For any normative domain, we can theorize about what is good in that domain. Such theories include utilitarianism, a view about what is good morally. But there are many domains other than the moral; these include the prudential, the aesthetic, and the intellectual or epistemic. In this last domain, it is good to be knowledgeable and bad to ignore evidence, quite apart from the morality, prudence, and aesthetics of these things. This dissertation builds a theory that stands to the epistemic (...) domain as utilitarianism stands to the moral domain. It builds an epistemic value theory. (shrink)

This paper is divided in five sections. Section 11.1 sketches the history of the distinction between speech act with negative content and negated speech act, and gives a general dynamic interpretation for negated speech act. “Downdate semantics” for AGM contraction is introduced in Section 11.2. Relying on semantically interpreted contraction, Section 11.3 develops the dynamic semantics for constative and directive speech acts, and their external negations. The expressive completeness for the formal variants of natural language utterances, none of which is (...) a retraction, has been proved in Section 11.4. The last section gives a laconic answer to the question posed in the title of the paper. (shrink)

According to scientific realism, the aim of science is to discover the truth about both observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent, objective reality, which we inhabit. It has been objected by Putnam and others that such a metaphysically realist position presupposes a God’s Eye point of view, of which no coherent sense can be made. In this paper, I will argue for two claims. First, scientific realism does not require the adoption of a God’s Eye point of view. Instead, (...) scientific realism is a hypothesis about the relationship between scientific theory and reality which may be proposed from within our human perspective. Second, even if scientific realism did require a God’s Eye point of view, this would not necessarily be to the detriment of realism. For it is possible to develop an intelligible external perspective on human epistemic relations to our environing reality. (shrink)