiential-theoretical account of objectivity’. I agree with Levine that Brandom’s structural account of objectivity can hardly answer the second question of objectivity. In this paper, however, I argue that we can answer the second question of objectivity without accepting Levine’s claim that experience has a rational bearing on the contents of empirical thoughts. (shrink)

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, (...) but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections. (shrink)

Robert Brandom argues for a “pragmatic phenomenalist account” of knowledge. On this account, we should understand our notion of justification in accordance with a Sellarsian social practice model, and there is nothing more to the phenomenon of knowledge than the proprieties of takings-as-knowing. I agree with these two claims. But Brandom's proposal is so sketchy that it is unclear how it can deal with a number of much-discussed problems in contemporary epistemology. The main purpose of this article is to develop (...) and defend a pragmatic phenomenalist account of knowledge by resolving those problems. I argue, in particular, that this account can accommodate both the lesson of the Gettier problem and the lesson of reliabilism simultaneously. -/- RÉSUMÉ: Robert Brandom soutient une «théorie pragmatique et phénomenaliste» de la connaissance. Selon cette théorie, nous devons comprendre notre notion de justification d'après un modèle sellarsien de la pratique sociale, et il n'y a rien d'autre dans phénomène de connaissance que la pertinence de «prendre-pour-connaître». Je suis tout à fait d'accord avec ces deux opinions. Mais la thèse de Brandom est si sommaire qu'il n'est pas évident de savoir comment elle peut trailer les nombreux problèmes discutés en épistémologie contemporaine. Le but principal de cet article est de développer et défendre une théorie pragmatique et phénomenaliste de la connaissance en résolvant ces problèmes. Je soutiens, en particulier, que cette théorie peut s'accorder en même temps à lerçon du problème de Gettier et au «fiabilisme». (shrink)

According to the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the application of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the norms governing its application. But this view faces some serious objections. In particular, according to Rosen, Glüer and Wikforss, this view leads to a vicious regress of norms. The purpose of this paper is to defend a version of the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts (...) against this objection. I argue that we can deal with this problem along the lines of a coherentist account of justification. (shrink)

The problem of epistemic circularity involved in justifying fundamental epistemic principles is one of the fundamental problems of epistemology. One important way out of this problem is a Sellarsian social practice theory of justification, according to which we are justified in accepting an epistemic principle if we can answer all objections raised against it in our social practice of demanding justification and responding to such demands. The main goal of this paper is to show that this social practice theory can (...) accomplish better than its rival theories, such as Alston’s doxastic practice approach, Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, and Wright’s entitlement theory, by making comparisons with these influential theories. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

We argue that probability mistakes indicate that at least some of us often do not adequately possess the concept of probability (and its cognates) and that the digital dissemination of such misinfo...

This article tackles the problem of normativity in naturalism and considers it in the context of the philosophy of historiography. I argue that strong naturalism is inconsistent with genuine normat...

This essay first traces change in, roughly, the epistemology of the humanities from the 1950s to the 21st century. The second section looks at how the meaning and options in moral philosophy altered in more or less the same period. The last and easily most speculative section examines how these changes permeated American culture, and how professional philosophers responded to the challenges of the new political world they inhabited.

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. My own view, however, is that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. In this paper, I critically examine one particularly interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. A minimalist view about the value of examining our concept of knowledge is defended.

Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of the conceptual (...) within our practices. This is done by first drawing on considerations furnished by a Wittgensteinean branch in analytic philosophy recently developed by Robert Brandom. With an account of conceptual normativity and reflexivity in hand, the article turns second to a crucial site of conceptual self-transformation by drawing on work from a particular Foucauldian lineage developed in the work of Arnold Davidson. Davidson's work helps us understand the crucial status of concepts of persons for any historical inquiry into practices. (shrink)

This article investigates the concept and the construction of judicial discretion. The strengths and weaknesses of both Dworkin and Hart are analysed, and in view of these, it is argued that a full picture of judicial discretion is between the two extremes. Thus, a moderate theory of judicial discretion is maintained which is based on achievements by Robert Alexy (2002b). The article develops a balancing model of discretion and relates it to the theory of legal argumentation. The limits of discretion (...) and the relation between structural (strong) and epistemic (weak) discretion are addressed in detail, both with illustrations from the jurisdiction of the German Federal Constitutional Court. (shrink)

