Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and (...) attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless. (shrink)

This paper advances the following criticisms against the received view of implicatures: (1) implicatures are relations of pragmatic implication and not attempts to convey particular speaker meanings; (2) conversational implicatures are non-cancellable; (3) generalised conversational implicatures and conventional implicatures are necessary to preserve the cooperative assumption employing a conversational maxim of conveyability; (4) implicatures should be divided into utterance implicatures and assumption implicatures, not speaker implicatures and sentence implicatures; (5) trivial implicatures are genuine implicatures; (6) Grice’s theory of conversation cannot (...) explain most of his examples of particularised conversational implicatures; (7) the apparent attempts of explicit cancellation of implicatures are apologies, not attempts to avoid misunderstandings. (shrink)

The current standard interpretation of Moore’s proof assumes Moore offers a solution to Kant’s famously posed problem of an external world, which Moore quotes at the start of his 1939 lecture “Proof of an External World.” As a solution to Kant’s problem, Moore’s proof fails utterly. Similarly, a second received interpretation imputes an aim of refuting metaphysical idealism that Moore’s proof does not at all achieve. This study departs from the received interpretations to credit Moore’s stated aim for the proof (...) Moore performed in his 1939 lecture that is to impose a counter-example to an explicitly stated presupposition of Kant’s famously posed problem of an external world. The outcome would therefore subvert Kant’s problem. There is not, however, any rival external world problem that Moore commends in place of Kant’s problem. (shrink)

Instability occurs when the very fact of choosing one particular possible option rather than another affects the expected values of those possible options. In decision theory: An act is stable iff given that it is actually performed, its expected utility is maximal. When there is no stable choice available, the resulting instability can seem to pose a dilemma of practical rationality. A structurally very similar kind of instability, which occurs in cases of anti-expertise, can likewise seem to create dilemmas of (...) epistemic rationality. One possible line of response to such cases of instability, suggested by both Jeffrey (1983) and Sorensen (1987), is to insist that a rational agent can simply refuse to accept that such instability applies to herself in the first place. According to this line of thought it can be rational for a subject to discount even very strong empirical evidence that the anti-expertise condition obtains. I present a new variety of anti-expertise condition where no particular empirical stage-setting is required, since the subject can deduce a priori that an anti-expertise condition obtains. This kind of anti-expertise case is therefore not amenable to the line of response that Jeffrey and Sorensen recommend. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain what a protest is by using the resources of speech-act theory. First, we distinguish the object, redress, and means of a protest. This provided a way to think of atomic acts of protest as having dual communicative aspects, viz., a negative evaluation of the object and a connected prescription of redress. Second, we use Austin’s notion of a felicity condition to further characterize the dual communicative aspects of protest. This allows us to distinguish protest from (...) some other speech acts which also involve a negative evaluation of some object and a connected prescription of redress. Finally, we turn to Kukla and Lance’s idea of a normative functionalist analysis of speech acts to advance the view that protests are a complex speech act constituted by dual input normative statuses and dual output normative statuses. (shrink)

Knowledge is good, ignorance is bad. So it seems, anyway. But in this dissertation, I argue that some ignorance is epistemically valuable. Sometimes, we should suspend judgment even though by believing we would achieve knowledge. In this apology for ignorance (ignorance, that is, of a certain kind), I defend the following four theses: 1) Sometimes, we should continue inquiry in ignorance, even though we are in a position to know the answer, in order to achieve more than mere knowledge (e.g. (...) understanding) while minimizing the effects of confirmation bias. 2) It’s false that we should believe every proposition such that we are guaranteed to be right about it (and even such that we are guaranteed to know it) if we believe it. 3) Being in a position to know is the norm of assertion: importantly, this does not require belief or (thereby) knowledge, and so proper assertion can survive speaker-ignorance. 4) It can be permissible and conversationally useful to tell audiences things that it is logically impossible for them to come to know: Proper assertion can survive (necessary) audience-side ignorance. Cumulatively, this project suggests that, properly understood, ignorance has an important role to play in the good epistemic life. (shrink)

