V prispevku se najprej analizira Popperov poskus razmejitve znanosti in metafizike. Ugotovi se, da Popperov kriterij demarkacije - ovržba - ne omogoča upravičbe želene delitve, ker je rezultat zelo nepričakovan. Na isti strani so matematika in logika, teorija indukcije, različne metafizične teorije in filozofija. Ovržba lahko funkcionira kot kriterij razločevanja le v horizontu ločevanja stavkov empiričnih znanosti od stavkov, ki empirični znanosti ne pripadajo. V nadaljevanju se primerja Tarskijevo teorijo resnice s Popperovo interpretacijo. Izkaže se, da Popper zahteva od Tarskega (...) preveč, čeprav je res, da prav z njegovo pomočjo zagotovi legitimnost svojega temeljnega prepričanja, da znanost teži k resnici in da se dejansko le tej tudi približuje. Zaradi nekaterih problemov ponudi Popper namesto tradicionalnega pojma resnice teorijo podobnosti resnici, ki pa ne uspe v poskusu preseganja le teh. Kot možna alternativa, ki pa ni slepa privolitev v Feyerabendov »vse je možno«, se ponuja zmes obeh pristopov. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

The term “consciousness” is very often, though not always, interchangeable with the term “awareness,” which is more colloquial to many ears. We say things like “are you aware that ...” often. Sometimes we say “have you noticed that ... ?” to express similar thoughts, and this indicates a close connection between consciousness (awareness) and attention (noticing), which we will come back to later in this chapter. Ned Block, one of the key figures in this area, provides a useful characterization of (...) what he calls “phenomenal consciousness.” For him, phenomenal consciousness is experience. Experience covers perceptions, e.g., when we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, we typically have experiences, such as seeing colors and smelling odors. It also covers bodily awareness, e.g., we typically have experiences of our own bodily temperature and positions of limbs. Consciousness is primarily about this experiential aspect of our mental lives. (shrink)

Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subject deploys the (...) same file twice, in association with both of the singular terms, she is bound to know that she is referring to the same entity twice. (shrink)

I suggest a solution to a conflict between semantic internalism – according to which the concepts one expresses are determined by one's use of representations – and publicity – according to which, if two subjects successfully communicate or are in genuine agreement, then they entertain thoughts constituted by the same concepts. My solution rests on the thesis that there can be successful communication and genuine agreement between thinkers employing distinct concepts as long as there is a certain relation (of conceptually (...) guaranteed sameness of extension) between them. In section 2, I motivate semantic internalism and show how it conflicts with publicity. In section 3, I carve the logical space of possible solutions to the conflict into liberal and conservative solutions. Section 4 assesses Wikforss's conservative solution to Burge's arthritis thought‐experiment and concludes that it fails for more than one reason. Section 5 introduces a new case study involving a deferential concept. This case serves as the backdrop for my positive account offered in section 6. The conclusion of the article is preceded by a comparison of my view with another recently proposed by Recanati (section 7) and some replies to possible objections (section 8). (shrink)

Philosophers have given much attention to belief and knowledge. Here I introduce an epistemic category close to but different from belief, that I call ‘ersatz’belief. Recognition of this category refines our catalogue of epistemic attitudes in an important way.

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...) argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism. (shrink)

The biological race debate is at an impasse. Issues surrounding hereditarianism aside, there is little empirical disagreement left between race naturalists and anti-realists about biological race. The disagreement is now primarily semantic. This would seem to uniquely qualify philosophers to contribute to the biological race debate. However, philosophers of race are reluctant to focus on semantics, largely because of their worries about the ‘flight to reference’. In this paper, I show how philosophers can contribute to the debate without taking the (...) flight to reference. Drawing on the theory of reference literature and the history of meaning change in science, I develop some criteria for dealing with cases where there is uncertainty about reference. I then apply these criteria to the biological race debate. All of the criteria I develop for eliminating putative kinds are met in the case of ‘race’ as understood by twentieth century geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and his contemporary proponents, suggesting that we should eliminate it from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all their members at all time. (...) Second, we have access to the inner mechanisms of the groups agents, because members know what they have decided on. I construct a counterexample with these features allowing me to reject interpretivism about group agency in favour of functionalism. (shrink)

