During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

You may not know me well enough to evaluate me in terms of my moral character, but I take it you believe I can be evaluated: it sounds strange to say that I am indeterminate, neither good nor bad nor intermediate. Yet I argue that the claim that most people are indeterminate is the conclusion of a sound argument—the indeterminacy paradox—with two premises: (1) most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations); (2) (...) fragmentation entails indeterminacy. I support (1) by examining psychological experiments in which most participants behave deplorably (e.g., by maltreating “prisoners” in a simulated prison) or admirably (e.g., by intervening in a simulated theft). I support (2) by arguing that, according to certain plausible conceptions, character evaluations presuppose behavioral consistency (lack of fragmentation). Possible reactions to the paradox include: (a) denying that the experiments are relevant to character; (b) upholding conceptions according to which character evaluations do not presuppose consistency; (c) granting that most people are indeterminate and explaining why it appears otherwise. I defend (c) against (a) and (b). (shrink)

in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)

Though the study of grounding is still in the early stages, Kit Fine, in ”The Pure Logic of Ground”, has made a seminal attempt at formalization. Formalization of this sort is supposed to bring clarity and precision to our theorizing, as it has to the study of other metaphysically important phenomena, like modality and vagueness. Unfortunately, as I will argue, Fine ties the formal treatment of grounding to the obscure notion of a weak ground. The obscurity of weak ground, together (...) with its centrality in Fine’s system, threatens to undermine the extent to which this formalization offers clarity and precision. In this paper, I show how to overcome this problem. I describe a system, the logic of strict ground (LSG) and demonstrate its adequacy; I specify a translation scheme for interpreting Fine’s weak grounding claims; I show that the interpretation verifies all of the principles of Fine’s system; and I show that derivability in Fine’s system can be exactly characterized in terms of derivability in LSG. I conclude that Fine’s system is reducible to LSG. (shrink)

Grace A. de Laguna was an American philosopher of exceptional originality. Many of the arguments and positions she developed during the early decades of the twentieth century later came to be central to analytic philosophy. These arguments and positions included, even before 1930, a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a private language argument, a critique of type physicalism, a functionalist theory of mind, a critique of scientific reductionism, a methodology of research programs in science and more. Nevertheless, de Laguna identified (...) herself as a defender of the speculative vision of philosophy, a vision which, in her words, “analytic philosophy condemns.” I outline her speculative vision of philosophy as well as what is, in effect, an argument she offers against analytic philosophy. This is an argument against the view that key parts of established opinion, e.g., our best theoretical physics or most certain common sense, should be assumed to be true in order to answer philosophical questions. I go on to bring out the implications of her argument for the approaches to philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Willard V. Quine and David Lewis, and I also compare the argument to recent, related arguments against analytic philosophy. I will suggest that de Laguna offers a viable critique of analytic philosophy and an alternative approach to philosophy that meets this critique. (shrink)

This paper argues that the main global critiques of scientism lose their punch because they rely on an uncharitable definition of their target. It focuses on epistemological scientism and divides it into four categories in terms of how strong (science is the only source of knowledge) or weak (science is the best source of knowledge) and how narrow (only natural sciences) or broad (all sciences or at least not only the natural sciences) they are. Two central arguments against scientism, the (...) (false) dilemma and self‐referential incoherence, are analysed. Of the four types of epistemological scientism, three can deal with these counterarguments by utilizing two methodological principles: epistemic evaluability of reliability and epistemic opportunism. One hopes that these considerations will steer the discussion on scientism to more fruitful pastures in the future. For example, there are interesting methodological considerations concerning what evaluability or reliability and epistemic opportunism entail. (shrink)

This paper sets out a predicative response to the Russell-Myhill paradox of propositions within the framework of Church’s intensional logic. A predicative response places restrictions on the full comprehension schema, which asserts that every formula determines a higher-order entity. In addition to motivating the restriction on the comprehension schema from intuitions about the stability of reference, this paper contains a consistency proof for the predicative response to the Russell-Myhill paradox. The models used to establish this consistency also model other axioms (...) of Church’s intensional logic that have been criticized by Parsons and Klement: this, it turns out, is due to resources which also permit an interpretation of a fragment of Gallin’s intensional logic. Finally, the relation between the predicative response to the Russell-Myhill paradox of propositions and the Russell paradox of sets is discussed, and it is shown that the predicative conception of set induced by this predicative intensional logic allows one to respond to the Wehmeier problem of many non-extensions. (shrink)

Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality and relative modality. In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for (...) practically all empirical inquiry. In RM, modal inferences are evaluated relative to what is kept fixed in a system, like a theory or a model. RM-based inferences are more certain but framework-dependent. While elements from both AM and RM can be found in some existing accounts of modality, it is worth highlighting them in their own right and isolating their features for closer scrutiny. This helps to establish their relevant epistemologies that are free from some strong philosophical assumptions often attached to them in the literature. We close by showing how combining these two routes amounts to a view that accounts for a rich variety of modal inferences in science. (shrink)

The concept of linguistic infinity has had a central role to play in foundational debates within theoretical linguistics since its more formal inception in the mid-twentieth century. The conceptualist tradition, marshalled in by Chomsky and others, holds that infinity is a core explanandum and a link to the formal sciences. Realism/Platonism takes this further to argue that linguistics is in fact a formal science with an abstract ontology. In this paper, I argue that a central misconstrual of formal apparatus of (...) recursive operations such as the set-theoretic operation merge has led to a mathematisation of the object of inquiry, producing a strong analogy with discrete mathematics and especially arithmetic. The main product of this error has been the assumption that natural, like some formal, languages are discretely infinite. I will offer an alternative means of capturing the insights and observations related to this posit in terms of scientific modelling. My chief aim will be to draw from the larger philosophy of science literature in order to offer a position of grammars as models compatible with various foundational interpretations of linguistics while being informed by contemporary ideas on scientific modelling for the natural and social sciences. (shrink)

Suppose that all non-qualitative facts are grounded in qualitative facts. I argue that this view naturally comes with a picture in which trans-world identity is indeterminate. But this in turn leads to either pervasive indeterminacy in the non-qualitative, or else contingency in what facts about modality and possible worlds are determinate.

The conditions are examined under which one theory is said to be replaceable by another, while preserving those features of the original theory which made it serviceable for a given purpose. Among such replacements, special attention is given to ones which qualify as so-called reductions of a theory, and some theorems are proved concerning the notion of a reduction.

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)

Van Fraassen does not argue that everyone should be a constructive empiricist. He claims only that constructive empiricism (CE) is a coherent post-positivist alternative to realism, notwithstanding the realist's charge that CE is arbitrary and irrational. He does argue, however, that the empiricist is obliged to limit belief as CE prescribes. Criticism of CE has been largely directed at van Fraassen's claim that CE is a coherent option. Far less attention has been directed at his claim that empiricists should be (...) constructive empiricists. I consider his various attempts to support this claim, conclude that they are unsuccessful, and suggest that the empiricist who repudiates CE does not thereby abandon contemporary empiricism itself. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object, is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas (...) of Empiricism” is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine’s development, this paper redefines the place of ‘Two Dogmas’ in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine’s book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s ; Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper. (shrink)

Many commentators now view Quine's ‘Truth by Convention’ as a flawed criticism of Carnap. Gary Ebbs argued recently that Quine never intended Carnap as his target. Quine's criticisms were part of his attempt to work out his own scientific naturalism. I agree that Carnap was not Quine's target but object that Quine's criticisms were wholly internal to his own philosophy. Instead, I argue that C.I. Lewis held the kind of truth‐by‐convention thesis that Quine rejects. This, however, leaves Carnap out of (...) the picture. I then show how Quine came to see the earlier criticisms as also having force against Carnap. (shrink)

s Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine’s brief flirtation with a “mitigated phenomenalism” (Gibson’s phrase) in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Quine’s ontology of 1953 (“On Mental Entities”) and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation.

