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This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” principle and the growing body of empirical evidence that undermines it. We report the results of an experimental study which show that people judge that agents ought to perform an action even when they also judge that those agents cannot do it and that such “ought” judgments exhibit an actor-observer effect. Because of this actor-observer effect on “ought” judgments and the Duhem-Quine thesis, talk (...) |
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Chalmers has argued that Bayesianism supports the existence of a priori truths, since it entails that scrutability conditionals are not rationally revisable. However, as we argue, Chalmers's arguments leave open that every proposition is rationally deniable, which would be devastating for large parts of his philosophical program. We suggest that Chalmers should appeal to well-known convergence theorems to argue that ideally rational subjects converge on the truth of scrutability conditionals. However, our discussion reveals that showing that these theorems apply in (...) |
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When we ask a decision maker to express her preferences, it is typically assumed that we are eliciting a pre-existing set of preferences. However, empirical research has suggested that our preferences are often constructed on the fly for the decision problem at hand. This paper explores the ramifications of this empirical research for our understanding of instrumental rationality. First, I argue that these results pose serious challenges for the traditional decision-theoretic view of instrumental rationality, which demands global coherence amongst all (...) |
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Some philosophers argue that the principles of human reasoning are impeccable, and that mistakes are no more than momentary lapses in “information processing”. This article makes a case to the contrary. It shows that human reasoners commit systematic fallacies. The theory of mental models predicts these errors. It postulates that individuals construct mental models of the possibilities to which the premises of an inference refer. But, their models usually represent what is true in a possibility, not what is false. This (...) |
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The topic of epistemic normativity has come to the fore of recent work in epistemology, and so naturally, theories of knowledge, truth and justification have been increasingly held accountable to preserving normative epistemological platitudes. Central to discussions of epistemic normativity are questions about epistemic agency and epistemic value. Here, our aim is to take up some of these issues as they come to bear on the rather unconventional brand of epistemology that was defended by Richard Rorty. Our purpose is to (...) |
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This article argues that inquirers should adopt an active orientation to the limits of their knowledge, an approach referred to as “Transformational Fallibilism”. Drawing on the Popperian tradition, this approach treats the fallibility of knowledge as more than a philosophical nicety, rather seeing the questioning of claims, including those that have been successful, as a key way to improve the understandings of inquirers. This is illustrated with reference to the example of Newtonian and Einsteinian understandings of gravity and time in (...) |
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In 1948 Hempel and Oppenheim proposed an explicatum for the concept of systematic power 1, pp. 164–167. Since that time some shortcomings have been found in this first attempt. It is the purpose of this paper to show that one can keep the basic approach of the ‘48 paper, and overcome the known disadvantages by means of changes in the details of the definition. In this improvement certain tools will be used that were not available in 1948. |
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At the end of a chapter in his book Race, Racism and Reparations, Angelo Corlett notes that “[t]here remain other queries about racism [than those he addressed in his chapter], which need philosophical exploration. … Perhaps most important, how might racism be unlearned?” (2003, 93). We agree with Corlett’s assessment of its importance, but find that philosophers have not been very keen to directly engage with the issue of how to best deal with, and ultimately do away with, racism. Rather, (...) |
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In the first part ("Determination"), I consider different notions of determination, contrast and compare modal with non-modal accounts and then defend two a-modality theses concerning essence and supervenience. I argue, first, that essence is a a-modal notion, i.e. not usefully analysed in terms of metaphysical modality, and then, contra Kit Fine, that essential properties can be exemplified contingently. I argue, second, that supervenience is also an a-modal notion, and that it should be analysed in terms of constitution relations between properties. (...) |
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In this paper I investigate the nature of the relation between meaning-interdependence and analyticity. The theory within which meaning-interdependence reaches its peak and becomes omnipresent is meaning holism, according to which every two expressions are meaning-interdependent. A lot of people reject holism partially due to the impression that the theory leads to the picture in which language is self-sufficient in the sense that it is nothing but a game of meanings which is detached from reality. What stands behind that impression (...) |
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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 (...) |
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ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion (...) |
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Contemporary political theory is fractured in its account of ontology and methods. One prominent fault line is between empirical and normative theory – the former usually called ‘philosophy of social science’, or ‘social-science methodology’, and not ‘theory’ at all. A second fault line exists between analytical and post-modern political theory. These fractures prevent political researchers who engage with the same substantive issues, such as the right of same-sex couples to marry, from speaking to one another in a common language. This (...) |