Arguing that psychology and business ethics are best brought together through a multi-level, broad-based agenda, this essay articulates a vision of psychology and business ethics to frame a future research agenda. The essay draws upon work published in JBE, but also identifies gaps where published research is needed, to build upon psychological conceptions of business ethics. Psychological concepts, notably, are not restricted to phenomena “in the head”, but are discussed at the intra-psychic, relational, and contextual levels of analysis. On the (...) basis of this presentation, I discuss future directions for development in psychology and business ethics, including but not limited to studies of personality, emotion, decision making, motivation, and the biological bases of psychology and business ethics. An inclusive approach to these and related areas, it is argued, will both bring about depth of understanding on the psychological bases of business ethics, and allow dialogue across disciplinary areas within JBE. (shrink)

This paper presents two cases demonstrating that theories allowing the environment to partially determine the content of moral concepts provide incorrect truth-conditions for moral terms. While typical Moral Twin Earth cases seek to establish that these theories fail to account formoral disagreement, neither case here essentially involves interpersonal disagreement. Both involve a single person retaining moral beliefs despite recognizing actual or potential mismatches with the purportedly content-determining facts. This lets opponents of such theories grant objections that standard Moral Twin Earth (...) cases fail to demonstrate disagreement, and argue more straightforwardly that they generate implausible truth-conditions for moral claims. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the (...) study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences. (shrink)

A few philosophers of biology have recently explicitly rejected Essential Membership, the doctrine that if an individual organism belongs to a taxon, particularly a species, it does so essentially. But philosophers of biology have not addressed the broader issue, much discussed by metaphysicians on the basis of modal intuitions, of what is essential to the organism. In this paper, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, (...) essence. The arguments appeal to the demands of biological explanation and are analogous to arguments that I have given elsewhere that a taxon has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. These conclusions about the essences of individuals and taxa yield an argument for Essential Membership. Finally, I cast doubt on LaPorte’s objection to that doctrine arising from the view that a species cannot survive having a daughter. (shrink)

The rigid designation of proper names and natural kind terms is the most well-known doctrine of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1981). On the basis of rigidity, Kripke has shown that proper names and natural kind terms do not refer via a description as argued by descriptivists. In response to Kripke several people have argued that all general terms could be interpreted rigidly, which would make the notion of rigidity trivial. This leads to the ‘rigidity problem’: the notion of rigidity cannot (...) be used to argue against descriptivism anymore. I will show that the rigidity problem appears on a larger scale: firstly, because it appears independently of the trivialisation problem, secondly, because it appears for descriptions acting like singular terms as well. I will argue, however, that proper names and natural kind terms differ in an important manner from rigid descriptions. While the first are de jure rigid, the latter are de facto rigid. I will show that the rigidity problem indeed appears for de facto rigidity, but not for de jure rigidity, with the result that Kripke’s argument against descriptivism can withstand. (shrink)

This paper investigates interactive kinds, a class of kinds suggested by Ian Hacking for which classification generates a feedback loop between the classifiers and what is classified, and argues that human interactive kinds should be distinguished from non-human ones. First, I challenge the claim that there is nothing ontologically special about interactive kinds in virtue of their members being classified as such. To do so, I reject Cooper’s counterexample to Hacking’s thesis that kind descriptions are necessary for intentional action, arguing (...) that classification is required for intentional action. Having considered ways to characterise the metaphysics of interactive kinds and the semantics of kind terms, I argue that the fact that classification facilitates intentional action makes human interactive kinds ontologically distinctive because of the anomalous nature of the change which the kind-classification brings about. I then briefly examine further distinguishing features of human interactive kinds. (shrink)