What is the core of legal scholarship? How can we understand its relation to other disciplines, such as moral and political philosophy, sociology, and economics? I explore these questions by analysing the impact of the dual nature thesis. Criticising established theories of legal scholarship, I defend the ideal of an integrative jurisprudence. Integrative jurisprudence combines the two dimensions of law by employing analytical, empirical, and normative methods. I then discuss three objections and address the problem of how to bridge is (...) and ought. In the course of my analysis of three different bridge theories, I ultimately further develop the dual nature thesis into a triadic nature thesis. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory is becoming an all-encompassing form of explanation in many branches of philosophy. However, emergence theory uses the concept of self-organization to support yet alter traditional evolutionary explanation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman suggests that the new science will need to tell stories, not simply as a heuristic device but as part of its fundamental task. This claim is reminiscent of C. S. Peirce’s criticism of the doctrine of necessity. Peirce’s suggestions reference Hegel, and this essay draws out this Hegelian background. (...) In particular, it addresses the question of subjectivity and issues some Hegelian reminders so that such evolutionary and emergent theories will consider the implication of this research program on philosophy of mind. The essay focuses primarily on two post-Kantian, neo-Hegelian thinkers in contemporary philosophy who deal with this problem: John McDowell and Robert Brandom. (shrink)

A key requirement for the automatic generation of argumentative or explanatory text is to present the constituent propositions in an order that readers will find coherent and natural, to increase the likelihood that they will understand and accept the author’s claims. Natural language generation systems have standardly employed a repertoire of coherence relations such as those defined by Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory. This paper models the generation of persuasive monologue as the outcome of an “inner dialogue”, where the (...) author attempts to anticipate potential challenges or clarification requests. It is argued that certain RST relations such as Motivate, Evidence and Concession can be seen to emerge from various pre-empting strategies. (shrink)

There was a time when meta-ethical expressivism seemed to be the only game in town for meta-ethical non-representationalists. In recent years, though, meta-ethical inferentialism has emerged as a promising non-representationalist alternative. So far, however, inferentialists lack something that would really allow them to draw level with expressivists. This is an explanation for the distinctive difference between normative and descriptive vocabulary when it comes to disagreement—something expressivists can explain in terms of the difference between representational and desire-like states and which constitutes (...) one of the primary motivations for expressivism. This paper develops a novel and distinctive account for this difference on behalf of inferentialists, based on the different functions of these two vocabularies. Not only does this account help inferentialists, it also shows how non-representionalist accounts can capture the relevant disagreement phenomena without appealing to the sorts of desire-like states expressivists tend to appeal to. (shrink)

The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I provide new defences against some (...) recent objections to the underconsideration argument, while also developing an account of explanatory inference that both survives these criticisms and does not entail realism. (shrink)

Nous montrons dans cet article comment les approches dynamiques en logique contemporaine ont retrouvé, quoique sous d ’ autres attendus, une configuration théorique qu ’ on peut attribuer à Aristote au moment de la rédaction des Topiques. Dans cette configuration, la logique et la rhétorique – ou au moins la dialectique – se complètent dans le cadre conceptuel homogène offert par la dialectique, entendue comme une certaine forme relativement codifiée de débat critique. L ’ idée principale est qu ’ aujourd (...) ’ hui, de même qu ’ alors, la dialectique est le cadre dans lequel il est possible de penser le rapport entre la logique et les formes générales de l ’ argumentation d ’ une part, et entre la logique et la théorie de la connaissance scientifique d ’ autre part. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well explained by this explanatory framework? This article provides a novel response to this enduring objection. First, following Brandom, it is suggested that, to understand the normativity of intentional states, we should countenance and distinguish between two normative categories of commitment and entitlement, only the former of which is argued to be essential (...) for intentional explanations. Conflating these two normative dimensions is noted to be one of the main sources of the objections leveled against the view. Second, it is shown that the committive dimension is rich and flexible enough to accommodate all the apparently problematic cases. (shrink)

In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well exp...