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The foremost aim of this paper is to realize the fourth part of the Aufbau. This part, which provides an actual phenomenalistic constitution system, is interpretable from a Kantian perspective (§§1-4). But Carnap plotted to overcome Kant’s old style of philosophy as well. We review this aspect of his constitution, focusing on space (§§7-13) and time (§§5-6), especially. |
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The determination of the meaning of theoretical terms by the axioms of theories as meaning postulates and the merely fictitious character of a basic observational language leads to Feyerabends problem of the incommensurability of physical theories. Different theories are actually compared by physicists as well. They might have a common sub-language as the language of macroscopic physics in atomic physics. Furthermore shared metalaws define an equivalence relation which identifies terms of different theories and enables physicists to talk about them in (...) |
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The determination of the meaning of theoretical terms by the axioms of theories as meaning postulates and the merely fictitious character of a basic observational language leads to Feyerabends problem of the incommensurability of physical theories. Different theories are actually compared by physicists as well. They might have a common sublanguage as the language of macroscopic physics in atomic physics. Furthermore shared metalaws (e. g. invariance principles) define an equivalence relation which identifies terms of different theories and enables physicists to (...) |
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Nanotechnology as an emerging field is strongly related to visionary prospects which are disposed to reappear as dystopian concerns. As long as nanotechnology does not provide reliable criteria for assessing these worries as rational or as irrational they remain a challenge for ethical reflection. Given this underdetermination, many nanovisions and their corresponding concerns should therefore be considered as “arational.” For that reason, a “constructivist” stance is endorsed which does not seek to take part in discussions as to how ethicists should (...) |
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Imagine your body is populated by billions of respirocytes capable of delivering 236 times more oxygen than your natural red blood cells. These mechanical, micron sized spheres are appropriately programmed by your physician to meet your personal requirements, be it the treatment of anemia or the enhancement of your physical abilities. Robert Freitas’ vision of such artificial blood cells comprised of nanometer-scale components was published in 1998 in a peer-reviewed medical journal, and was the first medical nanorobot design paper to (...) |
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Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons (BRR) is a beautiful book – sleek, sophisticated, and programmatic. One of its key aims is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths. In this article, I develop an epistemological problem that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that his “metaphysical pluralism” can be understood as a response to that problem. However, it resolves the problem only if it undercuts the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry. |
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The waning popularity of logical empiricism and the supposed discovery of insurmountable technical difficulties led most philosophers to abandon the project to formulate a formal criterion of empirical significance. Such a criterion would delineate claims that observation can confirm or disconfirm from those it cannot. Although early criteria were clearly inadequate, criticisms made of later, more sophisticated criteria were often indefensible or easily answered. Most importantly, Carnap’s last criterion was seriously misinterpreted and an amended version of it remains tenable. |
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Credal Conservatism says that an agent’s credal states should be conserved as far as possible when she undergoes a learning experience. Uniqueness says that for any given total evidence, there is a unique credal state that any agent with that total evidence should have. Epistemic Impartiality is the idea that there are no significant differences between intrapersonal and interpersonal rationality requirements when determining what credal states one ought to have for purposes of epistemic evaluation. I construe Epistemic Impartiality as a (...) |
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Holistic accounts of meaning normally incorporate a subjective dimension that invites the criticism that they make communication impossible, for speakers are bound to differ in ways the accounts take to be relevant to meaning, and holism generalises any difference over some words to a difference about all, and this seems incompatible with the idea that successful communication requires mutual understanding. I defend holism about meaning from this criticism. I argue that the same combination of properties (subjective origins of value, holism (...) |
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The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue (...) |
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In this paper I argue that the value attributed to coral reefs drives the characterisation of evidence for their regeneration or degradation. I observe that regeneration and degradation depend on an understanding of what an ecosystem looks like when undegraded (a baseline), and that many mutually exclusive baselines can be given for any single case. Consequently, facts about ecological processes are insufficient to usefully and non-arbitrarily characterise changes to ecosystems. By examining how baselines and the value of reefs interact in (...) |
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In this paper I propose and defend an account of color that I call color functionalism. I argue that functionalism is a non-traditional species of primary quality theory, and that it accommodates our intuitions about color and the facts of color science better than more widely discussed alternatives. |
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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 (...) |
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Suppose I make an utterance, intending it to be a command. You don’t take it to be one. Must one of us be wrong? In other words, must each utterance have, at most, one illocutionary force? Current debates over the constitutive norm of assertion and over illocutionary silencing, tend to assume that the answer is yes—that each utterance must be either an assertion, or a command, or a question, but not more than one of these. While I think that this (...) |