L'image de l'écriture est singulièrement fréquente dans des explications cognitivistes du fonctionnement de l'esprit, non seulement comme métaphore mais également comme paradigme conceptuel: la machine de Turing, en particulier, montre un isomorphisme structural complet avec l'utilisation de l'écriture alphabétique. La machine de Turing effectue exactement les mêmes opérations effectuées par un homme écrivant avec le stylo et le papier et cela dépend de deux raisons: 1. il a été conçu dans l'image et la similarité de la pratique concrète humaine de (...) l'écriture ; 2. c'est le produit typique de la rationalité occidentale, dont le développement n'a été rendu possible que par les caractères spécifiques du traitement alphabétique de l'information. Ces aspects sont utiles pour comprendre la raison pour laquelle l'esprit a commencé à être dépeint comme machine d'écriture au moment même où l'alphabet a commencé à se diffuser: une recherche généalogique montrera comment, dans des traités de mnémotechniques et dans la métaphysique de Platon et d'Aristote, nous pouvons trouver la toute première base de chaque modèle logicosymbolique de l'esprit. (shrink)

Agents can think using concepts they do not fully understand. This paper investigates the question “Under what conditions does a thinker fully understand, or have mastery of, a concept?” I lay out a gauntlet of problems and desiderata with which any theory of concept mastery must cope. I use these considerations to argue against three views of concept mastery, according to which mastery is a matter of holding certain beliefs, being disposed to make certain inferences, or having certain intuitions. None (...) of these attitudes is either necessary or sufficient for mastery. I propose and respond to objections to my own recognition view of the conditions under which a thinker has mastery of a concept. (shrink)

The cognitive anthropological approach has provided a powerful means of beginning to understand religious representations. I suggest that two extant approaches, despite their general plausibility, may not accurately characterise the detailed nature of those representations. A major source of this inaccuracy lies in the characterisation of negation of ontological properties, which gives rise to broader questions about their ontological determinacy and counter-intuitiveness. I suggest that a more plausible account may be forthcoming by allowing a more complex approach to the representations, (...) deriving from understanding their nature as concept combinations. Such an account also suggests an alternative approach to the role of deference in religious representations. In sum, the empirical and theoretical implications of a more fine-grained analysis of religious representations suggest a vindication of the cognitive anthropology approach to integrating culture and cognition. (shrink)

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s work on modelling “the action of the brain” (letter from Turing to Ashby, 1946) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: While it is clear that Turing was committed to formal, computational and Ashby to material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no straightforward mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based (...) AI and embodiment-centered views respectively. Instead, it will be demonstrated that both approaches, starting from a formal core, were at least partly concerned with biological and embodied phenomena, albeit in revealingly distinct ways. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently tried to define natural kinds in epistemic terms only. Given the persistent problems with finding a successful metaphysical theory, these philosophers argue that we would do better to describe natural kinds solely in terms of their epistemic usefulness, such as their role in supporting inductive inferences. In this paper, I argue against these epistemology-only theories of natural kinds and in favor of, at least partly, metaphysical theories. I do so in three steps. In the first section (...) of the paper, I propose two desiderata for a theory of natural kinds. In the second section, I discuss one example of a ‘general’ epistemology-only theory, proposed by Marc Ereshefsky and Thomas Reydon, and argue that theories like theirs fail to provide adequate criteria of natural kinds. In the third section, I focus on one example of a ‘specific’ epistemology-only theory, proposed by P. D. Magnus, and use it to show why such theories cannot justify the claim that the proposed epistemic criteria account for the naturalness of kinds. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the discussion between Ayer and Austin about whether sentences or utterances can be incorrigible and I argue in favor of Austin position. I defend Austin against objections from Ayer presented after the publication of Sense & Sensibilia. Unlike what was sustained by Ayer, experiential sentences and material object sentences are not epistemically asymmetrical. A material object sentence can be incorrigible if uttered in appropriated circumstances, and an experiential sentence can be corrigible if uttered in unappropriated (...) circumstances. Relying on Austin position, I argue that self-knowledge does not have any epistemic privilege in relation to knowledge of the external world. These kinds of knowledge equally depend on objective circumstances of the utterance situation. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente trabajo es, por un lado, reivindicar la importancia e influencia del enfoque de Locke para la discusión sobre los géneros naturales y, por otro, mostrar cómo su visión y aportaciones en torno al sistema de clasificación natural resultan de gran utilidad para entender en profundidad la compleja geografía del debate contemporáneo sobre estos géneros. En particular, ofrecemos una interpretación según la cual las concepciones de género natural se comprenden como críticas realistas a la posición que sostiene (...) Locke y mostramos cómo una importante tensión que aflora en la propuesta de Locke reaparece en el actual debate sobre los géneros naturales. (shrink)

