I show that there are good arguments and evidence to boot that support the language as an instrument of thought hypothesis. The underlying mechanisms of language, comprising of expressions structured hierarchically and recursively, provide a perspective (in the form of a conceptual structure) on the world, for it is only via language that certain perspectives are avail- able to us and to our thought processes. These mechanisms provide us with a uniquely human way of thinking and talking about the world (...) that is different to the sort of thinking we share with other animals. If the primary function of language were communication then one would expect that the underlying mechanisms of language will be structured in a way that favours successful communication. I show that not only is this not the case, but that the underlying mechanisms of language are in fact structured in a way to maximise computational efficiency, even if it means causing communicative problems. Moreover, I discuss evidence from comparative, neuropatho- logical, developmental, and neuroscientific evidence that supports the claim that language is an instrument of thought. (shrink)

Most human actions are complex, but some of them are basic. Which are these? In this paper, I address this question by invoking slips, a common kind of mistake. The proposal is this: an action is basic if and only if it is not possible to slip in performing it. The argument discusses some well-established results from the psychology of language production in the context of a philosophical theory of action. In the end, the proposed criterion is applied to discuss (...) some well-known theories of basic actions. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. (...) This makes it possible for a subject to use probabilistic decision theory to manage in a rational way cases of potential failure of this self-knowledge, as we find in implicit bias. Through such cases I argue that it is possible for uncertainty about what our beliefs are to be not only rationally permissible but advantageous. (shrink)

On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, (...) but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) – in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development. (shrink)

Empirical discussions of mental representation appeal to a wide variety of representational kinds. Some of these kinds, such as the sentential representations underlying language use and the pictorial representations of visual imagery, are thoroughly familiar to philosophers. Others have received almost no philosophical attention at all. Included in this latter category are analogue magnitude representations, which enable a wide range of organisms to primitively represent spatial, temporal, numerical, and related magnitudes. This article aims to introduce analogue magnitude representations to a (...) philosophical audience by rehearsing empirical evidence for their existence and analysing their format, their content, and the computations they support. 1 Background1.1 Evidence of analogue magnitude representations1.2 Weber’s law1.3 Scepticism about analogue magnitude representations2 Format2.1 Carey’s analogy2.2 Neural realization2.3 Analogue representation2.4 Analogue magnitude representation components3 Content3.1 Do analogue magnitude representations have representational content?3.2 What do analogue magnitude representations represent?3.3 What content types do analogue magnitude representations have?4 Computations4.1 Arithmetic computation4.2 Practical deliberation5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The ability to engage in reflexive thought—in thought about thought or about other mental states more generally—is regarded as a complex intellectual achievement that is beyond the capacities of most nonhuman animals. To the extent that reflexive thought capacities are believed necessary for the possession of many other psychological states or capacities, including consciousness, belief, emotion, and empathy, the inability of animals to engage in reflexive thought calls into question their other psychological abilities. This chapter attacks the idea that reflexive (...) thought is required in this pervasive way and holds that supposing that it is derives from a tendency among philosophers and scientists toward overcomplication. Against this tendency, it recommends an aponoian framework, from apó, “away from” and noûs, “intelligence” or “thought,” arguing that seemingly complex psychological abilities are often not as complex as they seem, and do not require the ability to engage in reflexive thought. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.

I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents. -/- In Posthuman Life I defended (...) AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings. -/- Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments. It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings. -/- The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency. -/- I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity. -/- This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the claim that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices. -/- AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can be determined by recourse to engineering alone. (shrink)

One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, fruit flies and plants decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.