Moore’s Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikka’s interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate way (...) our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moore’s Paradox. (shrink)

Constitutivists about one's cognitive access to one's mental states often hold that for any rational subject S and mental state M falling into some specified range of types, necessarily, if S believes that she has M, then S has M. Some argue that such a principle applies to beliefs about all types of mental state. Others are more cautious, but offer no criterion by which the principle's range could be determined. In this paper I begin to develop such a criterion, (...) arguing that although the principle applies when M is a belief, it does not apply when M is an emotion. I account for this asymmetry by focusing on differences in the commitments that belief and emotion conceptually involve, and briefly sketch out a psychological explanation of those differences. I conclude that one can reasonably split one's epistemological loyalties between constitutivism regarding meta-beliefs and non- constitutivism regarding beliefs about one's emotions. (shrink)

Fitch’s Paradox shows that if every truth is knowable, then every truth is known. Standard diagnoses identify the factivity/negative infallibility of the knowledge operator and Moorean contradictions as the root source of the result. This paper generalises Fitch’s result to show that such diagnoses are mistaken. In place of factivity/negative infallibility, the weaker assumption of any ‘level-bridging principle’ suffices. A consequence is that the result holds for some logics in which the “Moorean contradiction” commonly thought to underlie the result is (...) in fact consistent. This generalised result improves on the current understanding of Fitch’s result and widens the range of modalities of philosophical interest to which the result might be fruitfully applied. Along the way, we also consider a semantic explanation for Fitch’s result which answers a challenge raised by Kvanvig. (shrink)

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This essay is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of the declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. I propose a semantic explanation on which declaratives covertly host a "know"-parenthetical. A speaker (...) is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. I call this view parentheticalism and defend that it better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing. (shrink)

In the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in Moore’s Proof of the existence of an external world, which is now often rendered as follows:1 (I) Here’s a hand (II) If there is a hand here, there is an external world Therefore (III) There is an external world The contemporary debate has been mostly triggered by Crispin Wright’s influential—conservative —“Facts and certainty” and further fostered by Jim Pryor’s recent—liberal—“What’s wrong with Moore’s argument?”.2 This debate is worth (...) surveying with care because—so I shall contend—it will help us see that, in fact, it allows for an important view that, so far, hasn’t been explicitly considered. The critical survey will be the task of the next two sections, while, in the remaining.. (shrink)

On the basis of arguments showing that none of the most influential analyses of Moore’s paradox yields a successful resolution of the problem, a new analysis of it is offered. It is argued that, in attempting to render verdicts of either inconsistency or self-contradiction or self-refutation, those analyses have all failed to satisfactorily explain why a Moore-paradoxical proposition is such that it cannot be rationally believed. According to the proposed solution put forward here, a Moore-paradoxical proposition is one for which (...) the believer can have no non-overridden evidence. The arguments for this claim make use of some of Peter Klein’s views on epistemic defeasibility. It is further suggested that this proposal may have important meta-epistemological implications. (shrink)

On the basis of arguments showing that none of the most influential analyses of Moore's paradox yields a successful resolution of the problem, a new analysis of it is offered. It is argued that, in attempting to render verdicts of either inconsistency or self‐contradiction or self‐refutation, those analyses have all failed to satisfactorily explain why a Moore‐paradoxical proposition is such that it cannot be rationally believed. According to the proposed solution put forward here, a Moore‐paradoxical proposition is one for which (...) the believer can have no non‐overridden evidence. the arguments for this claim make use of some of Peter Klein's views on epistemic defeasibility. It is further suggested that this proposal may have important meta‐epistemological implications. (shrink)

Moore′s paradox came of age when John N. Williams gave us a simple paradoxical argument according to which the Moorean believer must hold false belief while believing contingent propositions. Simplicity was key; it was groundbreaking for the topic. On Williams′s account, given only the notions of inconsistency and self‐refutation, the thesis that belief distributes over conjunction, and a tiny bit of classical logic, we can derive a paradox from the Moorean propositional schemata. But, as argued here, it′s easy to overestimate (...) the significance of his argument to a proper understanding of the problem. His fundamental claim can be established in a way that shows how the paradox arises for any propositional attitude that distributes over conjunction, which gives us the opportunity to reconsider the problem we have been calling “Moore′s paradox”, and to conclude that all of the available analyses of the problem are, at best, incomplete. On this new approach, we lose a little formal simplicity vis‐à‐vis Williams′s approach, but make conceptual economy, as we gain a farther‐reaching problem than the one we have known. (shrink)

