The paper outlines the model of controversy spaces. The model of controversy spaces integrates two different elements of the dialectical tradition. On the one hand, dialectics in its ancient meaning: the practice of controversial dialogue. On the other hand, the model incorporates dialectics understood as a pattern of change in intellectual history, based on the confrontation between opposite standpoints. I will be argued in this paper, the dialectical tradition was almost completely left aside in modernity and substituted by a monolectic (...) approach. The model that will be outlined below aims at overcoming this view by focusing on the emergence, development and transformation of controversy spaces. (shrink)

This paper describes the materials in the Russell Archives relevant to Russell's work on logic and the foundations of mathematics, and suggests the kinds of information that may and may not be drawn about the historical development of his ideas. By way of illustration, a couple of episodes are described. The first concerns a logical system closely related to his theory of denoting, which preceeds the system used in Principia mathematics, while the second describes a delay in publishing the second (...) volume of that work due to the discovery by Whitehead of a conceptual error. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: There is an intuitive distinction between knowing someone in a detached manner and knowing someone in a more intimate fashion — personally. The latter seems to involve the specially active participation of the person known in a way that the former does not. In this paper I present a novel, communication account of knowing someone personally that successfully explains this participation. The account also illuminates the propositional and testimonial character of the personal knowledge of persons, the conditions of limited (...) transferability to which such knowledge is subject, and its distinctly meaningful role in everyday life. I conclude by considering a worry about self-knowledge that arises on the communication account. (shrink)

In this discussion of Sosa's second volume on reflective knowledge, I focus on the question of whether Sosa's account of knowledge is flawed for failing to capture a connection between possessing knowledge and gaining assurance of truth. In particular, I worry that if there is no more to reflective knowledge than apt belief about apt belief, where the understanding of aptness is the same at both the first and the second level, Sosa hasn't given us a way of gaining philosophically (...) satisfying knowledge. (shrink)

It is a common intuition that at least in some cases disagreement has skeptical consequences: the participants are not justified in persisting in their beliefs. I will argue that the currently popular non-dialectical and individualistic accounts of justification, such as evidentialism and reliabilism, cannot explain this intuition and defend the dialectical conception of justification that can explain it. I will also argue that this sort of justification is a necessary condition of knowledge by relying on Craig's genealogy of the concept (...) of knowledge. I will then respond to the accusation that the dialectical conception leads to radical skepticism. My response is partly concessive. It does lead to skepticism in areas where controversy prevails, such as philosophy, politics and religion, but this sort of skepticism is quite intuitive. Finally, I deal with the objection that my defense of skepticism about philosophy is self-refuting. (shrink)

I resolve an apparently unresolved dispute about how probable uniform experience makes an extrapolation from it, and draw some general lessons about such enumerative induction. Uniform experience does not necessarily confer a high probability on an extrapolation of or generalization from that experience. Rational extrapolation or generalization typically involves a lot of specific background information, though not necessarily a general assumption that nature is uniform or that the future will resemble the past. And new evidence which is highly likely on (...) one hypothesis but highly unlikely on any of its competitors does not necessarily make the former hypothesis highly probable. (shrink)