Most mental disorders affect only a small segment of the population. On the reasonable assumption that minds or brains are prone to occasional malfunction, these disorders do not seem to pose distinctive explanatory problems. Depression, however, because it is so prevalent and costly, poses a conundrum that some try to explain by characterizing it as an adaptation—a trait that exists because it performed fitness-enhancing functions in ancestral populations. Heretofore, proposed evolutionary explanations of depression did not focus on thought processes; instead, (...) they emphasized that it facilitates navigation of adverse social circumstances or promotes immune response to infectious agents. According to a new hypothesis, the “analytical rumination hypothesis” (ARH), however, depression’s crucial adaptive trait is rumination—negative, intrusive thought. ARH holds that, (i) social dilemmas trigger depressed mood; (ii) depressed mood induces changes in body systems that facilitate ruminative analysis aimed at solving dilemmas; and, (iii) depressive rumination is a fitness-enhancing trait that was selected for in evolutionary time. Jointly, (i)~(iii) imply that we should not think of rumination as a disorder; instead, it is a trade-off, an eminently rational one. In the same way that fever solves a problem—coordination of the immune system in response to infection—so too does depressive rumination solve a problem, a social dilemma, albeit at the cost of inducing anhedonia and other maladies. But they argue that the cost is worthwhile, something that should be endured “until the problem is solved.” First, we argue that there are two distinct types of rumination, brooding and pondering; the former is associated with a disposition for depression, not the latter. But only the latter has the problem-solving capabilities that ARH requires. Second, recent brain imaging studies of depression reveal resting state hypoactivity in lateral regions and hyperactivity in paralimbic regions; this asymmetric pattern correlates with heightened levels of brooding, self-focused rumination. In other words, on the personal level, patients are trapped within self, isolated from the external world and suffused with negative affect; on the subpersonal level, this pattern is reflected by an asymmetric pattern of lateral vs. paralimbic resting state activity. Third, we proceed to conjecture that rational responses (e.g., pondering) to social dilemmas are those that strike a balance between internal and external considerations in the process of belief formation. Fourth, because the asymmetric resting state activity blocks those who suffer with depression from accessing and processing potentially positive stimuli from the external world, the capacity for rational, analytic response—hence, problem-solving—is constrained. Fifth, it follows that, although there might be conditions for which suffering should be endured rather than pharmacologically alleviated, depression is not one of those. Indeed, in view of the effects of the asymmetric resting state pattern, it is unlikely that depressive rumination would have been useful even for ancestral populations. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)

This paper contests the standard reading, due to Bilgrami and Glüer, that Davidson is an anti-normativist about word-meaning. Their case for his anti-normativism rests on his avowed anti-conventionalism about word-meaning. While not denying Davidson’s anti-conventionalism, I argue in the central part of the paper devoted to Bilgrami that the constitutive role that charity must play in interpretation for Davidson puts pressure on his anti-conventionalism, ultimately forcing a more tempered anti-conventionalism than Bilgrami allows. Simply put, my argument is that two central (...) doctrines of Davidson’s—constitutive charity and anti-conventionalism—do not sit easily together in the project of interpreting speakers of our home language and that if they are to be made compatible, it is his anti-conventionalism that gets weakened. This ushers a certain meaning normativism into Davidson’s view. To strengthen my case for reading Davidson as a normativist about word-meaning, I respond to two important arguments against his alleged normativism: first, that meaning normativity is incompatible with the truism that the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary and, second, that constitutive charity far from ushering in meaning normativity is incompatible with it. (shrink)

Heidegger’s view of attunement, and evolutionary theories of emotion, would appear to be wholly independent accounts of affects. This paper argues that we can understand the phenomenology of attunement and the evolutionary functionalist theory of emotions as distinct perspectives on those same emotions. The reason that the two perspectives are distinct is that some affects can act as commitment mechanisms, and this requires them to be experienced in a way that obscures their ultimate functional role. These perspectives are potentially mutually (...) consistent, however, and being aware of both may provide insight for productive research programs. Although there are conflicts between the methods and background assumptions of these two approaches, I argue that we should allow these conflicts to stand if the outcome of interaction is productive. (shrink)