At the level of our platitudinous background knowledge about things, speech is the expression of thought. And understanding what such expressing involves is central to understanding the relation between thinking and speaking. Part of what it is for a speech act to express a mental state is that the speech act accurately captures the mental state and can convey to others what mental state it is. And for this to occur, the speech act at least must have propositional content that (...) somehow reflects that of the mental state, and perhaps must have other such properties as well. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop and defend a new adverbial theory of perception. I first present a semantics for direct-object perceptual reports that treats their object positions as supplying adverbial modifiers, and I show how this semantics definitively solves the many-property problem for adverbialism. My solution is distinctive in that it articulates adverbialism from within a well-established formal semantic framework and ties adverbialism to a plausible semantics for perceptual reports in English. I then go on to present adverbialism as a (...) theory of the metaphysics of perception. The metaphysics I develop treats adverbial perception as a directed activity: it is an activity with success conditions. When perception is successful, the agent bears a relation to a concrete particular, but perception need not be successful; this allows perception to be fundamentally non-relational. The result is a novel formulation of adverbialism that eliminates the need for representational contents, but also treats successful and unsuccessful perceptual events as having a fundamental common factor. (shrink)

In this paper I present an empirical solution to the puzzle of Macbeth's dagger. The puzzle of Macbeth's dagger is the question of whether, in having his fatal vision of a dagger, Macbeth sees a dagger. I answer this question by addressing a more general one: the question of whether perceptual verbs are intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). I present seven experiments, each of which tests a collection of perceptual verbs for one of the three features characteristic of ITVs. One of (...) these features is Nonexistence: the failure of sentences involving transitive verbs to entail the existence of their direct objects. The experiments reveal that with respect to all three of these features, "see" behaves much more like a paradigmatically extensional verb than an intensional one. But surprisingly, unlike "see", "perceive" behaves much more like a paradigmatically intensional verb. This shows that the category of perceptual verbs is not uniform with respect to the features of intensionality; while Macbeth does not see a dagger, he may still perceive one. (shrink)

O artigo procura mostrar que os chamados “Absurdos de Moore” (asserções do tipo “Está chovendo, mas eu não acredito que esteja” são o resultado do desrespeito aos princípios epistemológicos assumidos pelo próprio Moore. Além disso, ele apresenta um modo de dissolver os absurdos através da análise filosófica de Wittgenstein da crença e do conhecimento. A motivação para elaborar esse trabalho é a de descobrir se existe, como alguns comentadores sugerem, algum problema ético relacionado com o suposto paradoxo, por exemplo, uma (...) presuposição de sinceridade do falante. Finalmente, ele procura estabelecer as bases epistêmicas para determinar se Wittgenstein continua um não-cognitivista na ética no seu trabalho tardio. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 198 - 207 The paper discusses and presents an alternative interpretation to Penelope Maddy’s reading of G.E. Moore’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s anti-skeptical strategies as proposed in her book _What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy_. It connects this discussion with the methodological claims Maddy puts forward and offers an alternative to her therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_.

Susan Stebbing is often portrayed as indebted to G. E. Moore for her ideas concerning the relationship between common sense and philosophy and about analysis. By focusing mostly on her article “The...