In his Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell distinguished knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of truths. This paper argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between these two species of knowledge. I argue that knowledge by acquaintance of an object neither suffices for knowledge that one is acquainted with the object, nor puts a subject in a position to know that she is acquainted with the object. These conclusions emerge from a thorough examination of the central role played by attention (...) in Russell's theory of knowledge. Attention bridges the gap between knowledge by acquaintance and our capacity to form judgements about the objects of acquaintance. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize Michael Huemer's phenomenal conservatism, the theory of justification according to which if it seems to S that p, then in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and hunches provide counterexamples to phenomenal conservatism. I then defend a version of restricted phenomenal conservatism, the view that some but not all appearances confer prima facie justification on their propositional contents. Specifically, I (...) defend the view that S has defeasible justification for believing that p if and only if it seems to S that p and it seems to S that she is acquainted with the fact that makes p true. Finally, I criticize Huemer's self-defeat argument for phenomenal conservatism. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Gottlob Frege’s so called Context Principle (CP hereafter), which counts as one of the most controversial points of his philosophy. Due to its importance and centrality in Frege’s thought, a detailed discussion of the principle requires a detailed analysis of almost all aspects of his philosophy. Obviously, such a task cannot be successfully accomplished here. Thus I limit myself to address only two questions concerning the CP: what role does the principle play (in Grundlagen) and how (...) can we interpret it. Addressing the first problem is required in order to address the second. Most authors interpreted CP from the perspective of Frege’s later distinction between sense and reference, which I will call the ‘semantic interpretation’. Although I accept this perspective as valuable and important, I will initially inverse the action and I will try to approach CP, and generally Grundlagen, in a more natural way, contextually, namely setting them in the initial logicist plan of the Begriffschrift. Finally, I will try to provide an interpretation concerning the alleged conflict between CP and Frege’s compositionality thesis such that they could coherently stay together. (shrink)

The central fact in the delineation of radical behaviorism is its conceptual avoidance of propositional content. This eschewal of the intentional stance sets it apart not only from cognitivism but from other non-behaviorisms. Indeed, the defining characteristic of radical behaviorism is not that it avoids mediating processes per se but that it sets out to account for behavior without recourse to propositional attitudes. Based, rather, on the contextual stance, it provides definitions of contingency-shaped, rule-governed verbal and private behaviors which are (...) non-intentional. However, while the account provided by radical behaviorism fulfills the pragmatic criteria of prediction and control of its subject matter, it has problems of explanation that stem from the failure of radical behaviorist interpretation to address the personal level of analysis, to provide for the continuity of behavior, and to show how its accounts can be delimited in the face of causal equifinality. This leaves gaps in its explanation that radical behaviorists choose either to ignore or to fill with the very intentional locutions that they formally abhor but which I argue are essential. As a result, many psychologists who style themselves radical behaviorists have already moved beyond radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. They have done so primarily as a result of adopting the language of intentional psychology in order to explain behavior; where they have not done this, they have resorted to the unscientific assumption that somewhere there is a learning history that explains their data. While it is indeed the case that a learning history precedes all operant behavior, the explanatory gap that is revealed by the search for this unobtainable information reveals the inescapability of intentionality. Hence, psychologists, including radical behaviorists, are right to employ it. The challenge is to understand why this is so and to celebrate rather than denigrate the resulting extension of behavioral science. In this response, I first raise and seek to answer two questions: what is radical behaviorism, and what is intentional explanation? I go on to discuss the incompleteness of radical behaviorism. There follows a summary of the argument with respect to intentional behaviorism and super-personal cognitive psychology. And, finally, I bring the discussion back to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who initiated so much of it. (shrink)

Argues that there are two distinct senses in which knowledge is incompatible with accidental truth - each of which can be traced to a distinct role played by everyday knowledge attributions.

David Lewis and Peter van Inwagen have claimed that there are no “knockdown” arguments in philosophy. Their claim appears to be at odds with common philosophical practice: philosophers often write as though their conclusions are established or proven and that the considerations offered for these conclusions are decisive. In this paper, I examine some questions raised by Lewis’s and van Inwagen’s contention. What are knockdown arguments? Are there any in philosophy? If not, why not? These questions concern the nature of (...) the philosophical enterprise and our answers have implications for the limits on the attitudes of informed, rational thinkers. (shrink)