We examine the claim that the methodology of psychology leads to a bias in animal cognition research against attributing “anthropomorphic” properties to animals . This charge is examined in light of a debate on the role of folk psychology between primatologists who emphasize similarities between humans and other apes, and those who emphasize differences. We argue that while in practice there is sometimes bias, either in the formulation of the null hypothesis or in the preference of Type-II errors over Type-I (...) errors, the bias is not the result of proper use of the Neyman and Pearson hypothesis testing method. Psychologists’ preference for false negatives over false positives cannot justify a preference for avoiding anthropomorphic errors over anthropectic errors. (shrink)

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

The article provides a summary of the author's book Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). It details three areas in which the notion of a normative commitment is made central. These are (1) believing and intending, (2) practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, and (3) meaning and concepts. An account is given of how we may best explain the commitments incurred by beliefs and intentions. It is held that those states are themselves essentially normative. A problem (...) of the relevance of rationalizing to rationalizing explanation is explored and the relation between normative commitments and normative reasons is discussed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

Donald Davidson and John Searle famously differ, among other things, on the issue of animal thoughts. Davidson seems to be a latter-day Cartesian, denying any propositional thought to subhuman animals, while Searle seems to follow Hume in claiming that if we have thoughts, then animals do, too. Davidson’s argument centers on the idea that language is necessary for thought, which Searle rejects. The paper argues two things. Firstly, Searle eventually argues that much of a more complex thought does depend on (...) language, which reduces a distance between himself and Davidson. Secondly, some of Davidson’s suggestions are promising – in particular the idea that we may lack a vocabulary to capture the contents of animal thoughts. Based on this insight, one might, pace Davidson, grant thoughts to animals. However, this does not mean, pace Searle, that it should be possible to construe even the simplest of such thoughts as propositional. Perhaps we need to move beyond Davidson and Searle by developing a theory of nonpropositional thought for animals. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss language learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Starting from a remark by Bakhurst, I hold that both Wittgenstein and Davidson’s philosophies of language contain responses to the problem of language learning, albeit of a different form. Following Williams, I hold that the concept of language learning can explain Wittgenstein’s approach to the normativity of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations. Turning to Davidson, I hold that language learning can, equally, explain Davidson’s theory of triangulation. I sketch an (...) account of triangulation as Davidson’s response to the problem of the normativity of meaning and explain the role that language learning plays in this account. (shrink)

In the last few decades of the twentieth century there was a revolution in metaphysics: the intensional revolution. Many metaphysicians rejected the doctrine, associated with Quine and Davidson, that extensional analyses and theoretical resources were the only acceptable ones. Metaphysicians embraced tools like modal and counterfactual analyses, claims of modal and counterfactual dependence, and entities such as possible worlds and intensionally individuated properties and relations. The twenty-first century is seeing a hypterintensional revolution. Theoretical tools in common use carve more finely (...) than by necessary equivalence: two pieces of language can apply to the same entities across all possible worlds but not be equivalent; thoughts can be necessarily equivalent in truth value but not synonymous. This paper argues that hyperintensional resources are valuable in metaphysics outside theories of representation, and discusses some promising areas of hyperintensional metaphysics. (shrink)

The thesis evaluates a contemporary debate concerning the very possibility of thinking about the world. In the first chapter, McDowell's critique of Davidson is presented, focusing on the coherentism defended by the latter. The critique of the myth of the given (as it appears in Sellars and Wittgenstein), as well as the necessity of a minimal empiricism (which McDowell finds in Quine and Kant), lead to an oscillation in contemporary thinking between two equally unsatisfactory ways of understanding the empirical content (...) of thought. In the second chapter, I defend Davidson's approach, focusing on his theory of interpretation and semantic externalism, as well as on the relation between causes and reasons. In the third chapter, the debate is analyzed in more detail. I criticize the anomalous monism, the way in which the boundaries between the conceptual and the non-conceptual are understood by Davidson, as well as the naturalized Platonism defended by McDowell. This thesis is mainly negative, and it concludes by revealing problems in both positions under evaluation. (shrink)