In Being Realistic About Reasons T. M. Scanlon argues that particular fact about reasons are explained by contingent non-normative facts together with pure normative principles. A question then arises about the modal status of these pure principles. Scanlon maintains that they are necessary in a sense, and suggests that they are ‘metaphysically’ necessary. I argue that the best view for Scanlon to take, given his other commitments, is that these pure normative principles are metaphysically contingent in some cases and necessary (...) only in a weaker sense. (shrink)

I outline a pragmatic account of evidence, arguing that it allows us to underwrite two implications of feminist scholarship: that knowledge is socially constructed and constrained by evidence, and that social relations, including gender, race, and class, are epistemologically significant. What makes the account promising is that it abandons any pretense of a view from nowhere, the view of evidence as something only individuals gather or have, and the view that individual theories face experience in isolation.

I review and challenge the views on simplicity and its role in linguistics put forward by Ludlow. In particular, I criticize the claim that simplicity—in the sense pertinent to science—is nothing more than ease of use or “user-friendliness”, motivated by economy of labor. I argue that Ludlow’s discussion fails to do justice to the diversity of factors that are relevant to simplicity considerations. This, in turn, leads to the neglect of crucial cases in which the rationale for simplification is unmistakably (...) epistemic, as well as instances where simplicity is part of the content of substantive, empirical hypotheses. I illustrate these points with examples from the history of generative linguistics, such as: the shaping influence exerted by simplicity, via its involvement in the notion of “linguistically significant generalization”, its methodological and substantive contribution to the goal of explanatory adequacy, and its central role in the Minimalist Program’s search “beyond explanatory adequacy”. (shrink)

Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake, there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine's argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine's work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. (shrink)

Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant (...) ambivalence”. In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive. (shrink)

I argue that a pragmatic scepticism about metaphysical modality is a perfectly reasonable position to maintain. I then illustrate the difficulties and limitations associated with some strategies for defeating such scepticism. These strategies appeal to associations between metaphysical modality and the following: objective probability, counterfactuals and distinctive explanatory value.

We discuss some recent work by Tim Maudlin concerning Black Hole Information Loss. We argue, contra Maudlin, that there is a paradox, in the straightforward sense that there are propositions that appear true, but which are incompatible with one another. We discuss the significance of the paradox and Maudlin's response to it.

The positivists defined analyticity as truth in virtue of meaning alone and advocated the view that the notion of analyticity so defined is co-extensive with both the notion of an a priori truth an...

In recent work Huw Price has defended what he calls a global expressivist approach to understanding language and its relation to the physical world. Global expressivism rejects a representationalist picture of the language-world relation and thereby, by intention at least, also a certain metaphysical conception of what are commonly known as placement problems: how entities of the everyday, common sense world like mental states, meanings, moral values, modalities and so on fit into the natural world. Global expressivism upholds a commitment (...) to substantive enquiry into the naturalistic basis of thought about the world, but pursues this in a pragmatist or non-representationalist ’key’, thereby rendering—as it sees things—traditional metaphysical questions otiose. I am in broad sympathy with many of Price’s arguments and ideas. However, I believe the specific sub-variety of non-representationalism he develops actually fails to secure the anti-metaphysical results he seeks. My arguments have their starting point in the Carnap-Quine debate. Given Price’s view of this, which I endorse, I think it can be made clear that Quine’s view, or something very close to it, presents us with a coherent example of a non-representationalist metaphysical placement project. Though one might reasonably doubt the rationality of or motivation for such a view, Price’s own strongly naturalistic assumptions, as these are evinced in his so-called ’subject’ naturalism, make that move dialectically unavailable to him. I end with a brief sketch of an alternative non-representationalist and anti-metaphysical position. (shrink)

Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

I revisit my paper, ‘Grace de Laguna’s 1909 Critique of Analytic Philosophy’ and respond to the commentary on it. I respond to James Chase and Jack Reynolds by further analysing the difference between speculative philosophy as de Laguna conceived of it and analytic philosophy, by clarifying how her critique of analytic philosophy remains relevant to some of its more speculative forms, and by explaining what justifies the criticism of established opinion that goes along with her rejection of analytic philosophy’s epistemic (...) conservatism. In response to Andreas Vrahimis, I contextualise my reading of de Laguna’s work in 1909. This clarifies her critique of pragmatism, distinguishes it from her critique of epistemically conservative philosophy, and shows that she was not only already aware of the full scope of the latter critique but is likely to have identified the then incipient analytic philosophy as its primary target. Also, contra Vrahimis, her argument is effective against Bertrand Russell’s later, epistemically conservative approach to philosophy. In response to Cheryl Misak, I point out that her argument that de Laguna is, despite herself, a pragmatist rests on a misunderstanding of the differences between pragmatism and idealism, and I show that de Laguna’s main early influences were Herbert Spencer and her teacher, James Edwin Creighton. I further argue that Misak’s rejection of de Laguna’s critique of pragmatism rests on a misrepresentation of the critique. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Haze’s brief argument for the falsity of the theory that instantial terms refer arbitrarily, proposed by Breckenridge and Magidor in 2012. In this paper, I characterise instantial terms and outline the theory of arbitrary reference; then I reconstruct Haze’s argument and contend that it fails in its purpose. Haze’s argument is supposed to be a _reductio ad absurdum:_ according to Haze, it proves that a contradiction follows from the most basic tenets of the theory (...) of arbitrary reference. I will argue, however, that the contradiction in question follows not from these tenets, but from the surreptitious use that Haze makes of a self-referential expression. I conclude, consequently, that Haze’s argument is nothing more than an illustration of the well-known fact that self-referential expressions produce paradoxical results. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to argue against the real possibility of languages without subject‐predicate structure, so‐called feature‐placing languages. They were first introduced by Strawson (1959/1990), later given formal expression through Quine's Predicate Functor Logic (Quine, 1960, Quine, 1971/Quine, 1976, Quine, 1992), and further elaboration in (Hawthorne & Cortens, 1995). I argue that, on the presumption that feature‐placing languages are not mere notational variants on first‐order languages, the idea of such languages is incoherent. The argument for this view rests (...) on two highly plausible views about the conditions for the possibility of sentential meaning in natural languages. If accepted, these two views jointly imply that the sentences of feature‐placing languages lack sufficient internal structure to meet the conditions for sentential meaning. Feature‐placing languages cannot then count as genuine languages. (shrink)

Ontic structuralists claim that there are no individual objects, and that reality should instead be thought of as a “web of relations”. It is difficult to make this metaphysical picture precise, however, since languages usually characterize the world by describing the objects that exist in it. This paper proposes a solution to the problem; I argue that when discourse is reformulated in the language of the calculus of relations ‐ an algebraic logic developed by Alfred Tarski ‐ it can be (...) interpreted without presupposing the existence of objects. What is distinctive about the language of the calculus is that it contains no operator that resembles a quantifier, and yet it can be used to paraphrase any sentence expressible in first‐order logic. Since the use of a first‐order quantifier (or some similar operator) is usually what establishes commitment to an ontology of objects, and since the calculus of relations eschews the quantifier in favor of a composition operator that can be given a natural interpretation consistent with structuralist metaphysics, the calculus is an ideal language for the structuralist to use to describe the world. (shrink)

When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y’. Since Hempel did (...) so much to canonize this way of thinking about explanation, it deserves to be called ‘Hempel's problem’. (shrink)

Quine and Putnam argued for mathematical realism on the basis of the indispensability of mathematics to science. They claimed that the mathematics that is used in physical theories is confirmed along with those theories and that scientific realism entails mathematical realism. I argue here that current theories of confirmation suggest that mathematics does not receive empirical support simply in virtue of being a part of well confirmed scientific theories and that the reasons for adopting a realist view of scientific theories (...) do not support realism about mathematical entities, despite the use of mathematics in formulating scientific theory. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be continuous with science. This naturalistic turn is for a significant part due to the work of W. V. Quine. Yet, the development and the reception of Quine’s naturalism have never been systematically studied. In this paper, I examine Quine’s evolving naturalism as well as the reception of his views. Scrutinizing a large set of unpublished notes, correspondence, drafts, papers, and lectures as well as published responses (...) to Quine’s work, I show how both internal tensions and external criticisms forced him to continuously develop, rebrand, and refine his metaphilosophy before he explicitly decided to label his view ‘naturalism’ in the late 1960s. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. Against this background I consider notions of observation, meaning, and regulative standards. I sketch an account of the rationale of scientific change which preserves the merits and avoids the shortcomings of the approach of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. Each of these writers would hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes in what is observed, (...) in the meanings of the terms employed, and in the metastandards involved. They would claim that "incommensurable" replacement is what does, and should, occur during scientific "revolutions." Such writers, however, have trouble in comparing different scientific theories. My account permits different theories to be compared in various ways. These comparisons, I argue, are possible through appeal to "first-level" and "second-level" invariance. In this connection I argue that observation, meaning, and regulative standards should be, and in fact usually are, nontrivially invariant with respect to scientific change. (shrink)