On the basis of arguments showing that none of the most influential analyses of Moore's paradox yields a successful resolution of the problem, a new analysis of it is offered. It is argued that, in attempting to render verdicts of either inconsistency or self-contradiction or self-refutation, those analyses have all failed to satisfactorily explain why a Moore-paradoxical proposition is such that it cannot be rationally believed. According to the proposed solution put forward here, a Moore-paradoxical proposition is one for which (...) the believer can have no non-overridden evidence. The arguments for this claim make use of some of Peter Klein's views on epistemic defeasibility. It is further suggested that this proposal may have important meta-epistemological implications. (shrink)

Maclntyre's claim that contemporary moral language is, by traditional standards, merely chaotic somewhat exaggerates our chaos, and traditional order. He accuses. Moore and his disciples in particular of using moral language merely as propaganda, failing, like other critics, to reckon with the Platonic context of Moore's argument and the reasons why Goodness is an idea that rational inquiry should not abandon. Genuine moral action is done as the right thing, that produces more that is good than any alternative. Plato's model (...) of the threefold structure of human motivation, and his image of the cave, locates moral action at a higher level than action from desire or social prejudice. We discover our real selves, distinct from our physical and social natures, in seeing what Goodness requires. This neo?Platonism is a better bet than Maclntyre allows, and an answer to the barbarian puppeteers he rightly condemns. (shrink)

G.E. Moore noticed the oddity of statements like: “It's raining, but I don't believe it.” This oddity is often seen as analogous to the oddity of believing akratically, or believing what one believes one should not believe, and has been appealed to in denying the possibility of akratic belief. I describe a Belief Akratic's Paradox, analogous to Moore's paradox and centered on sentences such as: “I believe it's raining, but I shouldn't believe it.” I then defend the possibility of akratic (...) belief against appeals to this analogy, arguing both that akratic belief does not require belief-akratic-paradoxical belief, and that the latter is importantly different from Moorean belief. I conclude by considering the implications of these arguments for an understanding of both Moorean and akratic belief. (shrink)

Two readings of the much-discussed περιτροπή argument of "Theaetetus" 170c-171c have dominated the literature. One I call "the relativity reading". On this reading, the argument fails by ignoratio elenchi because it "carelessly" omits "the qualifications 'true for so-and-so' which [Protagoras'] theory insists on" (Bostock 1988: 90). The other reading I call "the many-worlds interpretation". On this view, Plato's argument succeeds in showing that "Protagoras' position becomes utterly self-contradictory" because "he claims that everyone lives in his own relativistic world, yet at (...) the same time he is forced by that very claim to admit that no one does" (Burnyeat 1976b: 48). I discuss and criticise both readings, and present a third, according to which the point of the argument is, very roughly, that Protagoras is committed to equating truth and truth-for, and so, further, to their intersubstitutability. This further commitment proves fatal to his argument. (shrink)

In a series of articles Christopher Cowie has provided what he calls a ‘Master Argument’ against the Companions in Guilt (CG) defence of moral objectivity. In what follows I defend the CG strategy against Cowie. I show, firstly, that epistemic judgements are relevantly similar to moral judgements, and secondly, that it is not possible coherently to deny the existence of irreducible and categorically normative epistemic reasons. My argument for the second of these claims exploits an analogy between the thesis that (...) epistemic norms are non-categorical and G.E. Moore’s paradox concerning first personal belief ascriptions. I argue that the absurdity of the assertion “I have evidence that p but no reason to believe it” shows that the norms of belief are categorical. I then consider the counter-argument that this categoricity is a ‘conceptual’ rather than an ‘objective’ requirement. By drawing on the work of Hilary Putnam and Charles Travis, I show that this counter-argument is unsuccessful. Putnam is one of the original proponents of the Companions in Guilt strategy. Thus, by supporting the CG argument through appeal to other Putnamian theses, I show that its insights can only fully be appreciated in the context of broader metaphysical and semantic lessons. (shrink)

In a previous article, we challenged the “incentivization view” held by J. P. Smit, Filip Buekens, and Stan du Plessis as failing to cover social phenomena involving strict joint actions. The authors’ response to our criticism seriously misstates our main point. We have therefore, as briefly and sharply as we can, restated the problem in this note.