There is a widely shared belief that the higher-level sciences can provide better explanations than lower-level sciences. But there is little agreement about exactly why this is so. It is often suggested that higher-level explanations are better because they omit details. I will argue instead that the preference for higher-level explanations is just a special case of our general preference for informative, logically strong, beliefs. I argue that our preference for informative beliefs entirely accounts for why higher-level explanations are sometimes (...) better—and sometimes worse—than lower-level explanations. The result is a step in the direction of the unity of science hypothesis. 1Introduction2Background: Is Omitting Details an Explanatory Virtue? 2.1Anti-reductionist arguments2.2Reductionist argument2.3Logical strength3Bases, Links and Logical Strength4Functionalism and Fodor’s Argument5Two Generalizations6Should the Base Really Be Maximally Strong?7Anti-reductionist Arguments Regarding the Base8Should the Antecedent of the Link Really Be Maximally Weak? (shrink)

Consider normative properties and facts, such as facts consisting in something's being what you ought to do, or the property of being morally wrong. Normative naturalism is the view that normative properties and facts such as these exist, and that they are natural properties and facts. Some suspect, however, that normativity is incompatible with a wholly naturalistic worldview: that the normative couldn't be natural because it's somehow “just too different” from the natural. I critically examine recent forms of this “just (...) too different” objection to normative naturalism, with a view to making the debate accessible to a general philosophical audience. (shrink)

My concern in what follows is to give a comparative report on some important lectures held at the Hegel-Kongreß 1981 in Stuttgart. In discussing the views of Quine, Hacking, Davidson, Putnam and Habermas I want to confront them with some details of Rorty's recent critique of our philosophical tradition. At last I try to give a tentative answer whether there is an end or a turning-point for current analytical philosophy.

Was the philosophy of Early German Romanticism, as we understand it today, nothing but a milder variety of Early German Idealism? Not at all! One has only to note the radical differences between the two. Friedrich von Hardenberg and Friedrich Schlegel, the two most significant thinkers of the Early Romantic movement, decisively broke with what Reinhold’s critical disciples had called a “philosophy from the highest principle [Grundsatzphilosophie].” Instead of adopting Reinhold’s and Fichte’s idea of subjectivity as the principle of a (...) deductively unfolding system of knowledge, they replaced it with the idea of “philosophy as an unending longing for the Infinite.” Who only aspires to the Absolute cannot pretend to “possess” or capture it in an absolute knowledge as Fichte and Hegel did, but Schelling did not. Underlying Hegel’s and Fichte’s denial that the Absolute transcends knowability is the temptation to make existence itself dependent upon the grasp of thoughts or concepts, a temptation firmly rejected by the Early Romantics. This is why Early Romanticism should not be considered as a species of one or the other kind of Idealism, as most German and American researchers would like it to be. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce and defend a notion of analyticity for formal languages. I first uncover a crucial flaw in Timothy Williamson’s famous argument template against analyticity, when it is applied to sentences of formal mathematical languages. Williamson’s argument targets the popular idea that a necessary condition for analyticity is that whoever understands an analytic sentence assents to it. Williamson argues that for any given candidate analytic sentence, there can be people who understand that sentence and yet who fail (...) to assent to it. I argue that, on the most natural understanding of the notion of assent when it is applied to sentences of formal mathematical languages, Williamson’s argument fails. Formal analyticity is the notion of analyticity that is based on this natural understanding of assent. I go on to develop the notion of formal analyticity and defend the claim that there are formally analytic sentences and rules of inference. I conclude by showing the potential payoffs of recognizing formal analyticity. (shrink)

