The paper defends the philosophical method of "regimentation" by example, especially in relation to the theory of mind. The starting point is the Place-Smart after-image argument: A green after-image will not be located outside the skull, but if we cracked open your skull, we won't find anything green in there either. (If we did, you'd have some disturbing medical news.) So the after-image seems not to be in physical space, suggesting that it is non-physical. In response, I argue that the (...) green blob is a fictional object, while assuming a weak sort of realism about fictional objects (where they exist as mind-dependent objects). This view can look like dualism, however, but I try to interpret it not as implying metaphysical dualism, but rather as reflecting a dualism of theory. Roughly, there can be a theory of mind-independent objects, and a theory of mind-dependent objects. Yet there are principled reasons why we cannot integrate the two into a consistent whole, for reasons related to Russell's vicious circle principle. Most of the paper motivates this by an analogy between the physicalist's theory of the world, and drawing a map with a complete representation of the map itself. Regimentation unearths the inconsistencies that arise, when trying to represent as part of a model the very representations used to define the model. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged kind is (...) largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)

Modal intuitions are not only the primary source of modal knowledge but also the primary source of modal error. An explanation of how modal error arises — and, in particular, how erroneous modal intuitions arise — is an essential part of a comprehensive theory of knowledge and evidence. This chapter begins with a summary of certain preliminaries: the phenomenology of intuitions, their fallibility, the nature of concept-understanding and its relationship to the reliability of intuitions, and so forth. It then identifies (...) two sources of modal error: the first has to do with the failure to distinguish between metaphysical possibility and various kinds of epistemic possibility; the second, with the local misunderstanding of one's concepts. The first source of error is widely misunderstood; the second source has not been discussed in philosophical literature. This source of modal error, and the potential to overcome it, has wide-ranging implications for philosophical method. The failure to understand these sources of modal error has recently led to sceptical accounts of intuition and modal error, which are, ultimately self-defeating. (shrink)

This volume puts together twelve new essays by scholars who have done groundbreaking work in epistemology over the past four decades. Unfortunately, the editor’s brief introduction offers only a sketchy presentation of the papers and their background. Given the variety and complexity of the issues tackled, one would have expected a more detailed account of the nature and developments of the epistemological theories and arguments put forward and discussed by the contributors. The absence of such an account is all the (...) more surprising considering that the editor does not himself contribute a paper to the volume. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a theory of the physical realization of higher-level properties. I argue that physical realization is in an important sense indirect, and that at each level causal relations are crucial to realizing next-level phenomena. My account makes it intelligible how higher-level properties can be realized by wide stretches of physical reality without the inter-level dependence becoming weak, or global; it also explains how both physicalism and non-reductivism can be true.

In this paper I distinguish two types of mental causation, called 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation'. These notions superficially resemble the traditional problematic notions of supervenient causation and downward causation, but they are different in crucial respects. My new distinction is supported by a radically externalist competitor of the so-called Standard View of mental states, i.e. the view that mental states are brain states. I argue that on the Alternative View, the notions of 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation' can in combination dissolve (...) the problem of mental causation as standardly discussed. (shrink)

Max de Gaynesford; How Wrong Can One Be?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 387–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

This paper discusses the current fashion for brain-based learning, in which value-laden claims about learning are grounded in neurophysiology. It argues that brain science cannot have the ‘authority’ about learning that some seek to give it. It goes on to discuss whether the claim that brain science is relevant to learning involves a category mistake. The heart of the paper tries to show how the contribution of brain science to our grasp of the nature of learning is limited in principle. (...) Finally the paper explores the potential of brain science to illuminate specific learning disabilities. (shrink)

Social externalism implies that many competences are not personal assets separable from social and cultural environments but complex states of affairs involving individuals and persisting features of social reality. The paper explores the consequences for competence identity over time and across contexts, and hence for the predictive role usually accorded to competences.