Philosophers have often claimed that general ideas or representations have their origin in abstraction, but it remains unclear exactly what abstraction as a psychological process consists in. We argue that the Lockean aspiration of using abstraction to explain the origins of all general representations cannot work and that at least some general representations have to be innate. We then offer an explicit framework for understanding abstraction, one that treats abstraction as a computational process that operates over an innate quality space (...) of fine-grained general representations. We argue that this framework has important philosophical implications for the nativism-empiricism dispute, for questions about the acquisition of unstructured representations, and for questions about the relation between human and animal minds. (shrink)

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal (...) freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental conception of the human. (shrink)

The imperviousness of delusions to counter-evidence makes it tempting to classify them as imaginings. Bayne and Pacherie argue that adopting a dispositional account of belief can secure the doxastic status of delusions. But dispositionalism can only secure genuinely doxastic status for mental states by giving folk-psychological norms a significant role in the individuation of attitudes. When such norms individuate belief, deluded subjects will not count as believing their delusions. In general, dispositionalism won't confer genuinely doxastic status more often than do (...) competing accounts of belief. (shrink)

What is the relation between philosophical theorizing and experimental data? A modest set of naturalistic assumptions leads to what I term the force-field puzzle. The assumption that philosophy is continuous with natural science, as captured in Quine’s force-field metaphor, seems to push us simultaneously towards thinking that there have to be conceptual constraints upon how we interpret experimental data and towards thinking that there cannot be such conceptual constraints, because all theorizing must be accountable to data and observation. The key (...) to resolving the force-field puzzle is to take a more nuanced view of how conceptual constraints can be accountable to data and observation. This can be done by developing conceptual arguments in conjunction with interpretative frameworks for making sense of experimental evidence. This paper shows how attending to important differences between different types of mindreading yields tools for interpreting experimental and observational data in a manner consistent with a (conceptually derived) constraint that I have developed elsewhere. This is the first-order constraint that second-order thinking, or thinking about thinking, is only available to language-using creatures. (shrink)

This chapter provides a critical overview of ten central arguments that philosophers have given in support of a distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. We use these arguments to examine the question of whether (and in what sense) perceptual states might be deemed nonconceptual and also whether (and in what sense) animals and infants might be deemed to lack concepts. We argue that philosophers have implicitly relied on a wide variety of different ways to draw the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction and (...) that all ten of the arguments we discuss face considerable difficulties. (shrink)

Ever since the 1970’s, philosophers of mind have engaged in a lively discussion of Externalism. Externalism is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of one’s thoughts are determined partly by empirical features of one’s environment. Externalism appears to clash with another plausible thesis—the epistemological thesis that one can have knowledge of one’s own thoughts, without evidence or empirical investigation. Many have argued that the conjunction of these theses is incompatible. I have argued elsewhere for their compatibility.1 Here I’ll just assume (...) that they are compatible and explore some consequences of conjoining a particular externalist thesis about the contents of thoughts (Social Externalism) with a particular thesis about self-knowledge (First-Person Authority). (shrink)

This paper considers the challenge to understanding another that comes from the view that language is, in Cristina Lafont’s phrase, ‘world‐disclosing’. If different speakers understand and refer to the world from different holistically structured worldviews, it seems to follow that there can be no mutual understanding unless there is significant overlap between ‘worlds’. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I claim, blocks this consequence while maintaining that language is indeed world‐disclosing. By holding that language is a medium in which the distinction between interpretation and (...) object of interpretation is paradoxically both maintained and overcome, Gadamer shows us that the interpreter always thinks the object of interpretation as both transcending and immanent in her worldview. Mutual understanding becomes a matter of mutual recognition of such worldview‐(but not language‐) transcendent objects. Truth and meaning may on this view be characterized as ‘objective’, while retaining a significant element of relativity. (shrink)