Relationalism claims that the phenomenal character of perception is constituted by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to mind-independent objects. Although relationalism provides what seems to be the most straightforward and intuitive account of how experience strikes us introspectively, it is very often believed that the argument from hallucination shows that the view is untenable. The aim of this thesis is to defend relationalism against the argument from hallucination. The argument claims that the phenomenal character of hallucination and perception (...) deserves the same account, and that relationalism cannot be true for hallucinations, therefore relationalism must be rejected. This argument relies on the Indiscriminability Principle, the claim that two experiences that are introspectively indiscriminable from each other have the same phenomenal character. Before assessing the plausibility of this principle, I first consider and dismiss versions of the argument which wouldn’t depend on IND. Although widely accepted, no satisfactory support for IND has been presented yet. In this thesis I argue that defending IND requires that we understand the notion of ‘indiscriminability’ employed in IND in an impersonal sense. I then identify what underwrites IND: the intuition that, in virtue of its superficiality, the nature of a phenomenal character must be accessible through introspection, together with the claim that it is not possible to deny IND without denying the superficiality of phenomenal characters too. I argue that the relationalist can deny IND while preserving the superficiality of phenomenal characters. This can be done by adopting a negative view of hallucination and an account of introspection whereby the phenomenal character doesn’t exist independently of one’s introspective awareness of it and where having introspective access to our experience depends on our perceptual access to the world. (shrink)

Speakers’ intuitive judgements about meaning provide important data for many debates in philosophy of language and pragmatics, including contextualism vs. relativism in semantics; ‘faultless’ disagreement; the limits of truth-conditional semantics; vagueness; and the status of figurative utterances. Is the use of speakers intuitive judgments about meaning justified? Michael Devitt has argued that their use in philosophy of language is problematic because they are fallible empirical judgements about language that reflect speakers’ folk theories about meaning rather than meaning itself. In this (...) paper I respond to Devitt’s criticism and propose a positive account explaining the nature and evidential status of such judgements. I argue that speakers’ intuitive judgements about meanings of utterances provide valuable evidence for various debates in philosophy of language because they are importantly connected to the linguistic performance of speakers. Arguably, the connection is reliable due to a constant monitoring of the interpretations ascribed to linguistic utterances. I call this the voice of performance view. My account restores prominence to speakers’ intuitive judgements about meaning while avoiding Devitt’s worries. (shrink)

Millians about proper names typically claim that it is knowable apriori that Hesperus is Phosphorus. We argue that they should claim instead that it is knowable only aposteriori that Hesperus is Hesperus, since the Kripke-Putnam epistemic arguments against descriptivism are special cases of Quinean arguments that nothing is knowable apriori, and Millians have no resources to resist the more general Quinean arguments.

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and developing a first (...) positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference. (shrink)

The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is (...) easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of P amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying P, then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a ‘third code’ for mental representations. (shrink)

Is there a plausible middle position in the debate between realists and constructivists about categories or kinds? Such a position may seem to be contained in the account of triangulation that Donald Davidson develops in recent writings. On this account, the kinds we pick out are determined by an interaction between our shared similarity responses and causal relations between us and things in our environment. So kinds and categories are neither imposed on us by the nature of the world, nor (...) imposed by us on an intrinsically unstructured reality. But the picture derivable from Davidson's account of triangulation can be interpreted in either of two ways. On one interpretation, it collapses into constructivism. On the other, it turns out to be very close to the most plausible versions of realism. It is argued that Davidson's attempts to distinguish his view from Putnam's realism about natural kinds are unsuccessful. So Davidson's account of triangulation does indeed suggest a plausible view of kinds. But that view is a version of traditional realist views, not an alternative to them. (shrink)

This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...) face serious problems of their own. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that the most systematic arguments for the impossibility of reducing of social facts are not, in fact, good arguments. The best of these, the multiple realizability argument, has been very successful in convincing people to be non-reductionists in the philosophy of mind, and can plausibly be adapted to argue for anti-reductionism in the social sciences. But it, like the other arguments for the impossibility of social reduction, cannot deliver. Any preference we have for social (...) scientific explanations that don't refer to properties of individuals should not be based on a belief in the impossibility of reduction. (shrink)

I hope to show that supervenience and determination, as I have here intuitively characterized them, are really different expressions of the same core idea which one may make more precise in a great number of different ways, depending on the interpretation one puts on the catchall parameters “cases”, “truth of kind P”and “truth of kind S”.