This paper defends the epistemological doctrine of fallibilism from recent objections. In “The Myth of Knowledge” Laurence BonJour argues that we should reject fallibilism for two main reasons: first, there is no adequate way to specify what level of justification is required for fallible knowledge; second, we cannot explain why any level of justification that is less than fully conclusive should have the significance that makes knowledge valuable. I will reply to these challenges in a way that allows me to (...) make progress on a number of important issues in contemporary epistemology: epistemic value, the functional roles of knowledge attributions, experimental epistemology, skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the lottery paradox. My argument is motivated by appealing to various insights derived from the method of ‘practical explication’, particularly the idea that a central purpose of the concept of knowledge is to flag reliable informants. My conclusion is that various practical and theoretical considerations derived from the method of practical explication support the fallibilist conception of knowledge. (shrink)

In the literature, regress arguments often take one of two different forms: either they conclude that a given solution fails to solve any problem of a certain kind (the strong conclusion), or they conclude that a given solution fails to solve all problems of a certain kind (the weaker conclusion). This gives rise to a logical problem: do regresses entail the strong or the weaker conclusion, or none? In this paper I demonstrate that regress arguments can in fact take both (...) forms, and clearly set out the logical difference between them. Throughout the paper, I confine myself to metaphysical examples from the early Russell. Only now that we know they are valid can we start to discuss whether they are sound. (shrink)

We report experimental results showing that participants are more likely to attribute knowledge in familiar Gettier cases when the would-be knowers are performing actions that are negative in some way (e.g. harmful, blameworthy, norm-violating) than when they are performing positive or neutral actions. Our experiments bring together important elements from the Gettier case literature in epistemology and the Knobe effect literature in experimental philosophy and reveal new insights into folk patterns of knowledge attribution.

In recent years, many philosophers have supposed that perceptual representations have propositional content. A prominent rationale for this supposition is the assumption that perceptions may justify beliefs, but this rationale can be doubted. This rationale may be doubted on the grounds that there do not seem to be any viable characterizations of the belief-justifying propositional contents of perceptions. An alternative is to model perceptual representations as marks in a perceptual similarity space. A mapping can be defined between points in perceptual (...) similarity space and points in an objective quality space. The correctness of perceptual representation can then be defined as a kind of accuracy of mapping rather than as the truth of a proposition. The phenomenon of seeing-as can be accounted for as a matter of the location of marks in perceptual similarity space relative to other marks in perceptual similarity space. Perceptual representations, on this account, will not justify beliefs, but they may nonetheless guide judgment. (shrink)

Many scholars note that the Analects, and Confucian philosophy more generally, hold a conception of knowing that more closely approximates ‘knowing-how’ than ‘knowing-that’. However, I argue that this description is not sufficiently sensitive to the concerns of the early Confucians and their focus on self-cultivation. I propose that a particular conception of knowing—knowing to act in the moment—is better suited to capturing the Analects’ emphasis on exemplary lives in actual contexts. These investigations might also contribute to discussions on know-how in (...) epistemology in western philosophy. (shrink)

In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scientific context within which the Toolbox Project operates, a context that features a growing interest in and commitment to cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We then develop an argument for the leading idea (...) behind this effort, namely, that philosophical dialogue can improve cross-disciplinary science by effecting epistemic changes that lead to better group communication. On the heels of this argument, we describe our approach and its output; in particular, we emphasize the Toolbox instrument that generates philosophical dialogue and the Toolbox workshop in which that dialogue takes place. Together, these constitute a philosophical intervention into the life of CDR teams. We conclude by considering the philosophical implications of this intervention. (shrink)

Examining the origin and development of my views of social epistemology, I contrast my position with the position held by analytic social epistemologists. Analytic social epistemology (ASE) has failed to make significant progress owing, in part, to a minimal understanding of actual knowledge practices, a minimised role for philosophers in ongoing inquiry, and a focus on maintaining the status quo of epistemology as a field. As a way forward, I propose questions and future areas of inquiry for a post-ASE to (...) address. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher likelihood that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in a restricted scenario (Olsson and Schubert 2007, Synthese 157:297–308). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where it is any finite (...) number of witnesses that give equivalent reports. It is shown that only the so-called Shogenji measure is reliability conducive in this scenario. I take that to be an argument for the Shogenji measure being a fruitful explication of coherence. (shrink)