Experimental philosophers have empirically challenged the connection between intuition and philosophical expertise. This paper reviews these challenges alongside other research findings in cognitive science on expert performance and argues for three claims. First, evidence taken to challenge philosophical expertise may also be explained by the well-researched failures and limitations of genuine expertise. Second, studying the failures and limitations of experts across many fields provides a promising research program upon which to base a new model of philosophical expertise. Third, a model (...) of philosophical expertise based on the limitations of genuine experts may suggest a series of constraints on the reliability of professional philosophical intuition. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. — Bertrand Russell, On the Value of Scepticism. (shrink)

Nearly all philosophers agree that only true things can be known. But does this principle reflect actual patterns of ordinary usage? Several examples in ordinary language seem to show that ‘know’ is literally used non-factively. By contrast, this paper reports five experiments utilizing explicit paraphrasing tasks, which suggest that non-factive uses are actually not literal. Instead, they are better explained by a phenomenon known as protagonist projection. It is argued that armchair philosophical orthodoxy regarding the truth requirement for knowledge withstands (...) current empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation, moral realism is the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. Ethical naturalism is the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these metaethical debates (...) remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of “direct reference” —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's “open question argument.” In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background. (shrink)

Various data from communication that does not occur face-to-face are taken to be problematic for Kaplan’s account of indexical expressions, as is the case with the so-called answering machine paradox. One fix, developed by Sidelle (1991) and Briciu (2018), is the remote utterance view: recording artifacts are means by which speakers perform utterances at a distance, just as by means of other artifacts agents performs other types of actions at a distance. This view has faced an important objection, namely that (...) remote utterances lead to Moorean paradoxes. In this paper, I defend the remote utterance view against this objection and further develop the view. I argue that worries about Moorean paradoxes can easily be dispelled if we take into consideration the artifactual nature of recording devices, their materiality, and the communicative affordances they bring about. In the first section, we’ll present the answering machine paradox and give a brief overview of the remote utterance view. The second section presents the objection against the view, while the third gives a detailed rejoinder to the objection. Answering this objection is important also because it allows us to explore some underdeveloped aspects of the remote utterance view. First, I will discuss how the theorist calibrates her model with the data she seeks to explain and predict. Secondly, I will argue that speech acts performed via recording devices have different felicity conditions than their oral counterparts. I conclude with a short discussion of some semantic and pragmatic consequences of the view. (shrink)

Diachronic Dutch book arguments seem to support both conditionalization and Bas van Fraassen's Reflection principle. But the Reflection principle is vulnerable to numerous counterexamples. This essay addresses two questions: first, under what circumstances should an agent obey Reflection, and second, should the counterexamples to Reflection make us doubt the Dutch book for conditionalization? In response to the first question, this essay formulates a new "Qualified Reflection" principle, which states that an agent should obey Reflection only if he or she is (...) certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence in the future. Qualified Reflection follows from the probability calculus together with a few idealizing assumptions. The essay then formulates a "Distorted Reflection" principle that approximates Reflection even in cases where the agent is not quite certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence. In response to the second question, the essay argues that contrary to a common misconception, not all Dutch books dramatize incoherence—some dramatize a less blameworthy sort of epistemic frailty that the essay calls "self-doubt." The distinction between Dutch books that dramatize incoherence and those that dramatize self-doubt cross-cuts the distinction between synchronic and diachronic Dutch books. The essay explains why the Dutch book for conditionalization reveals true incoherence, whereas the Dutch book for Reflection reveals only self-doubt. (shrink)

In a dissonance case, a person sincerely and with conviction asserts that P, while her overall automatic behaviour suggests that she believes that not-P. In contrast with several mainstream views, this paper defends the contradictory-belief view of some relevant dissonance cases and explores its consequences regarding Moorean propositions. The paper argues that in relevant cases, the dissonant person is justified in asserting a Moorean proposition on the grounds of her explicit view on the subject matter and the recognition of her (...) opposing beliefs. The person is irrational in being dissonant, but not in asserting a Moorean proposition. (shrink)

One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, informational relations, teleological (...) or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have no mental properties at all. (shrink)

One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items (objects, properties, facts) in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, (...) informational relations, teleological or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have no mental properties at all. (shrink)