In this paper I investigate the nature of the relation between meaning-interdependence and analyticity. The theory within which meaning-interdependence reaches its peak and becomes omnipresent is meaning holism, according to which every two expressions are meaning-interdependent. A lot of people reject holism partially due to the impression that the theory leads to the picture in which language is self-sufficient in the sense that it is nothing but a game of meanings which is detached from reality. What stands behind that impression (...) is probably something along the lines: analyticity stems from meaning-interdependence, so if all expressions are meaning-interdependent, then everything appears analytic. I defend holism from this kind of objection. I start with showing that analyticity traditionally understood cannot pour over language within holism, because it is not applicable to the theory at all. Then, I argue that adopting some weaker notion of analyticity leads to the ubiquity of analyticity indeed, but analyticity so understood is too weak to actually endanger holism. Finally, I demonstrate that the problems with analyticity appear only when meaning-interdependence is treated in extremely superficial way. I also propose a very simple hierarchy of meaning-interdependence, based on Pagin’s total-pair holism, which immediately repeal the ‘ubiquitous analyticity’ problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the idea that language is a rule‐constituted and rule‐governed practice. This notion has been criticised recently. It has been claimed that, even if linguistic meaning is determined by rules, these rules are not genuinely normative because they do not govern actions within the practice by themselves. It has been emphasised that one needs to consent (e.g., has relevant intention or desire) to be a part of that practice. First, I distinguish between two issues: (1) (...) How do rules come to life? (and the answer to that question is by enactment or communal acceptance), and (2) does being assessed by the standards set by the rules require some form of consent for one's actions to be evaluated by these standards? Then, I demonstrate how, by introducing the notion of “default normativity”, one can defend the idea that there are normative practices that are constituted and governed by rules and that language is one of them. (shrink)

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (shrink)

According to Brandom, perceptual knowledge is the product of two distinguishable capacities: the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli, and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlements and commitments of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a (...) blind spot, which makes Brandom’s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects. (shrink)

This paper explores the cognitive developments underlying conventionalized social phenomena such as language and ownership. What do children make of the claims that, 'This is mine' or 'That is called "water"?' Understanding these features of social reality involves appreciating status as a system of normative prescriptions. Research on children's theories of intentional agency suggests important constraints on the development of status systems. Key insights are that prescriptions affect behavior only via representations, and that the norms involved in prescriptions are distinct (...) from statements of preferences. When do children appreciate the normative structure of social facts, and what kinds of experiences might advance their understanding? (shrink)

This essay seeks to clarify the meaning and nature of normativity in metaethics and offers reasons why comparative religious ethics (CRE) must properly address questions about normativity. Though many comparative religious ethicists take CRE to be a normative discipline, what they say about normativity is often unclear and confusing. I argue that the third‐wave scholars face serious questions with respect to not only the justification of moral belief but also the rationality of moral belief and action. These scholars tend to (...) view the justification of moral belief to be a matter of process (that is, discursive social practice) rather than evidence‐possession, thus overlooking crucial differences between the two. They also run the risk of confusing motivating and explanatory reasons with normative reasons for moral belief and action. Consequently, their account of normativity would be insufficient for determining the rationality of moral beliefs and actions as well as for justifying moral beliefs. (shrink)

On a representationalist view, conceptual engineering is the practice of changing the extensions and intensions of the devices we use to speak and think. But if this view holds true, conceptual engineering has a bad rationale. Extensions and intensions are not the sorts of things that are better or worse as such. A representationalist account of conceptual engineering thus falls prey to the objection that the practice has a bad rationale. To account for the assumption that conceptual engineering is worthwhile, (...) we propose to view what is being engineered as inferential devices, as opposed to representational devices. The objective is not to establish that being or having an inferential role is all there is to meaning or conceptual content. Rather, our agenda is to recommend a shift of focus from the representational features of content to the inferential features of content for the purposes of doing and thinking about conceptual engineering. Inferentialism about conceptual engineering makes better sense of the practice than a representationalist approach: In addition to accounting for the rationality of engaging in conceptual engineering, inferentialism provides a sound interpretation of what is at stake in concrete examples of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these (...) norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection. (shrink)

