I defend a novel pragmatist account of truth that I call ‘truth from the agent point of view’ or ‘agential truth’, drawing on insights from Hilary Putnam. According to the agential view, as inquirers, when we take something to be truth-apt, we are taking ourselves and all other thinkers to be accountable to getting right a shared target that is independent of any individual's or community's view of that target. That we have this relationship to truth is what enables our (...) practices of disagreement and agreement, even when subject to the glare of self-conscious reflection, and represents a crucial ingredient in our capacity for rational thought. The resulting account shares elements with Huw Price's and Cheryl Misak's views, but also has important advantages over both. It also yields a surprising conclusion—that our best pragmatist account of truth may well be a version of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an adequate meta-semantic framework capable of accommodating the range of projects currently identified as projects in conceptual engineering must be sensitive to the fact that concepts (and hence projects relating to them) fall into distinct kinds. Concepts can vary, I will argue, with respect to their direction of determination, their modal range, and their temporal range. Acknowledging such variations yields a preliminary taxonomy of concepts and generates a meta-semantic framework that allows us both to (...) accommodate the full range of cases and to identify a proper subset of concepts for special ameliorative consideration. Ignoring such variations, in contrast, leads to a restricted meta-semantic framework that accommodates only a subset of the particular projects while generating implausible accounts of others. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is sometimes presented as an alternative to conceptual analysis. But one important objection to conceptual analysis threatens to carry across: that philosophy investigates phenomena—knowledge, truth, freedom, etc.—rather than concepts of those phenomena. This poses a prima facie problem insofar as conceptual engineering targets concepts or terms rather than phenomena. Call it the ‘phenomenon objection’. I begin by examining recent discussions of the phenomenon objection by Cappelen and Scharp, rejecting their responses. I then clarify and strengthen the objection, discussing (...) the challenge that the ‘strong phenomenon objection’ poses to conceptual engineers. Finally, I develop a new response to the strong phenomenon objection. In doing so, I motivate, articulate and defend an account of philosophy and its problems on which conceptual engineering is the appropriate method for tackling many philosophical problems—as well as, perhaps surprisingly, some problems in the sciences. (shrink)

Frankfurt-Style Cases (FSCs) seem to elicit the intuitive judgment that an agent is morally responsible despite being unable to act otherwise, which is supposed to falsify the Principle of Alternative Possibility (PAP). Recent empirical studies have shown that the inclination toward this intuitive judgment is shared among people, which seems to reinforce the argument against the PAP. However, some scholars have argued for Descriptive Anti-Intuitionism (DAI) — intuitive judgments have never played an evidential role in philosophy — and thus denied (...) the philosophical significance of such empirical findings. I point out that although DAI fails in its literal claim for FSCs, an associated insight remains potent: an intuitive judgment is so fragile that it can be easily defeated by further arguments. Nevertheless, I argue, empirical studies are significant in uncovering the general principles to which we are committed in our practice concerning moral responsibility. I clarify how such findings can play a robust evidential role in philosophical debates concerning moral responsibility by tracing the literature written by Frankfurt and philosophers. (shrink)

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a (...) strong effect of this kind: Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. (shrink)

The disease debate in philosophy of medicine has traditionally been billed as a debate over the correct conceptual analysis of the term “disease.” This paper argues that although the debate’s participants overwhelmingly claim to be in the business of conceptual analysis, they do not tend to argue as if this is the case. In particular, they often show a puzzling disregard for key parameters such as precise terminology, linguistic community, and actual usage. This prima facie strange feature of the debate (...) points to an interesting and potentially instructive hypothesis: the disease debate makes little sense within the paradigm of conceptual analysis but makes good sense on the assumption that pathology is a real kind. (shrink)

Defining Mental Disorder: Jerome Wakefield and His Critics, edited by Denis Forest and Luc Faucher, is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of medicine whose work is informed by that of Jerome Wakefield, or the disease debate in general. If you are anything like me, this book will open the door to a new depth of understanding of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) and its methodical underpinnings, and an enriched appreciation of what is at stake in defining medical (...) disorder. To those confident that they understand Wakefield’s view and the surrounding debate, thinking perhaps that they do not need a refresher, I would say: perhaps you do not understand it as well as you think. Defining Mental Disorder provides much more than an overview of previously well-trodden ground. The chapters themselves, and Wakefield’s own detailed responses, help to elucidate a number of methodological nuances and peculiarities that have rarely been covered in such depth before. I was startled to learn how philosophically complex Wakefield’s position actually is, and how shallow my own understanding of it has been. It emerges as a far more nuanced and sophisticated account than I had given it credit for, and one that deserves serious reevaluation. (shrink)