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Debunking arguments

Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12638 (2019)

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  1. Vague Composition Without Vague Existence.Chad Carmichael - 2011 - Noûs 45 (2):315-327.
    David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection between composition and existence that Lewis assumes. On the resulting view, in troublesome cases of vague composition, there is an object, (...)
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  • The power of second-order conspiracies.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (Online):1-26.
    A second-order conspiracy (SOC) is a conspiracy that aims to create (and typically also disseminate) a conspiracy theory. Second-order conspiracy theories (SOCT) are theories that explain the occurrence of a given conspiracy theory by appeal to a conspiracy. In this paper I argue that SOC and SOCT are useful and coherent concepts, while also having numerous philosophically interesting upshots (in terms of epistemology, explanation, and prediction). Secondly, I appeal to the nature of two specific kinds of second-order conspiracies to make (...)
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  • Against Moorean Defences of Speciesism.François Jaquet - 2023 - In Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán & Fernando Aguiar (eds.), Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy. Routledge.
    Common sense has it that animals matter considerably less than humans; the welfare and suffering of a cow, a chicken or a fish are important but not as much as the welfare and suffering of a human being. Most animal ethicists reject this “speciesist” view as mere prejudice. In their opinion, there is no difference between humans and other animals that could justify such unequal consideration. In the opposite camp, advocates of speciesism have long tried to identify a difference that (...)
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  • Genealogical Defeat and Ontological Sparsity.Jonathan Barker - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47:1-23.
    When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of (...)
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  • Why is Presentism Intuitive?Ernesto Graziani - 2023 - Metaphysica 24 (2):181-201.
    Presentism is, roughly, the ontological view that only the present exists. Among the philosophers engaged in the metaphysics of time there is wide agreement that presentism is intuitive (or commonsensical) and that its intuitiveness counts as evidence in its favour. My contribution has two purposes: first, defending the view that presentism is intuitive from some recent criticisms; second, putting forth a genealogical (or debunking) argument aimed at depriving presentism’s intuitiveness of the evidential value commonly granted to it.
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  • A Defense of Explanationism against Recent Objections.Tomas Bogardus & Will Perrin - forthcoming - Episteme:1-12.
    In the recent literature on the nature of knowledge, a rivalry has emerged between modalism and explanationism. According to modalism, knowledge requires that our beliefs track the truth across some appropriate set of possible worlds. Modalists tend to focus on two modal conditions: sensitivity and safety. According to explanationism, knowledge requires only that beliefs bear the right sort of explanatory relation to the truth. In slogan form: knowledge is believing something because it’s true. In this paper, we aim to vindicate (...)
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  • Debunking Concepts.Matthieu Queloz - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1):195-225.
    Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...)
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  • Varieties of Grounding Skepticism.David Mark Kovacs - 2023 - The Monist 106 (3):301-316.
    Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...)
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  • Explanationism versus Modalism in Debunking (and Theory Choice).Harjit Bhogal - 2023 - Mind 132 (528):1005-1027.
    At the core of the recent debate over moral debunking arguments is a disagreement between explanationist and modalist approaches. Explanationists think that the lack of an explanatory connection between our moral beliefs and the moral truths, given a non-naturalist realist conception of morality, is a reason to reject non-naturalism. Modalists disagree. They say that, given non-naturalism, our beliefs have the appropriate modal features with respect to truth -- in particular they are safe and sensitive -- so there is no problem. (...)
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  • Recalibrating evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):456-478.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic principles are just as vulnerable to debunking as our moral beliefs. I argue that this objection suffers from several defects, the most (...)
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  • Debunking Debunked? : Challenges, Prospects, and the Threat of Self-Defeat.Conrad Bakka - 2023 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    Metaethical debunking arguments often conclude that no moral belief is epistemically justified. Early versions of such arguments largely relied on metaphors and analogies and left the epistemology of debunking underspecified. Debunkers have since come to take on substantial and broad-ranging epistemological commitments. The plausibility of metaethical debunking has thereby become entangled in thorny epistemological issues. In this thesis, I provide a critical yet sympathetic evaluation of the prospects and challenges facing such arguments in light of this development. In doing so, (...)
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  • Genealogical Undermining for Conspiracy Theories.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-23.
    In this paper I develop a genealogical approach for investigating and evaluating conspiracy theories. I argue that conspiracy theories with an epistemically problematic genealogy are (in virtue of that fact) epistemically undermined. I propose that a plausible type of candidate for such conspiracy theories involves what I call ‘second-order conspiracies’ (i.e. conspiracies that aim to create conspiracy theories). Then, I identify two examples involving such conspiracies: the antivaccination industry and the industry behind climate change denialism. After fleshing out the mechanisms (...)
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  • Debunking creedal beliefs.Hrishikesh Joshi - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-18.
    Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: (i) the costs to the (...)
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  • Two epistemological challenges regarding hypothetical modeling.Peter Tan - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    Sometimes, scientific models are either intended to or plausibly interpreted as representing nonactual but possible targets. Call this “hypothetical modeling”. This paper raises two epistemological challenges concerning hypothetical modeling. To begin with, I observe that given common philosophical assumptions about the scope of objective possibility, hypothetical models are fallible with respect to what is objectively possible. There is thus a need to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate hypothetical modeling. The first epistemological challenge is that no account of the epistemology of (...)
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  • Immanence in Abundance.Chad Carmichael - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (4):1535-1553.
    In this paper, I develop a theory on which each of a thing’s abundant properties is immanent in that thing. On the version of the theory I will propose, universals are abundant, each instantiated universal is immanent, and each uninstantiated universal is such that it could have been instantiated, in which case it would have been immanent. After setting out the theory, I will defend it from David Lewis’s argument that such a combination of immanence and abundance is absurd. I (...)