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands (...) semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts. (shrink)

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In (...) this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. -/- Published online first 27 January 2021. (shrink)

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

P.F. Strawson contributed to many philosophical domains, including the philosophy of language, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy and philosophical methodology. Most of his contributions in these areas have influenced contemporary debates, either because his views are still defended or because they are still considered worthy of detailed responses. His views on the philosophy of logic have been only rarely discussed, however. My aim in this paper is threefold. First, I provide a systematic account of Strawson’s philosophy of logic. (...) I argue that Strawson is an important predecessor of logical expressivism, a contemporary position in the philosophy of logic most notably defended by Robert Brandom. My main focus is on Strawson’s largely-neglected 1982 paper ‘Logical Form and Logical Constants’, which contains his most mature ideas on the topic. Second, while Strawson’s position is of historical and independent philosophical interest, I argue that he leaves many points unclear. Finally, I propose several clarifications of Strawson’s position. (shrink)

Robert Brandom and John McDowell pursue similar, yet strikingly different approaches to a shared problem: that of how we can be answerable to the world in our beliefs about it in the wake of Sellars' critique of the myth of the given. While McDowell attempts to rehabilitate the idea that experience is capable of providing justifications for our beliefs, Brandom constructs a sophisticated social-pragmatist account of the objectivity of our conceptual commitments in which experience is, as he says, not one (...) of his words. In this article, I argue that McDowell is right in stressing the indispensability of the idea of experience, but that he is wrong in believing that Brandom lacks the resources for making sense of the idea of being answerable to the world in experience. Especially when we expand Brandom's account of discursive practice to include its relation to what he has called practical intentionality, his work provides the resources for an answer to McDowell's concerns, but only if it is understood not as an attempt to simply deny McDowell's claims about experience, but as an attempt to explain what we must be capable of doing in order for experience, in McDowell's sense, to be possible. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that Husserl's phenomenological project is compromised or even destroyed by Wittgenstein's critical inquiries into our use of psychological concepts. In contrast to oppositional interpretations, this paper explicates certain crucial connections between Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's late thinking—shared views that concern the embodied nature of selfhood and our relations to other selves. In line with certain recent contributions, I argue that there are important similarities between Husserl's analysis of these phenomena and Wittgenstein's remarks on our use of (...) language and that these connections, when noticed and explicated, can help us avoid simplified, barren contrasts and get clear about our actual philosophical alternatives. (shrink)

The quantum theory of decoherence plays an important role in a pragmatist interpretation of quantum theory. It governs the descriptive content of claims about values of physical magnitudes and offers advice on when to use quantum probabilities as a guide to their truth. The content of a claim is to be understood in terms of its role in inferences. This promises a better treatment of meaning than that offered by Bohr. Quantum theory models physical systems with no mention of measurement: (...) it is decoherence, not measurement, that licenses application of Born’s probability rule. So quantum theory also offers advice on its own application. I show how this works in a simple model of decoherence, and then in applications to both laboratory experiments and natural systems. Applications to quantum field theory and the measurement problem will be discussed elsewhere. (shrink)

The paradox of Wigner’s friend challenges the objectivity of quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. Quantum theory provides situated agents with resources for predicting and explaining what happens in the physical world—not conscious observations of it. Even in bizarre Wigner’s friend scenarios, differently situated agents agree on the objective content of physical magnitude statements while, normally, quantum Darwinism permits agents equal observational access to their truth. Quantum theory has nothing to say about (...) conscious experiences. But it does prompt us to reexamine the significance of everyday claims about the physical world. (shrink)