The central problem of the dissertation concerns the possibility of a distinction between truth-evaluable and non-truth-evaluable utterances of a natural language. The class of truth-evaluable utterances includes assertions, con. ectures and other kinds of speech act susceptible of truth evaluation. The class of non-truth-evaluable utterances includes commands, exhortations, wishes i.e. utterances not evaluated as being true or false. The problem is placed in the context of radical interpretation theory and it shown that it is a substantial problem of Davidson‘s early (...) theory of radical interpret at ion. I consider the possibility of distinguishing between locutionary and illocutionary act in uttering a sentence and its significance in the present project. I discuss the suggestion that the mood of the verb of the sentence signifies the required distinction between truth-evaluable utterances and non-truth-evaluable ones. I argue that no criterion for the distinction based on the mood of the verb is adequate. The solution that I propose to the problem of classifylng truth-evaluable utterances appeals to mental states. The view that grounds this line of inquiry is that the truth-evaluability of an utterance is a characteristic of it exclusively relevant to the doxastic dimension of the speaker’s mind. I discuss the constraints that the nature of radical interpretation puts upon the way we construe the notion of belief. I propose that a possible classification of mental states into doxastic and non-doxastic that would result in a classification of utterances into truth-evaluable and non-truthevaluable ones can be given by an elaborated version of a decision theoretic scheme. I suggest that a decision theoretic scheme based on a decision theory that, like Savage’s theory, grants independence axioms is a better candidate to offer a solution to the central problem of the dissertation than a scheme based on a non- standard decision theory such as Richard Jeffrey’s. I conclude by showing that the proposal I make satisfies the constraints I have considered and that it can be accommodated by a radical interpretation theory. (shrink)

A common objection raised against naturalism is that a naturalized epistemology cannot account for the essential normative character of epistemology. Following an analysis of different ways in which this charge could be understood, it will be argued that either epistemology is not normative in the relevant sense, or if it is, then in a way which a naturalized epistemology can account for with an instrumental and hypothetical model of normativity. Naturalism is here captured by the two doctrines of empiricism and (...) gradualism. Epistemology is a descriptive discipline about what knowledge is and under what conditions a knowledge-claim is justified. However, we can choose to adopt a standard of justification and by doing so be evaluated by it. In this sense our epistemic practices have a normative character, but this is a form of normativity a naturalized epistemology can make room for. The normativity objection thus fails. However, in the course of this discussion, as yet another attempt to clarify the normativity objection, such a naturalistic model will be contrasted with Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretation. Even though this comparison will not improve upon the negative verdict upon the original objection, it will be argued that naturalism cannot accept Davidson’s theory since it contains at least one constitutive principle – the principle of charity – whose epistemic status is incompatible with the naturalistic doctrine of gradualism. So, if this principle has this role, then epistemology cannot be naturalized. (shrink)

Beliefs can be evaluated from a number of perspectives. Epistemic evaluation involves epistemic standards and appropriate epistemic goals. On a truthconducive account of epistemic justification, a justified belief is one that serves the goal of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Beliefs are also prompted by nonepistemic reasons. This raises the question of whether, say, the pragmatic benefits of a belief are able to rationalize it. In this paper, after criticizing certain responses to this question, I shall argue that, as far (...) as beliefs are concerned, justification has an essentially epistemic character. This conclusion is then qualified by considering the conditions under which pragmatic consequences of a belief can be epistemically relevant. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the dependency or, maybe, the interdependency of rationality and self-knowledge. Here two questions may be distinguished, viz. (1) whether being rational is a necessary condition for a creature to have self-knowledge, and (2) whether having self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a creature to be rational. After a brief explication of what I mean by self-knowledge, I deal with the first question. There I defend the Davidsonian position, according to which rationality is, indeed, a (...) necessary condition for self-knowledge. In addition, I distinguish two aspects of rationality which I call basic and local rationality. After that I concentrate on the second question for the remaining larger part of this article. Here I proceed in two stages: first I examine whether self-knowledge is necessary for basic rationality, and then whether it is necessary for local rationality. (shrink)