The defense of common sense in Berkeley's Three Dialogues is, first and foremost, a defense of the gardener's claim to know this cherry tree, a claim threatened by both Cartesian and Lockean philosophy. Berkeley's defense of the gardener's knowledge depends on his claim that the being of a cherry tree consists in its being perceived. This is not something the gardener believes; rather, it is a philosophical analysis of the rules unreflectively followed by the gardener in his use of the (...) word 'exists'. It is by following these rules that the gardener gains knowledge of the cherry tree. Uncovering these deep connections between Berkeley's epistemology and his philosophy of language and placing them in the context of his critique of both Cartesian and Lockean philosophy will clarify Berkeley's strategy for bringing his reader back to common sense and practical engagement in the ordinary affairs of life. (shrink)

The relationship between individuals and communities in knowing is a central topic of discussion in current feminist epistemology. Lynn Hankinson Nelson's work is unusual in grounding knowledge primarily in the community rather than the individual. In this essay I argue that responses to Nelson's work are based on a misinterpretation of her holistic approach. However, Nelson's holism is incomplete and hence inconsistent. I defend a more radically holistic feminist empiricism with a multiaspect view of the knower, which is more consistent (...) with a feminist empiricist approach to evidence. (shrink)

Many ethical systems hold that agents earn merit and demerit through their good and bad deeds. Some of these ethical systems also accept merit transference, allowing merit to be transferred, in certain circumstances, from one agent to another. In this article, I argue that there is a previously unrecognized paradox for merit transference involving a phenomenon I call “merit inflation”. With a particular focus on Buddhist ethics, I then look at the options available for resolving this paradox. I conclude that (...) merit inflation poses a serious challenge for any ethical system that broadly permits the transfer of merit. (shrink)

People see five kinds of views in epistemology and ontology as hinging on there being words a person can learn only by private ostensive definitions, through direct acquaintance with his own sensations: skepticism about other minds, 2. skepticism about an external world, 3. foundationalism, 4. dualism, and 5. phenomenalism. People think Wittgenstein refuted these views by showing, they believe, no word is learnable only by private ostensive definition. I defend these five views from Wittgenstein’s attack.

Central elements of W. V. Quine’s epistemology are widely and deeply misunderstood, including the following. He held from first to last that our evidence consists of the stimulations of our sense organs, and of our observations, and of our sensory experiences; meeting the interpretive challenge this poses is a sine qua non of understanding his epistemology. He counted both “This is blue” and “This looks blue” as observation sentences. He took introspective reports to have a high degree of certainty. He (...) endorsed outright Hume’s “skeptical” argument concerning induction. His naturalized epistemology is simply naturalistic, or scientific, epistemology stripped of the project of rational reconstruction, and is thoroughly normative. Quine was unconditionally a scientific philosopher who took our theories to be answerable ultimately to our perceptual experiences (sensations)—and conditionally an empiricist, empiricism being a scientific theory that has no competitors worthy of the name. I attempt to make all of this clear, and conclude by offering a concise formulation of his epistemology. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that anyone who accepts the ontology of scientific realism can only accept a pragmatic theory of truth, i.e., a theory on which truth is what it is epistemically right to believe. But the combination of realism with such a theory of truth is a form of internal realism; therefore, a scientific realist should be an internal realist. The strategy of the paper is to argue that there is no adequate semantic or correspondence theory of truth (...) compatible with a realist ontology, that a redundancy theory cannot account for the value of truth, and that the only kind of truth theory which can account for the value of truth, and is compatible with a realist ontology, is a pragmatic theory. The kind of truth theory I wish to defend is objective and naturalistic, and the ontology is realistic. My position is, therefore, one of objective, naturalistic realism. (shrink)