In connecting educational theory to a neo-pragmatist social epistemology, we set out to understand education as knowledge practices that yield ‘the cultural world again’ by retelling culture or by making explicit what is implicit in culture. Recent trends in German educational studies towards holistic understanding of education demonstrate that such a holistic, non-representationalist framework is deliberately placed outside the traditional procedure of merely applying knowledge gained in the so-called foundational disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or psychology to the field of (...) education. By constructively relating Brandom's non-representational inferentialism to a re-reading of Mollenhauer's distinction of the presentation and representation of culture in and through education, we try to show that Brandom's philosophy can also be used to point out an inferentialism that is already at work in educational theory. Together, this strengthens a social theoretic account of education that explores how to conceptualise the role of knowledge in educational processes in terms of a holistic epistemology. (shrink)

One of the most lively debates on scientific understanding is standardly presented as a controversy between the so-called factivists, who argue that understanding implies truth, and the non-factivists whose position is that truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. A closer look at the debate, however, reveals that the borderline between factivism and non-factivism is not as clear-cut as it looks at first glance. Some of those who claim to be quasi-factivists come suspiciously close to the position of their (...) opponents, the non-factivist, from whom they pretend to differ. The non-factivist, in turn, acknowledges that some sort of ‘answering to the facts’ is indispensable for understanding. This paper discusses an example of convergence of the initially rival positions in the debate on understanding and truth: the use of the same substitute for truth by the quasi-factivist Kareem Khalifa and the non-factivists Henk de Regt and Victor Gijsbers. It is argued that the use of ‘effectiveness’ as a substitute for truth by both parties is not an occasional coincidence of terms, it rather speaks about a deeper similarity which have important implications for understanding the essential features of scientific understanding. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 4, Page 431-445, July 2022.

In this paper, I show that we should understand the direction of fit of beliefs and desires in normative terms. After rehearsing a standard objection to Michael Smith’s analysis of direction of fit, I raise a similar problem for Lloyd Humberstone’s analysis. I go on to offer my own account, according to which the difference between beliefs and desires is determined by the normative relations such states stand in. I argue that beliefs are states which we have reason to change (...) in light of the world, whereas desires are states that give us reason to change the world. After doing this, I show how the view avoids various objections, including two from David Sobel and David Copp. The paper ends by briefly discussing the relevance of the view to the Humean theory of motivation. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, but the main points of the paper concern not (...) merely how to classify, but how to understand, the theories. Also, though the paper takes theories of mental content as a case study, much of the discussion is applicable to theories of other phenomena. To a first approximation, the difference between the traditional and the proposed taxonomies turns on whether we classify theories of content by, on the one hand, their implications for a non-redundant supervenience base for content facts (i.e., for facts about what contents thoughts have) or, on the other, by their constitutive accounts of content. By a "constitutive account," I mean the kind of elucidation of the nature of a phenomenon that theorists have tried to give for, for example, knowledge, justice, personal identity, consciousness, convention, heat, and limit. The tendency to taxonomize by supervenience base is encouraged, I suggest, by a failure to keep clearly in view a distinction between constitutive and modal determination. Many philosophers would accept that a constitutive account cannot be captured in purely modal terms. Giving a constitutive account is not the same as specifying modally necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, philosophers often try to cash constitutive claims in modal terms. A case in point is that theories of content tend to be conceptualized in terms of the theories' implications for a supervenience base for content facts. My thesis goes beyond the by-now somewhat familiar proposition that not all modal determinants of a phenomenon are constitutive determinants. One who has taken that point on board might nevertheless conceive of a philosophical account as an attempt to specify constitutive determinants of the target phenomenon that make up a non-redundant supervenience base for the phenomenon. Shoehorning a philosophical account into this form leaves out elements that are modally redundant, but may be explanatorily or ontologically significant. For example, when a constitutive account has multiple levels, the different levels will typically be modally redundant. Formulating the account as a specification of a supervenience base of constitutive determinants will therefore flatten the account into a single level. Many of my arguments can be illustrated by considering the place of normativity in the theory of content. The new taxonomy gives a distinct niche to normative theories of content - theories that explain a thought's having a certain content at least in part in terms of the obtaining of normative facts. By contrast, on a traditional map, normative theories are invisible as such because normative facts supervene on non-normative ones. (shrink)