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  • What's the coincidence in debunking?Harjit Bhogal - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):147-167.
    Many moral debunking arguments are driven by the idea that the correlation between our moral beliefs and the moral truths is a big coincidence, given a robustly realist conception of morality.One influential response is that the correlation is not a coincidence because there is a common explainer of our moral beliefs and the moral truths. For example, the reason that I believe that I should feed my child is because feeding my child helps them to survive, and natural selection instills (...)
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  • Global Debunking Arguments.Andrew Moon - 2023 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    This chapter explores global debunking arguments, debunking arguments that aim to give one a global defeater. I defend Alvin Plantinga’s view that global defeaters are possible and, once gained, are impossible to escape by reasoning. They thereby must be extinguished by other means: epistemically propitious actions, luck, or grace. I then distinguish between three types of global defeater—pure-undercutters, undercutters-because-rebutters, and undercutters-while-rebutters—and systematically consider how one can deflect such defeaters. Lastly, since I draw insights from the literature on perhaps the most (...)
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  • An Explanationist Account of Genealogical Defeat.Daniel Z. Korman & Dustin Locke - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):176-195.
    Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...)
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  • The epistemology of evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12155-12176.
    Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and (...)
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  • Speciesism and tribalism: Embarrassing origins.François Jaquet - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):933-954.
    Animal ethicists have been debating the morality of speciesism for over forty years. Despite rather persuasive arguments against this form of discrimination, many philosophers continue to assign humans a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. The primary source of evidence for this position is our intuition that humans’ interests matter more than the similar interests of other animals. And it must be acknowledged that this intuition is both powerful and widespread. But should we trust it for all that? The present (...)
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  • Knowledge is Believing Something Because It's True.Tomas Bogardus & Will Perrin - 2022 - Episteme 19 (2):178-196.
    Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese (...)
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  • No need to get up from the armchair.Dan Baras - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3):575-590.
    Several authors believe that metaethicists ought to leave their comfortable armchairs and engage with serious empirical research. This paper provides partial support for the opposing view, that metaethics is rightly conducted from the armchair. It does so by focusing on debunking arguments against robust moral realism. Specifically, the article discusses arguments based on the possibility that if robust realism is correct, then our beliefs are most likely insensitive to the relevant truths. These arguments seem at first glance to be dependent (...)
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  • Debunking Arguments for Illusionism about Consciousness.David Chalmers - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):258-281.
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  • Circular and question-begging responses to religious disagreement and debunking arguments.Andrew Moon - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):785-809.
    Disagreement and debunking arguments threaten religious belief. In this paper, I draw attention to two types of propositions and show how they reveal new ways to respond to debunking arguments and disagreement. The first type of proposition is the epistemically self-promoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that one reliably believes it. Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield an epistemically circular argument in response to (...)
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  • Debunkings de dicto and de re : Brandom on Genealogical Explanation.W. Clark Wolf - 2022 - Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 3 (1):123-145.
    One of the most surprisingly prominent themes in Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust is the role of genealogical explanations. Brandom sees genealogies or ‘debunking arguments’ as significant because of their ability to deprive our discursive acts of the normative status they require to be genuinely discursive or conceptual. His solution to the problem of genealogy is to offer rationalizing reconstructions of others’ discursive acts, which credit them with normative status. He calls this “forgiveness”. In this paper, I provide some (...)
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  • How Should Theists Respond to Debunking Arguments? A Critique of Hans Van Eyghen’s Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion.Lari Launonen - 2022 - Philosophia Reformata 87 (2):179-194.
    Cognitive science of religion has inspired several debunking arguments against theistic belief. Hans Van Eyghen’s book Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion is the first monograph devoted to answering such arguments. This article focuses on Van Eyghen’s responses to two widely discussed debunking arguments, one by Matthew Braddock and another by John Wilkins and Paul Griffiths. Both responses have potential but also face problems. Even if Van Eyghen manages to show that these authors have not fully excluded the possibility of (...)
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  • Un-debunking Ordinary Objects with the Help of Predictive Processing.Paweł Gładziejewski - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (4):1047-1068.
    Debunking arguments aim to undermine common sense beliefs by showing that they are not explanatorily or causally linked to the entities they are purportedly about. Rarely are facts about the aetiology of common sense beliefs invoked for the opposite aim, that is, to support the reality of entities that furnish our manifest image of the world. Here I undertake this sort of un-debunking project. My focus is on the metaphysics of ordinary physical objects. I use the view of perception as (...)
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  • From Altered States to Metaphysics: The Epistemic Status of Psychedelic-induced Metaphysical Beliefs.Paweł Gładziejewski - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-23.
    Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...)
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  • The Evolutionary Debunking of Quasi-Realism.Neil Sinclair & James Chamberlain - 2023 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 33-55.
    In “The Evolutionary Debunking of Quasi-Realism,” Neil Sinclair and James Chamberlain present a novel answer that quasi-realists can pro-vide to a version of the reliability challenge in ethics—which asks for an explanation of why our moral beliefs are generally true—and in so doing, they examine whether evolutionary arguments can debunk quasi-realism. Although reliability challenges differ from EDAs in several respects, there may well be a connection between them. For the explanatory premise of an EDA may state that a particular theory (...)
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  • Value, Fittingness and Partiality : On the Partiality Problem for Fitting Attitude Analyses of Value.Nils Sylvan - 2021 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    This dissertation is about the partiality problem for fitting attitude (FA) analyses of value. More specifically, it is about whether and how the problem might be resolved. In Chapter 1, I set the stage by offering a short introduction to the topic and a rationale for investigating it. I then give a more detailed account of FA analyses of value in Chapter 2, including a brief outline of their history and appeal, before explaining more thoroughly just what the partiality problem (...)
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