Suppose our ordinary notion of truth is ‘inconsistent’ in the sense that its meaning is partly given by principles that classically entail a logical contradiction. Should we replace the notion with a consistent surrogate? This paper begins by defusing various arguments in favor of this revisionary proposal, including Kevin Scharp’s contention that we need to replace truth for the purposes of semantic theorizing . Borrowing a certain conservative metasemantic principle from Matti Eklund, the article goes on to build a positive (...) case for the opposite policy: retaining truth as-is. The thought is basically that bivalence for the bulk of what we say in the course of ordinary, scientific, and philosophical inquiry should suffice to justify keeping ‘true’. Two versions of the story are told: one more philosophical, drawing on an analogy to Lewis’ response to Putnam’s paradox; the other more technical, invoking a deviant stran.. (shrink)

This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of (...) the sentences of fiction is that they are unambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition. (shrink)

I critically examine Miriam Solomon’s critique of individualist normative accounts of scientific rationality and her own “social” account of scientific rationality that takes communities to be the locus of rationality. I argue that scientists are not influenced in their decision making by nonepistemic factors to the extent that Solomon suggests and an individualist account can show how judgmental heuristics are conducive to scientific success. I also argue that Solomon’s account of rationality cannot guide us when we do not yet know (...) what is most conducive to scientific success. Consequently, I offer a defense of internalist individualist accounts of rationality and suggest that what is social about rationality are the standards of epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

I argue that there are living and everyday case in which rationality requires you, as a non-idealized human thinker, to have inconsistent beliefs while recognizing the inconsistency. I defend my argument against classical and insightful objections by Doris Olin, as well as others. I consider three versions of the preface paradox as candidate cases, including Makinson’s original version. None is free from objection. However, there is a fourth version, Modesty, that supposes that you believe that at least one of your (...) beliefs is false. I argue that this version escapes all the objections that could trouble the other versions, including the objection that given certain closure principles for justified belief, justified inconsistent beliefs saddle you with a pair of justified beliefs that are in explicit contradiction. I also argue more tentatively for the same verdict for Modesty*, a version that supposes that you believe that at least one of your beliefs is false. In that case, your belief guarantees that its content is true, in which case your beliefs are inconsistent, because at least one of them must be false. Once you think you’re wrong, you must be right! Crucial to my argument is a distinction between explicitly contradictory beliefs and three forms of inconsistency in belief. In the first of these, you believe contingent propositions each of which is logically independent of the others, yet you also believe the syntactic negation of their conjunction. In the second, your beliefs are inconsistent because of the rigid designation of demonstratives such as ‘this’ embedded in their contents. In the third, as in Modesty and Modesty* your beliefs are inconsistent because of self-reference. (shrink)

In a series of recent publications, Gigerenzer and his collaborators have attempted to derive new norms of rationality from their psychological research in the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition (ABC). Specifically, they have claimed that there are good reasons to replace the norms traditionally used to assess rational behaviour, which rest on the ideal of optimisation. Their proposal has considerable importance, as it has been laid out as a revision of the normative framework accepted in the social, behavioural, and (...) cognitive sciences. Still, whereas the ABC scholars present their approach as diametrically opposed to the framework of optimisation—two incompatible takes on the problem of defining rational behaviour—this paper argues that it is not entirely clear whether this is the case. I introduce a distinction between different kinds of reflection upon norms of rationality that has been neglected by ABC scholars, and provide reasons to think that the departure from the traditional framework might be less radical than ABC scholars suppose. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which resource limitations influence the nature of perceptual and cognitive processes. A framework is developed that allows early visual processing to be analyzed in terms of these limitations. In this approach, there is no one ``best'' system for any visual process. Rather, a spectrum of systems exists, differing in the particular trade-offs made between performance and resource requirements.

In this paper it is argued that the conjunction of linguistic ersatzism, the ontologically deflationary view that possible worlds are maximal and consistent sets of sentences, and possible world semantics, the view that the meaning of a sentence is the set of possible worlds at which it is true, implies that no actual speaker can effectively use virtually any language to successfully communicate information. This result is based on complexity issues that relate to our finite computational ability to deal with (...) large bodies of information and a strong, but well motivated, assumption about the cognitive accessibility of meanings of sentences ersatzers seem to be implicitly committed to. It follows that linguistic ersatzism, possible world semantics, or both must be rejected. (shrink)

This paper provides moderate criticism of so-called normative theories of thinking and reasoning. The discussion focuses on the problems of idealization, adequacy, inconsistent yet non-trivial logics, logical omniscience etc. I called them “internal” to the normative approach, because they stem from the very properties of formal systems used to model these two human activities. Some arguments, however, refer to the current theories in cognitive science, including those which are developed within “descriptive” framework.