Legal philosophers share the same phenomenology of legal practice. Yet, they differ in its explanation. For normativists, descriptivists got it wrong and vice versa. This controversy between normativists and descriptivists will be called “the methodological problem” in legal theory. Normativists such as Dworkin and Perry argue that descriptivists need evaluation. By contrast, descriptivists such as Coleman argue that normativists need the methods of descriptivism such as conceptual analysis and therefore might be committed to descriptivism. The paper shows that the responses (...) of Perry and Coleman to the methodological problem are not free from difficulties. The article also advances a reinterpretation of normativism in terms of two tenets: 1. the semantic sting argument, and 2. the ametaphysical thesis argument. If the latter argument is sound, normativism is unavoidable, because if there cannot be an external point of view or Archimedean perspective, then we can only resort to our moral convictions or substantive claims. The first tenet has been criticized in previous work and the paper focuses on a criticism of the second tenet. (shrink)

Mandik (2012)understands color-consciousness conceptualism to be the view that one deploys in a conscious qualitative state concepts for every color consciously discriminated by that state. Some argue that the experimental evidence that we can consciously discriminate barely distinct hues that are presented together but cannot do so when those hues are presented in short succession suggests that we can consciously discriminate colors that we do not conceptualize. Mandik maintains, however, that this evidence is consistent with our deploying a variety of (...) nondemonstrative concepts for those colors and so does not pose a threat to conceptualism. But even if Mandik has shown that we deploy such concepts in these experimental conditions, there are cases of conscious states that discriminate colors but do not involve concepts of those colors. Mandik’s arguments sustain only a theory in the vicinity of conceptualism: The view that we possess concepts for every color we can discriminate consciously, but need not deploy those concepts in every conscious act of color discrimination. (shrink)

Another view has entered the metaethical debate—relaxed realism [Dworkin 1996; Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014]. Relaxed realists claim that there are irreducible moral properties, but seek to avoid the...

One of the most important views in the recent discussion of epistemological scepticism is Neo-Mooreanism. It turns a well-known kind of sceptical argument (the dreaming argument and its different versions) on its head by starting with ordinary knowledge claims and concluding that we know that we are not in a sceptical scenario. This paper argues that George Edward Moore was not a Moorean in this sense. Moore replied to other forms of scepticism than those mostly discussed nowadays. His own anti-sceptical (...) position turns out to be very subtle and complex; furthermore it changed over time. This paper follows Moore's views of what the sceptical problem is and how one should respond to it through a series of crucial papers with the main focus being on Moore's 'Proof of an External World'. An appendix deals with the much neglected relation between epistemological scepticism and moral scepticism in Moore. (shrink)

Voluntarism about beliefs is the view that persons can be free to choose their beliefs for non-epistemic (truth-related) reasons (cf. Williams 1973). One problem for belief voluntarism is that it can lead to Moore-paradoxality. The person might believe that -/- a.) there are also good epistemic reasons for her belief, or that b.) there are no epistemic reasons one way or the other, or that c.) there are good epistemic reasons against her belief. -/- If the person is aware of (...) the fact that she chose her belief for non-epistemic reasons, then she would believe one of the following three things (using "evidence" as a term for all kinds of epistemic reasons): -/- a.) I believe that p but not because of the good evidence in favour of it; b.) I believe that p but that has nothing to do with the evidence; c.) I believe that p but the evidence speaks against it. -/- We could add a fourth case in which the person suspends belief on the subject matter despite the evidence: -/- d.) The evidence supports "p" but I have no view on the matter. -/- All the different versions a-d are somehow Moore-paradoxical. They constitute different ways of mistrusting one's own belief (cf. Wittgenstein 1958, p.190). Given that one cannot, for conceptual reasons, mistrust one's beliefs, it follows that a person cannot be in one of the above predicaments described by a-d. Hence, voluntarism about beliefs is false, at least if we are dealing with cases in which the person is aware of the fact that she chose her belief for non-epistemic reasons. It won't help to focus on cases in which the person is not aware of that fact, either because she has forgotten the genesis of her belief or because the process of belief acquisition was unconscious. -/- Bas van Fraassen's conception of a stance (cf. van Fraassen 2002)-a mix of commitments, values, goals-gives us reason to rethink the possibility of voluntarism. Might we be free to choose our stances for non-epistemic reasons? I argue here that the answer is negative. First, it is not clear at all whether stances can be objects of choice, properly speaking. And: Can we make sense of the idea of a free choice here? Furthermore, I argue that similar problems of Moore-paradoxality would arise for voluntarism about stances. If one does not want to completely devalue the idea of a stance, one should avoid voluntarism. (shrink)