Over the last two decades the traditional conception of intelligence and other mental powers as stable individual assets has been challenged by approaches in psychology emphasising context and ‘situated cognition’. This paper argues that the debate should not be seen as an empirical dispute, and relates it to discussions in philosophy of mind between methodological solipsists and varieties of externalists. In the light of this I argue that attempts to conceptualise the identity over time of mental powers qua individual assets (...) run into intractable difficulties. Hence ‘individual asset’ views of many abilities should be abandoned. Implications for education policy particularly in regard to assessment are explored. (shrink)

It is argued that Husserl was an “externalist” in at least one sense. For it is argued that Husserl held that genuinely perceptual experiences—that is to say, experiences that are of some real object in the world—differ intrinsically, essentially and as a kind from any hallucinatory experiences. There is, therefore, no neutral “content” that such perceptual experiences share with hallucinations, differing from them only over whether some additional non-psychological condition holds or not. In short, it is argued that Husserl was (...) a “disjunctivist”. In addition, it is argued that Husserl held that the individual object of any experience, perceptual or hallucinatory, is essential to and partly constitutive of that experience. The argument focuses on three aspects of Husserl’s thought: his account of intentional objects, his notion of horizon, and his account of reality. (shrink)

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that is, how they can set up conditions of satisfaction or be responsive to norms such that they can succeed or fail (...) at referring. The standard representationalist view—which thinks of the problem in first-person terms—is contrasted with Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialist approach, which adopts a third-person stance. The rest of the paper defends a phenomenological version of the representationalist position (seeking to preserve its first-person stance) but offers a conception of representation that does not identify it with an entity ‘in the head.’ The standard view of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist is undermined by rejecting its fundamental assumption—that Husserl’s concept of the ‘noema’ is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of ‘phenomenological immanence’ that has a normative, rather than a psychological, structure. Finally, it is argued that phenomenological immanence cannot be identified with ‘consciousness’ in Husserl’s sense, though consciousness is a necessary condition for it. (shrink)

To begin, I introduce an analysis of interlevel relations that allows us to offer an initial characterization of the debate about the way classical and connectionist models relate. Subsequently, I examine a compatibility thesis and a conditional claim on this issue.With respect to the compatibility thesis, I argue that, even if classical and connectionist models are not necessarily incompatible, the emergence of the latter seems to undermine the best arguments for the Language of Thought Hypothesis, which is essential to the (...) former. (shrink)

I argue that the dispute between two leading theories of interpretation of legal texts, textual originalism and textual evolutionism, depends on the false presupposition that changes in the way a word is used necessarily require a change in the word’s meaning. Semantic externalism goes a long way towards reconciling these views by showing how a word’s semantic properties can be stable over time, even through vicissitudes of usage. I argue that temporal externalism can account for even more semantic stability, however. (...) Temporal externalism is the theory that the content of an utterance at time t may be determined by developments in linguistic usage subsequent to t. If this semantic theory is correct, then the originalist and evolutionist positions effectively collapse. Originalism is correct in that the original meaning of the text is the meaning that is binding on jurists, but evolutionism is vindicated, as it is the current practices and standards that determine the meaning the text now has, and has always had. Objections to temporal externalism, and to its application to the interpretation of legal texts, are considered and addressed. (shrink)

In the debate between internalists and externalists in philosophy of language and philosophy of psychology, internalists such as Jerry Fodor have invoked a strong a priori argument to show that externalist descriptions can play no role in a science of the human mind and of human action. Shifting the ground of the debate from psychology to social science, I try to undermine Fodor's reasoning. I also point to a role for externalist theorising in the area where the socio-semantic theory of (...) the 'division of linguistic labour' makes contact with traditional micro-sociological theorising. (shrink)

We distinguish and discuss two different accounts of the subject matter of theories of reference, meta-externalism and meta-internalism. We argue that a form of the meta- internalist view, “moderate meta-internalism”, is the most plausible account of the subject matter of theories of reference. In the second part of the paper we explain how this account also helps to answer the questions of what kind of concept reference is, and what role intuitions have in the study of the reference relation.