There is a duality in our everyday view of belief. On the one hand, we sometimes speak of credence as a matter of degree. We talk of having some level of confidence in a claim (that a certain course of action is safe, for example, or that a desired event will occur) and explain our actions by reference to these degrees of confidence – tacitly appealing, it seems, to a probabilistic calculus such as that formalized in Bayesian decision theory. On (...) the other hand, we also speak of belief as an unqualified, or flat-out, state (‘plain belief’ as it is sometimes called), which is either categorically present or categorically absent. We talk of simply believing or thinking that something is the case, and we cite these flat-out attitudes in explanation of our actions – appealing to classical practical reasoning of the sort formalized in the so-called ‘practical syllogism’.1 This tension in everyday discourse is reflected in the theoretical literature on belief. In formal epistemology there is a division between those in the Bayesian tradition, who treat credence as graded, and those who think of it as a categorical attitude of some kind. The Bayesian perspective also contrasts with the dominant view in philosophy of mind, where belief is widely regarded as a categorical state (a token sentence of a mental language, inscribed in a functionally defined ‘belief box’, according to one popular account). A parallel duality is present in our everyday view of desire. Sometimes we talk of having degrees of preference or desirability; sometimes we speak simply of wanting or desiring something tout court, and, again, this tension is reflected in the theoretical literature. What should we make of these dualities? Are there two different types of belief and desire – partial and flat-out, as they are sometimes called? If so, how are they related? And how could both have a role in guiding rational action, as the everyday view has it? The last question poses a particular challenge in relation to flat-out belief and desire.. (shrink)

A traditional objection to coherentism is that there may be incompatible though equally coherent sets of beliefs. The purpose of the paper is to assess this objection. It is argued that the better a belief "p" coheres with the system of a person, the less likely it is that the negation of the belief coheres equally well with someone else's system, or even that there is someone else who believes the negation of "p". The arguments are based on two plausible (...) assumptions about coherence, and some more controversial assumptions concerning meaning and interpretation. (shrink)

The basic alternatives seem to be either a Humean reductionist view that any particular assertion needs backing with inductive evidence for its reliability before it can retionally be believed, or a Reidian criterial view that testimony is intrinscially, though defeasibly, credible, in the absence of evidence against its reliability.Some recent arguments from the constraints on interpreting any linguistic performances as assertions with propositional content have some force against the reductionist view. We thus have reason to accept the criterial view, at (...) least as applied to eyewitness reports. But these considerations do not establish that any rational enquirer must have the concept of other minds or testimony. The logical possibility of the lone enquirer, who uses symbols and thereby expresses some knowledge of his world, remains open — but it is a question we have no need to pronounce upon. (shrink)

In order to illustrate the nature of the indeterminacy of meaning, Donald Davidson sometimes compares it to the fact that we can measure length or temperature on different scales. In the following paper I try to explain first why we are supposed to expect such an analogy, given the semantics of the word meaning and of the word length or temperature. In the second part I examine how close the analogy is by distinguishing different forms of indeterminacy of meaning (viz., (...) the indeterminacy of reference and the indeterminacy of truth) and ask whether both forms have an equivalent in a theory of measurement. I shall conclude that this is indeed the case. (shrink)

Certain metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are shown to play a role in the defense of Davidson's claims that an empirically constructed theory of truth provides an adequate theory of meaning for any natural language. Dadivson puts forward demonstrative arguments in favor of these presuppositions in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Thought and Talk, and The Method of Truth in Metaphysics. These arguments are examined and found to include controversial and dubitable assumptions as premises. It is then suggested (...) that both these controversial assumptions and Davidson's metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions can be partially defended, however, by dialectical, interpretive, and historical arguments that elucidate the nature of persons. (shrink)