Ability and achievement are not traits: they are relations. Mistaking traits for relations has a history even in science (our understanding of gravity). This mistake is possibly responsible for the lackluster performance of the results of our educational research when we have tried to use it to inform policy. It is particularly troublesome for interventions that target “children at risk.” The paper provides a quasi-formal outline of achievement as a relation and it then uses the outline to explain some problematic (...) research findings. (shrink)

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, owing primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists (...) are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which—according to them—moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or—as it is sometimes put—what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties. (shrink)

I argue that mental descriptivism cannot be reasonably thought superior to rival theories on the grounds that it can (while they cannot) provide an elegant account of reference failure. Descriptivism about the particular-directed intentionality of our mental states fails when applied to desires. Consider, for an example, the desire that Satan not tempt me. On the descriptivist account, it looks like my desire would be fulfilled in conditions in which there exists exactly one thing satisfying some description only Satan satisfies (...) (call it the Satanic Description). However, against this analysis, it is clearly compatible with desiring that Satan not tempt me that I also desire that there exist nothing satisfying the Satanic Description. The descriptivist has room for maneuver here, but the cost of accommodating this phenomenon is that the descriptivist shall no longer be able to use her theory to ameliorate the possibility of reference failure. (shrink)

What is exemplification? A proposition that attributes a property to an object is true if the object exemplifies the property. But according to the correspondence theory, a proposition is true if the corresponding fact exists. So if the correspondence theory is correct, an exemplification of a temporal property by an object is simply the concrete circumstance of the object’s having the property. But since not all properties are temporal, not all exemplifications are circumstances, and we need to recognise timeless as (...) well as temporal facts. This distinction allows us to solve the problem of converse relations, and to give an account of the logically complex facts which deduction allows us to know. (shrink)

To be open-minded is to be willing to revise or entertain doubts about one’s beliefs. Commonly regarded as an intellectual virtue, and often too as a moral virtue, open-mindedness is a trait that is generally desirable for a person to have. However, in the major theistic traditions, absolute commitment to one’s religious beliefs is regarded as virtuous or ideal. But one cannot be completely resolved about an issue and at the same time be open to revising one’s beliefs about it. (...) It appears, then, that religious devotion is inconsistent with open-mindedness. The more religiously devout a person is, the more firmly she will hold to her convictions. And the stronger her belief commitments, the less open-minded she will be regarding these beliefs. So there appears to be a paradox here, where from the standpoint of religious devotion, it is virtuous to display an intellectual vice, namely closed-mindedness. I discuss this problem and explore some potential routes of escape from the paradox. (shrink)

The conceivability argument against materialism, originally raised by Saul Kripke and then reformulated, among others, by David Chalmers holds that we can conceive of the distinctness of a phenomenal state and its neural realiser, or, in Chalmers’ variation of the argument, a zombie world. Here I argue that both phenomenal and natural kind terms are ambiguous between two senses, phenomenal and natural, and that the conceivability argument goes through only on one reading of a term. Thus, the antimaterialist has to (...) provide some reasons independent of anti-materialism itself to favour that reading of a term that supports his or her argument. Given that there are no such independent reasons, I conclude that we should put more weight on empirical considerations than on a priori discussion in resolving the question concerning the identity between a phenomenal state and its neural realiser. (shrink)

Revelation is the thesis that having an experience that instantiates some phenomenal property puts us in a position to know the nature or essence of that property. It is widely held that although Revelation is prima facie plausible, it is inconsistent with physicalism, and, in particular, with the claim that phenomenal properties are physical properties. I outline the standard argument for the incompatibility of Revelation and physicalism and compare it with the Knowledge Argument. By doing so, I hope to show (...) that on various plausible interpretations of Revelation it is in fact consistent with physicalism. Moreover, there is a robust reading of Revelation that a posteriori physicalists can, and should, accept. (shrink)