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This article reviews some linguistic and philosophical work in lexical semantics. In Section 1, the general methods of lexical semantics are explored, with particular attention to how semantic features of verbs are associated with grammatical patterns. In Section 2, philosophical consequences and issues arising from this sort of research is reviewed. |
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Holistic theories of meaning have, at least since Dummett’s Frege: The Philosophy of language, been assumed to be problematic from the perspective of the incremental nature of natural language learning. In this essay I argue that the general relationship between holism and language learning is in fact the opposite of that claimed by Dummett. It is only given a particular form of language learning, and a particular form of holism, that there is a problem at all; in general, for all (...) |
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In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the development of analytic philosophy in the Philippines. I first highlight the circumstances that led to its inception in the late 1930s, and some of the notable works by prominent Filipino analytic philosophers that helped shape the tradition. Next, I discuss the socio-political climate in the late 1950s through the 1970s that may have led some Filipino philosophers to move away from analytic philosophy. Finally, I explore some signs of its re-emergence (...) |
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Inferential Role Semantics is often criticized for being incompatible with the platitude that words of different speakers can mean the same thing. While many assume that this platitude can be accommodated by understanding sameness of meaning in terms of similarity of meaning, no worked out proposal has ever been produced for Inferential Role Semantics. I rectify this important omission by giving a detailed structural account of meaning similarity in terms of graph theory. I go on to argue that this account (...) |
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David Lewis is associated with the controversial thesis that some properties are more eligible than others to be the referents of our predicates solely in virtue of those properties’ being more natural; independently, that is, of anything to do with our patterns of usage of the relevant predicates. On such a view, the natural properties act as ‘reference magnets’. In this paper I explore (though I do not endorse) a related thesis in epistemology: that some propositions are ‘justification magnets’. According (...) |
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Introduction to Special Issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Overview of the central issues in cognitive architecture, epistemology, and ethics surrounding cognitive penetrability. Special issue includes papers by philosophers and psychologists: Gary Lupyan, Fiona Macpherson, Reginald Adams, Anya Farennikova, Jona Vance, Francisco Marchi, Robert Cowan. |
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Since the early 20th century underdetermination has been one of the most contentious problems in the philosophy of science. In this article I relate the underdetermination problem to models in biology and defend two main lines of argument: First, the use of models in this discipline lends strong support to the underdetermination thesis. Second, models and theories in biology are not determined strictly by the logic of representation of the studied phenomena, but also by other constraints such as research traditions, (...) |
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Craig Callender claims that ‘time is the great informer’, meaning that the directions in which our ‘best’ physical theories inform are temporal. This is intended to be a metaphysical claim, and as such expresses a relationship between the physical world and information-gathering systems such as ourselves. This article gives two counterexamples to this claim, illustrating the fact that time and informative strength doubly dissociate, so the claim cannot be about physical theories in general. The first is a case where physical (...) |
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This paper examines our pre-theoretic conception of non-supernaturalism; the thesis that all that exists is natural. It is argued that we intuitively take this thesis to be a substantive, non-dogmatic, empirically justified, not merely contingent truth. However, devicing an interpretation of non-supernaturalism that captures all aspects of this intuition is difficult. Indeed, it is found that this intuition conflates the strong inferential scope of a metaphysical claim with the modest justificatory requirements of an empirical matter of fact. As such, non-supernaturalism, (...) |
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This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains (...) |
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Is there a principled difference between entailments in natural language that are valid solely in virtue of their form or structure and those that are not? This paper advances an affirmative answer to this question, one that takes as its starting point Gareth Evans’s suggestion that semantic theory aims to carve reality at the joints by uncovering the semantic natural kinds of the language. I sketch an Evans-inspired account of semantic kinds and show how it supports a principled account of (...) |
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Intuitively, (1)-(3) seem to express genuine claims (true or false) about what the world is like, attempts to correctly describe parts of extra-linguistic reality. By contrast, it is tempting to regard (4)-(6) as merely reflecting decisions (or conventions, or dispositions, or rules) concerning the terms in which that extra-linguistic reality is described, decisions about which things to label with 'vixen', 'bachelor' or 'cup'. |
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Résumé Jules Vuillemin était un philosophe érudit et savant ; il entretenait avec la philosophie analytique de son temps une relation étroite, mais rendue énigmatique par sa fidélité au principe de l’inséparabilité entre la philosophie et l’histoire de la philosophie hérité de l’historien de la philosophie, Martial Gueroult. La question principale que je me pose ici est de savoir quelle était l’attitude exacte de Vuillemin à l’égard de la triple controverse entre Quine et Carnap provoquée par les critiques dirigées par (...) |
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