The representation of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the analysis of natural-language, propositional-attitude reports presents difficult problems for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, various representational approaches to attitudes involve the incorrect “imputation,” to cognitive agents, of the use of artificial theory-laden notions. Interesting cases of this problem are shown to occur in several approaches to attitudes. The imputation problem is shown to arise from the way that representational approaches explicate properties and relationships, and in particular from the (...) way they explicate propositional attitudes themselves. Another factor contributing to imputation is the compositional nature of typical semantic approaches to propositional-attitude reports. Some strategies for avoiding undesirable imputation are examined. One of the main conclusions is that the importance of imputations that arise in a representation scheme depends strongly on the use to which the scheme is put -- on whether, for instance, the scheme is used as part of a formal, objective account of natural language, or is used rather as a representational tool within an agent. (shrink)

We formalize what it means to have permission to say something. We adapt the dynamic logic of permission by van der Meyden (J Log Comput 6(3):465–479, 1996 ) to the case where atomic actions are public truthful announcements. We also add a notion of obligation. Our logic is an extension of the logic of public announcements introduced by Plaza ( 1989 ) with dynamic modal operators for permission and for obligation. We axiomatize the logic and show that it is decidable.

We formalise a notion of dynamic rationality in terms of a logic of conditional beliefs on (doxastic) plausibility models. Similarly to other epistemic statements (e.g. negations of Moore sentences and of Muddy Children announcements), dynamic rationality changes its meaning after every act of learning, and it may become true after players learn it is false. Applying this to extensive games, we “simulate” the play of a game as a succession of dynamic updates of the original plausibility model: the epistemic situation (...) when a given node is reached can be thought of as the result of a joint act of learning (via public announcements) that the node is reached. We then use the notion of “stable belief”, i.e. belief that is preserved during the play of the game, in order to give an epistemic condition for backward induction: rationality and common knowledge of stable belief in rationality. This condition is weaker than Aumann’s and compatible with the implicit assumptions (the “epistemic openness of the future”) underlying Stalnaker’s criticism of Aumann’s proof. The “dynamic” nature of our concept of rationality explains why our condition avoids the apparent circularity of the “backward induction paradox”: it is consistent to (continue to) believe in a player’s rationality after updating with his irrationality. (shrink)

Public announcement logic is an extension of multiagent epistemic logic with dynamic operators to model the informational consequences of announcements to the entire group of agents. We propose an extension of public announcement logic with a dynamic modal operator that expresses what is true after any announcement: after which , does it hold that Kφ? We give various semantic results and show completeness for a Hilbert-style axiomatization of this logic. There is a natural generalization to a logic for arbitrary events.

According to the Transparency Method, one can know whether one believes that P by attending to a question about the world—namely, ‘Is P true?’ On this view, one can know, for instance, whether one believes that Socrates was a Greek philosopher by attending to the question ‘Was Socrates a Greek philosopher?’ While many think that TM can account for the self-knowledge we can have of such a belief—and belief in general—fewer think that TM can be generalised to account for the (...) self-knowledge we can have of other propositional attitudes, such as our desires, intentions, wishes and so on. Call this the Generality Problem. In the present paper, I contrast my own attempt to solve the Generality Problem with several recent ones. I argue that in order to extend TM beyond belief, we must look to the concepts underpinning each kind of mental state. Doing so, I argue, reveals a series of outward-directed questions that can be attended to, in order to know what one desires, intends, wishes and so on. Call this the conceptual approach to extending TM. I support the conceptual approach in the present paper by showing how it generates Moore-Paradoxical sentences that are analogous to the case of belief. (shrink)