Philosophy has four forms: wonder, faith, doubt and scepticism. These are not separate categories, but separate ideal possibilities. Modern academic philosophy has fallen, for several centuries, into an error: which is the error of supposing that philosophy is only what I call doubt. Philosophy may be doubt: indeed, it is part of my argument that this is undeniably one element of, or one possibility in, philosophy; but doubt is only one of four points of the compass. In this essay I (...) indicate the nature of each point of the compass as it has been found in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

According to one creation myth, analytic philosophy emerged in Cambridge when Moore and Russell abandoned idealism in favour of naive realism: every word stood for something; it was only after “the Fall,” Russell's discovery of his theory of descriptions, that they realized some complex phrases (“the present King of France”) didn't stand for anything. It has become a commonplace of recent scholarship to object that even before the Fall, Russell acknowledged that such phrases may fail to denote. But we need (...) to go further: even before the Fall, Russell had taken an altogether more discerning approach to the ontology of logic and relations than is usually recognized. (shrink)

This paper critiques the rise of scientific approaches to central questions in the humanities, specifically questions about human nature, ethics, identity, and experience. In particular, I look at how an increasing number of philosophers are turning to evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as sources of answers to philosophical problems. This approach constitutes what I term a biological turn in the humanities. I argue that the biological turn, especially its reliance on evolutionary psychology, is best understood as an epistemology of ignorance that (...) contributes to a climate of hostility and intolerance regarding feminist insights about gender, identity, and the body. (shrink)

An improvement on Horwich's so-called "pseudo-proof" of Russell's principle of induction is offered, which, we believe, avoids certain objections to the former. Although strictly independent of our other work in this area, a connection can be made and in the final section we comment on this and certain questions regarding rationality, etc.

Can there be relational universals? If so, how can they be exemplified? A monadic universal is by definition capable of having a scattered spatiotemporal localization of its different exemplifications, but the problem of relational universals is that one single exemplification seems to have to be scattered in the many places where the relata are. The paper argues that it is possible to bite this bullet, and to accept a hitherto un-discussed kind of exemplification relation called ‘scattered exemplification’. It has no (...) immediate symbolic counterpart in any Indo-European natural language or in any so far constructed logical language. In order to remedy this, a notion called ‘many-place copula’ is introduced, too. (shrink)

In his seminal work Moral Notions , Julius Kovesi presents a novel account of concept formation. At the heart of this account is a distinction between what he terms the material element and the formal element of concepts. This paper elucidates his distinction in detail and contrasts it with other distinctions such as form-matter, universal-particular, genus-difference, necessary-sufficient, and open texture-closed texture. We situate Kovesi’s distinction within his general philosophical method, outlining his views on concept formation in general and explain how (...) his theory of concept formation is applied in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Forthcoming in D.H. Pritchard & V. Hendricks, New Waves in Epistemology,.

Abductivists claim that explanatory considerations (e.g., simplicity, parsimony, explanatory breadth, etc.) favor belief in the external world over skeptical hypotheses involving evil demons and brains in vats. After showing how most versions of abductivism succumb fairly easily to obvious and fatal objections, I explain how rationalist versions of abductivism can avoid these difficulties. I then discuss the most pressing challenges facing abductivist appeals to the a priori and offer suggestions on how to overcome them.

In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth (...) Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. (shrink)

For the past twenty years, taxonomy has been in a state of turmoil. This confusion brings along with it four distinct schools of thought, each of which offers a different concept of biological species. The thesis will show that these concepts are purely operational and have only a weak theoretical force. In turn, it will be argued that a sound definition of species uses the notion of natural kinds, which is itself defined in term of non-causal nomological regularities.