Philosophers agree that an important part of our knowledge is acquired via testimony. One of the main objectives of social epistemology is therefore to specify the conditions under which a hearer is justified in accepting a proposition stated by a source. Non-reductionists, who think that testimony could be considered as an a priori source of knowledge, as well as reductionists, who think that another type of justification has to be added to testimony, share a common conception about children development. Non-reductionists (...) believe that infants and children are fundamentally gullible and their gullibility could be seen as an example for justifying testimony, while reductionists believe that this gullibility is merely an exception that should be taken into account. The objective of this paper is to review contemporary literature in developmental psychology providing empirical grounds likely to clarify this philosophical debate. What emerges from current research is a more elaborated vision of children’s attitude toward testimony. Even at a very young age, children do not blindly swallow information coming from testimony; doubtful or contradictory information is automatically screened by their cognitive system. Even if they are unable to give positive reasons for the acceptance of a given testimony, young children are not gullible. Such empirical findings tend to call into question the radical opposition between reductionism and non-reductionism. (shrink)

Recent work in biology and cognitive science depicts a variety of target phenomena as the products of a tangled web of causal influences. Such influences may include both internal and external factors as well as complex patterns of reciprocal causal interaction. Such twisted tales are sometimes seen as a threat to explanatory strategies that invoke notions such as inner programs, genes for and sometimes even internal representations. But the threat, I shall argue, is more apparent than real. Complex causal influence, (...) in and of itself, provides no good reason to reject these familiar explanatory notions. To believe otherwise, I suggest, is generally to commit (at least) one of two seductive errors. The first error is to think that the general notion of a state x coding for an outcome y involves the state's constituting a full description of y. This is what I call the myth of the self-contained code. The second error is to think that the practice of treating certain factors as special (e.g., seeing genes as coding for outcomes in a way environmental factors do not) depends on the (often mistaken) belief that the singled out factor is somehow doing the most real work. Where the amounts of causal influence are evenly spread, it is assumed there can be no reason to treat one factor in a special way. This is what I term the Myth of Explanatory Equality. Avoiding these errors involves reminding ourselves of (1) the rich context-dependence of even standard, unproblematic uses of the notions of code, program and information content (all three make sense only relative to an assumed ecological backdrop) and (2) the difference between explaining why an event occurred and displaying the full workings of a complex causal system. (shrink)

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not (...) generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to explore some of the relations between morality and politics. Areas in which these are explored include the role of ideals in foreign policy , committing evil for the sake of a greater good in wartime, and lying and deception in political affairs. Illustrative examples are used throughout and include the Iraq war and its political fallout , Allied and Axis actions during the Second World War, decisions made by former Australian Prime Minister John (...) Howard and thought-experiments such as whether to lie about the Jewish family hiding in the basement when the Nazis come knocking at the door.Chapters 1 and 2, making up the first half of the book, are the highlight of it. In them, Coady confronts the realist critique of morality in foreign …. (shrink)

Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. (...) In particular, we contend that the principle has plausible counterexamples, resulting from the fact that some mental states are not fully grounded by goings on ‘in our heads’ but also require external factors to be included in their full grounds. We draw the sceptical conclusion that it remains unclear whether non-reductive physicalists can plausibly respond to the exclusion argument by appealing to considerations of grounding. (shrink)

According to the most popular non-skeptical views about intuition, intuitions justify beliefs because they are based on understanding. More precisely: if intuiting that p justifies you in believing that p it does so because your intuition is based on your understanding of the proposition that p. The aim of this paper is to raise some challenges for accounts of intuitive justification along these lines. I pursue this project from a non-skeptical perspective. I argue that there are cases in which intuiting (...) that p justifies you in believing that p, but such that there is no compelling reason to think this is because your intuition is based on your understanding of the proposition that p. (shrink)

The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something about the nature of concepts, (...) language, and meaning. In this article I first characterize verbal disputes, spell out a method for isolating and resolving them, and draw out conclusions for philosophical methodology. I then use the framework to draw out consequences in first-order philosophy. In particular, I argue that the analysis of verbal disputes can be used to support the existence of a distinctive sort of primitive concept and that it can be used to reconstruct a version of an analytic/synthetic distinction, where both are characterized in dialectical terms alone. (shrink)

A content of a subject's mental state is narrow when it is determined by the subject's intrinsic properties: that is, when any possible intrinsic duplicate of the subject has a corresponding mental state with the same content. A content of a subject's mental state is..

Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been motivated using verificationism, (...) externalism, and coherentism. I argue that a more powerful veridicalist response to global skepticism can be motivated by structuralism, on which physical entities are understood as those that play a certain structural role. I develop the structuralist response and address objections. (shrink)

When I say ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, I seem to express a proposition. And when I say ‘Joan believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus’, I seem to ascribe to Joan an attitude to the same proposition. But what are propositions? And what is involved in ascribing propositional attitudes?

This chapter contains section titled: Overview Dualism Individualism Privileged Access References and Further Reading.

Reply to criticsThe replies in this symposium are some of the most insightful contributions to contemporary metaphilosophy I have read. I wish I had seen them before I wrote Philosophy without Intuitions . It would have made it a better book. I also wish I had space to explore all the important issues raised, but unfortunately, the focus here will have to be on points of disagreement. The replies build on each other—I draw on material from the earlier replies in (...) the later ones. It is possible to read each reply in isolation, but they are best read in sequence.Socratic knowledge and its role in philosophy: Reply to WeathersonWeatherson presents one of the most interesting accounts of the role of intuitions in philosophy that I have encountered. For Weatherson, the role is limited, fragile, and elusive .One of the most interesting ideas in the paper is that “the important intuitions are the ones you bar .. (shrink)

This paper addresses four issues: 1. What is nonsense? 2. Is nonsense possible? 3. Is nonsense actual? 4. Why do the answers to (1)–(3) matter, if at all? These are my answers: 1. A sentence (or an utterance of one) is nonsense if it fails to have or express content (more on ‘express’, ‘have’, and ‘content’ below). This is a version of a view that can be found in Carnap (1959), Ayer (1936), and, maybe, the early Wittgenstein (1922). The notion (...) I propose abstracts away from their favored (but wrong) theories of what meaning is. It is a notion of nonsense that can be appealed to by all semantic frameworks and all theories of what content is, but structurally it is just like e.g. Carnap’s. Nonsense, as I construe it, is accompanied by illusions of thought (and I think that was part of Carnap’s conception as well). 2. Yes. In particular, I examine three arguments for the impossibility of illusion of thought (which on my construal accompanies linguistic nonsense) and they are all unsound. 3. Yes. There might be a lot of nonsense, both in ordinary and theoretical speech. In particular, it is likely that much of contemporary philosophy consists of nonsense. Empirical work is required to determine just how much. 4. The struggle to avoid nonsense (and achieve meaningfulness) is at least as important as the struggle for truth. The avoidance of nonsense is a precondition not just for having a truth value but also for more important properties such as saying something interesting or kind. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2-3, Page 221-237, April 2022.

Machery’s book is an effort to show how experimental philosophy can be valuable without the perephenelia of intuitions. I argue that the effort fails.

Davidson advocates a radical and powerful form of anti-conventionalism, on which the scope of a semantic theory is restricted to the most local of contexts: a particular utterance by a particular speaker. I argue that this hyper-localism undercuts the explanatory grounds for his assumption that semantic meaning is systematic, which is central, among other things, to his holism. More importantly, it threatens to undercut the distinction between word meaning and speaker’s meaning, which he takes to be essential to semantics. I (...) argue that a moderate form of conventionalism can restore systematicity and the word/speaker distinction while accommodating Davidson’s insights about the complexities and contextual variability of language use. (shrink)

When dealing with ‘meaning’ or related notions, one cannot ignore what for a long time was the dominant paradigm in semantics. According to such paradigm, truth-conditional formal semantics for natural language is a theory of semantic competence. In this article, I shall discuss a foundational problem for such semantic program. I shall first be following authors who claim that truth-conditional formal semantics is unable to provide a complete account of lexical competence, and, therefore, it suffers from incompleteness. Moreover, as a (...) few authors observed, a coherent completion of lexical meaning/competence cannot be easily provided in the philosophical framework of truth-conditional semantics. The problem is a consequence of Kripke’s and Putnam’s arguments against the view that semantic values of words are cognitively determined. I shall argue that these arguments undermine the notion that formal semantics can be, at the same time, a theory of truth-conditions and a theory of semantic competence. I shall outline and critically discuss two general attempts to solve this problem, which I shall refer to as the social/ideal route and the concepts route. The conclusions of the article are deliberately open. I shall argue that both these attempts are exposed to conceptual troubles and counterintuitive consequences, and so the lexical problem still remains a deep and unresolved issue for semantics. (shrink)

Jackson's black-and-white Mary teaches us that the propositional content of perception cannot be fully expressed in language.