Is it possible for there to be facts about reality with a logical structure that is in principle unrepresentable by us? I outline the main motivations for thinking that this question should receive a positive answer. I then argue that, upon inspection, the view that such structurally ineffable facts are possible is self-defeating and thus incoherent. My argument is based on considerations about the fundamental role that the purely formal concept of an object plays in our propositional representations and its (...) intimate connection with subject-predicate structure. (shrink)

Terms such as ‘exist’, ‘actual’, etc., (hereafter, “ontic terms”) are recognized as having uses that are not ontologically committing, in addition to the usual commissive uses. (Consider, e.g., the Platonic and the neutral readings of ‘There is an even prime’.) In this paper, I identify five different noncommissive uses for ontic terms, and (by a kind of via negativa) attempt to define the commissive use, focusing on ‘actual’ as my example. The problem, however, is that the resulting definiens for the (...) commissive ‘actual’ is itself equivocal between a commissive and a noncommissive reading. I thus consider other proposals for defining the commissive use, including two proposals from David Lewis. However, each proposal is found to be equivocal in the same way—and eventually I argue that it is impossible to define an ontic term unequivocally. Even so, this is not meant to overshadow that we can understand an ontic term as univocally commissive, in certain conversational contexts. I close by illustrating the import of these observations for the Hirsch–Sider debate in metaontology. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that common sense knowledge survives sophisticated philosophical proofs against it. Recently, however, Bryan Frances (forthcoming) has advanced a philosophical proof that he thinks common sense can’t survive. Exploiting philosophical paradoxes like the Sorites, Frances attempts to show how common sense leads to paradox and therefore that common sense methodology is unstable. In this paper, we show how Frances’s proof fails and then present Frances with a dilemma.

Naturalism in twentieth century philosophy is founded on the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, as can be seen in Quine’s rejection of what he calls ‘cosmic exile’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology falls within the scope of what naturalism rejects, but I argue that the opposition between phenomenology and naturalism is less straightforward than it appears. This is so not because transcendental phenomenology does not involve a problematic form of exile, but because naturalism, in its recoil from transcendental philosophy, creates a new form (...) of exile, what I call in the paper ‘exile from within’. These different forms of exile are the result of shared epistemological aspirations, which, if set aside, leave open the possibility of phenomenology without exile. In the conclusion of the paper, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty as an example of what phenomenology without epistemology might look like. (shrink)

In this article I argue for an empiricist view on laws. Some laws are fundamental in the sense that they are the result of inductive generalisations of observed regularities and at the same time in their formulation contain a new theoretical predicate. The inductive generalisations simul- taneously function as implicit definitions of these new predicates. Other laws are either explicit definitions or consequences of other previously established laws. I discuss the laws of classical mechanics, relativity theory and electromagnetism in detail. (...) Laws are necessary, whereas acciden- tal generalisations are not. But necessity here is not a modal concept, but rather interpreted as short for the semantic predicate “... is necessarily true”. Thus no modal logic is needed. The neces- sity attributed to law sentences is in turn interpreted as “necessary condition for the rest of the the- ory”, which is true since fundamental laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates use in the theory. (shrink)

In this paper I show that one of the most fruitful ways of employing paradoxes has been as a philosophical method that forces us to reconsider basic assumptions. After a brief discussion of recent understandings of the notion of paradoxes, I show that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of paradoxes in this sense, against the background of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ way of argumentation: in contrast to Heraclitus, Zeno’s paradoxes do not ask us to embrace a paradoxical reality; and in (...) contrast to Parmenides, Zeno shows common assumptions to be internally problematic, not just in light of Eleatic positions. (shrink)

Alexander George has put forward a novel interpretation of the Quine-Carnap debate over analyticity. George argues that Carnap's claim that there exists an analytic-synthetic distinction was held by Carnap to be empty of empirical consequences. As a result, Carnap understood his position to be empirically indistinguishable from Quine's. Although George defends his interpretation only briefly, I show that it withstands further examination and ought to be accepted. The consequences of accepting it undermine a common understanding of Quine's criticism of Carnap, (...) and I argue that it is difficult to find a perspective from which Quine can criticize Carnap in a non-question-begging way. (shrink)