This paper examines the prospects for a conceptual or functional role theory of moral concepts. It is argued that such an account is well-placed to explain both the irreducibility and practicality of moral concepts. Several versions of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts are distinguished, depending on whether the concept-constitutive conceptual roles are wide or narrow normative or non-normative and purely doxastic or conative. It is argued that the most plausible version of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts involves only (...) ‘narrow’ conceptual roles, where these include connections to motivational, desire-like, states. In the penultimate section it is argued, contrary to what Wedgwood, Enoch and others have claimed, that such an account of moral concepts cannot plausibly be combined with the claim that moral concepts refer to robust properties. (Published with Open Access.). (shrink)

In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) develop an account of understanding. Finally, I will draw attention to some consequences of this approach. (shrink)

In various arguments, Descartes relies on the principles that conceivability implies possibility and that inconceivability implies impossibility. Those principles are in tension with another Cartesian view about the source of modality, i.e. the doctrine of the free creation of eternal truths. In this paper, I develop a ‘two-modality’ interpretation of the doctrine of eternal truths which resolves the tension and I discuss how the resulting modal epistemology can still be relevant for the contemporary discussion.

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body (...) of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people. During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

I argue for three central theses: ‘intuition’ is ambiguous, in material object metaphysics ‘intuition’ refers to pre-theoretical beliefs, and these pre-theoretical beliefs are generated by an innate physical reasoning system. I begin by outlining the relevant background discussions on the nature of intuitions and their role in philosophy to motivate the need for a more careful investigation of the meaning of ‘intuition’ and the role of intuitions in specific sub-disciplines of philosophy. In chapters one and two I argue that ‘intuition’ (...) is ambiguous between an inflationary and deflationary sense. In the inflationary sense, ‘intuition’ refers to a priori intellectual seemings with a special phenomenology, conceptual etiology, and modal content. In the deflationary sense, ‘intuition’ refers to beliefs or inclinations to believe. In chapter three I specifically examine the use of intuitions in material object metaphysics and conclude that in this sub-community ‘intuition’ is used in the deflationary sense to refer to pre-theoretical beliefs. Drawing from research on infant cognition, in the final chapter I argue that intuitions regarding material object metaphysics are those judgments that arise from an innate physical reasoning system. Based on this empirical observation, I argue that metaphysicians ought to give preference to abstract intuitions over intuitions regarding concrete cases because these abstract intuitions reflect the innate structure of our physical reasoning mechanisms. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker argues that his causal-pragmatic account of the problem of intentionality commits him to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, where propositions are represented as sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker also accepts the "direct reference" theory of names, according to which co-referring names have the same content. Stalnaker's view of content is thus threatened by Frege's Puzzle. Stalnaker's classic paper "Assertion" is intended to provide a response to this threat. In this paper, I evaluate Stalnaker's claim (...) that the causal-pragmatic account of intentionality commits one to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, and argue that the apparatus laid out in "Assertion" is not sufficiently comprehensive to account for all versions of Frege's Puzzle. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the analysis of the relations between different levels of reality. The core argument is based on considerations of both an epistemology of action and manipulative causality as a criterion of object identity. The argumentation is extended towards the concepts of self-organization and self-regulation. Finally, several views on reduction and the problems of emergence and complexity are discussed.

Some explanations are relatively abstract: they abstract away from the idiosyncratic or messy details of the case in hand. The received wisdom in philosophy is that this is a virtue for any explanation to possess. I argue that the apparent consensus on this point is illusory. When philosophers make this claim, they differ on which of four alternative varieties of abstractness they have in mind. What’s more, for each variety of abstractness there are several alternative reasons to think that the (...) variety of abstractness in question is a virtue. I identify the most promising reasons, and dismiss some others. The paper concludes by relating this discussion to the idea that explanations in biology, psychology and social science cannot be replaced by relatively micro explanations without loss of understanding. (shrink)