The paper addresses a prima facie tension between two popular views about concepts. The first is the doctrine that some concepts are constitutively perceptual/experiential, so that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced subjects. This is a classic empiricist theme, but its most conspicuous recent appearance is in literature on phenomenal concepts. The second view is anti-individualism: here, the view that concept possession depends not only on a thinker’s internal states and relations to the concepts’ referents, but also on (...) certain of her relations to sociolinguistic peers. In recent works, Derek Ball and Michael Tye have in effect argued that the doctrines are incompatible, and their conclusion is that no concepts depend on experience. In reply, Bénédicte Veillet endorses those authors’ incompatibilism, but argues that it is anti-individualism that we should reject. I develop an approach to reconciliation that is more promising than any considered by these theorists. Against Veillet, I defend a version of anti-individualism about phenomenal concepts, but against Ball and Tye, I argue that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced thinkers. (shrink)

Earl Conee and Richard Feldman claim that mentalism identifies the core of internalist epistemology. This is what I call identifying ur-internalism. Their version of ur-internalism differs from the traditional one ? viz., accessibilism ? by not imposing requirements stipulating that subjects must have reflective access to facts which justify their beliefs for these beliefs to be justified. Instead, justification simply supervenes on the mental lives of subjects. I argue that mentalism fails to establish itself as ur-internalism by demonstrating that the (...) strong supervenience claim used by Conee and Feldman is consistent with cognitive externalism (often called ?the extended mind hypothesis?). Briefly, cognitive externalism claims that the mental states themselves (rather than their contents) constitutively depend on factors outside the bodily individual. Given this possibility, I claim Conee and Feldman's supervenience principle no longer suits the purposes to which they put it. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that (at least many) philosophical thought experiments are unreliable. But I argue that this notion of unreliability has to be understood relative to the goal of thought experiments as knowledge producing. And relative to that goal many thought experiments in science are just as unreliable. But in fact thought experiments in science play a varied role and I will suggest that knowledge production is a goal only under quite limited circumstances. I defend the view that (...) these circumstances can (sometimes) arise in philosophy as well. (shrink)

I challenge a claim that seems to be made when nominalists offer reformulations of the content of mathematical beliefs, namely that these reformulations are accessible to everyone. By doing so, I argue that these theories cannot account for the mathematical knowledge that ordinary people have. In the first part of the paper I look at reformulations that employ the concept of proof, such as those of Mary Leng and Ottavio Bueno. I argue that ordinary people don’t have many beliefs about (...) proofs, and that they are not in a position to acquire knowledge about proofs autonomously. The second part of the paper is concerned with other reformulations of content, such as those of Hartry Field and Stephen Yablo. There too, the problem is that people are not able to acquire knowledge of the reformulated propositions autonomously. Ordinary people simply do not have beliefs with the kind of content that the nominalists need, for their theory to account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. All in all then, the conclusion is that a large number of theories that suggest reformulations of mathematical content yield contents that are inaccessible for most people. Thus, these theories are limited, in that they cannot account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. (shrink)

In “Imaging or Imagining? A Neuroethics Challenge In- The assumption at issue here is the assumption that the formed by Genetics,” Judy Illes and Eric Racine (see this ismind literally is the brain (i.e., is numerically identical to sue) argue that “traditional bioethics analysis” (TBA), as de-.

In a number of influential papers, Hartry Fieldhas advanced an account of truth and referencethat we might dub quasi-disquotationalism. According to quasi-disquotationalism, truth and reference are to be explained in terms of disquotationand facts about what constitute a goodtranslation into our language. Field suggeststhat we might view quasi-disquotationalism aseither (a) an analysis of our ordinarytruth-theoretic concepts of reference andtruth, or (b) an account of certain otherconcepts that improve upon our ordinaryconcepts. In this paper, I argue that (i) ifthe view is (...) understood along the lines of (a)it fails, and (ii) if it is construed along thelines of (b) it is, at best, under-motivated. (shrink)