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general (...) theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3). (shrink)

Ivan Boh affirms and Robert Pasnau denies that William Heytesbury holds merely true belief to be sufficient for knowledge in the broad sense. I argue that Boh is correct and Pasnau is mistaken, and that there is a long-running orthodox medieval tradition agreeing with Heytesbury about the conditions for knowledge. I offer a hypothesis about the origins, continuance and demise of that medieval tradition, and some remarks about the tradition's significance.

In his paper on ‘Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference’ Saul Kripke remarks: “Like the present account, Künne stresses that for Frege times, persons, etc. can be part of the expression of the thought. However, his reading is certainly not mine in significant respects . . .”. On both counts, he is right. As regards the differences between our readings, in some respects I shall confess to having made a mistake, in several others I shall remain stubbornly unmoved. Thus I (...) shall insist on the need for distinguishing Fregean sense from linguistic (lexico-grammatical) meaning, I shall resist Kripke's function-theoretic account of ‘hybrid’ thought-expressions, and I shall deplore his transformation of Gottlob Frege into Gottrand Fressell. As regards this transformation, I shall argue that some of the main points Kripke wants to drive home do not depend on it. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne argues that belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for faith, and he also argues that, while faith is voluntary, belief is involuntary. This essay is concerned with the tension arising from the involuntary aspect of faith, the Christian doctrine that human beings have an obligation to exercise faith, and the moral claim that people are only responsible for actions where they have the ability to do otherwise. Put more concisely, the problem concerns the coherence of the (...) following claims: (1) one cannot have faith, (2) one has an obligation to have faith, and (3) ought implies can. To solve this dilemma, I offer three solutions that I believe have the philosophical resources to demonstrate the consistency of these claims. Thus, I defend the claim that it is logically possible for a person to be culpable for an involuntary failure to have faith in God. (shrink)

The long history of the overlap of science and philosophy finds a focal point in cosmology. In an effort to examine what happens when science and deconstruction encounter, this essay thus begins with, and follows the path of, cosmology. I start by suggesting a new solution to the oldest question in cosmology: why is there something rather than nothing? From this, I attempt to outline the way in which necessity is thought to operate by means of natural laws, tracing the (...) sense in which science's demand for falsifiable claims creates an aporia in which its truths are not ultimately truthful and its necessity is not necessary. Focusing on the ways in which différance and the autoimmune can help us open up the work of science, I come to suggest two new tropes, that of apoptosis and the remainder, arguing that the inherent openness of science can be one of its strengths, especially if we ask the question of what remains to be asked once science has answered a question. (shrink)

Correspondence theories are frequently charged with being either implausible -- metaphysically troubling and overly general -- or trivial -- collapsing into deflationism's "'P' is true iff P." Philip Kitcher argues for a "modest" correspondence theory, on which reference relations are causal relations, but there is no general theory of denotation. In this paper, I start by showing that, understood this way, "modest" theories are open to charges of triviality. I then offer a refinement of modesty, and take the first steps (...) toward articulating a modest correspondence theory, giving a particular account of the relation between predicates, properties, and extensions. Finally, I argue that my account does not collapse into a deflationary one. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Une thèse sousjacente au présent article est que la reconnaissance de notre capacité à mal représenter le monde devrait jouer un rôle significatif dans les explications de la genèse de la connaissance empirique. Je recours à cette contrainte explicative pour évaluer le tableau proposé par John McDowell dans Mind and World et, en particulier, ses arguments contre l’idée que le contenu de l’expérience est non conceptuel. McDowell considère Gareth Evans comme un représentant de cette conception et soutient que le (...) contenu de toute expérience est conceptuel. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que l’approche de McDowell est inadéquate parce qu’elle ne permet pas de rendre compte de notre capacité à mal représenter le monde. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The analytic method by which Descartes established the first principle of his philosophy is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference that differs markedly from the deductive model of noetic apprehension long associated with seventeenth-century rationalism. In this paper, it is shown that the same analytic process is at work in the Third Meditation proof of the innateness of the idea of God, where, however, there are serious doubts about its legitimacy.