Despite the prominence of doubt in philosophy since Descartes, the published philosophical literature includes no extended treatment of the nature of doubt. In this paper, I summarize the main contributions that have been made to the subject and then develop a commonsense functionalist account of doubt by specifying the functional role of doubt that something is the case. After adding two further wrinkles, I show how the resulting account can be used to address the questions of how doubt is related (...) to belief and whether suspension of judgment can be identified with doubt. Although the account is partisan, it should hold interest for those who favor other positions in the philosophy of mind, since much of the account can be taken on board by those in other camps, and the paper demonstrates how a sufficiently detailed account of doubt can be put to work addressing longstanding questions of interest across philosophical sub-disciplines. (shrink)

Does faith require belief? “Belief-plus” accounts of faith say yes. “Non-doxastic” accounts say no but tend to place a “no-disbelief constraint” on faith. Both sides, I argue, are mistaken for making belief explanatorily prior to faith. Indeed, both “faith” and “belief” have contextualist semantics, which leaves only a tenuous tie between the applications of the two words.

This essay explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether the authors of these works intend or approve of their doing so. It is shown why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Recently developed results in social choice theory are applied (...) here to cases where racial bias is perpetuated through institutionally orchestrated collective decision making. The “discursive dilemma” theorem suggests why the analysis of subliminal attitudes is irrelevant to correcting the racial injustices presumed to follow from implicit bias in societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced. (shrink)

It is shown here that injustices due to racial discrimination are best identified in light of the deleterious effects they have upon their victims, rather than the beliefs and attitudes of their perpetrators. For among participants who cooperate clandestinely to bring about racial injustice there may be broad disagreement about what it is they are doing collectively, and why; or they may disagree in principle about whether what they are doing is morally right. I employ the notion of ‘nomotropic’ behaviour (...) to replace the oversimplified notion of ‘rule-following’ in order to explain how duplicity and hypocrisy fall shy of being regarded as irrational in social climates where implicit norms reinforce racial privileging while explicit norms denounce it. Further, examining the ‘collective utility’ of dogmatic beliefs and norms comprising part of the social architecture that covertly reinforces racial injustice may help to explain why it often seems to make so little diffe... (shrink)

In this paper, we explicate an underappreciated distinction between two conceptions of valuing. According to the first conception, which we call the surface-account, valuing something is exclusively a matter of having certain behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dispositions. In contrast, the second conception, which we call the layer-account, posits that valuing is constituted by the presence of certain representational mental states underlying those dispositions. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the distinction in proper detail and show that the (...) accounts have different implications regarding the valuings of agents. In the second part, we situate the accounts within the extant philosophical literature. First, we relate them to the recent debate between so-called dispositionalists and representationalists about the nature of beliefs and point out that this debate can help anticipate some of the main dialectical fault lines to be expected between surface- and layer-theorists. Second, we examine the contemporary meta-ethical debate on conceptualizing valuing, indicate that scholars have largely ignored the distinction introduced here, and outline that this oversight has substantial theoretical costs: as we show, key arguments within the meta-ethical debate require thorough re-evaluation in light of the proposed distinction. The third part of the paper illustrates the theoretical leverage of the distinction for practical research by exploring its implications for behavioral welfare economics. (shrink)

According to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty presents a theory of hinges, and hinges have a role to play in a foundationalist epistemology. Williams and Coliva have claimed that the hinges are not suitable to play such a role as they are not shared universally. Moyal-Sharrock has replied that a subset of the hinges is suitable to play such a role: the “universal” hinges, an account of which she developed in her 2004 book Understanding on Certainty. I argue that for (...) Moyal-Sharrock’s reply to be sustained, she must construe the set of universal hinges much more narrowly than she does currently. For instance, Moyal-Sharrock claims that “I have a brain” is a universal hinge, which consigns people who know nothing about brains to stand outside the bounds of sense. I also provide a novel way of thinking about the universal hinges, which I argue is better textually motivated than Moyal-Sharrock’s own way, and which provides a set of hinges more suitable to play a role in foundationalist epistemology. (shrink)

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged collective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures collective (...) intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective attitudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes. (shrink)

While the causal contributions of so-called ‘automatic’ processes to behavior are now widely acknowledged, less attention has been given to their normative role in the guidance of action. We develop an account of the normativity of automaticity that responds to and builds upon Tamar Szabó Gendler's account of ‘alief’, an associative and arational mental state more primitive than belief. Alief represents a promising tool for integrating psychological research on automaticity with philosophical work on mind and action, but Gendler errs in (...) overstating the degree to which aliefs are norm-insensitive. (shrink)

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

The essential task of the investigation of self-deception is nothing more than establishing the boundary of it, herein known as the distinction problem of self-deception. Such a boundary is necessary for distinguishing the phenomenon of self-deception from other similar phenomena, especially wishful thinking, and sheds light on the future research of other theoretical questions posed by the phenomenon. Although philosophers have reached a vague consensus on certain necessary elements involved in the phenomenon of self-deception, there is no general agreement on (...) their details, leading to a lack of canonical literature regarding the question of what makes self-deception a unique phenomenon. In this thesis, I begin by attempting to re-establish the initial definition of self-deception by illustrating the vague consensus in the current discussion of self-deception. Then, several representative views are examined to uncover the reason for their failure to capture the distinction between self-deception and other kinds of irrationality. These findings are then used to clarify what the basic structure of self-deception should be. Finally, I develop an account revealing that the distinction problem is related to the study of the necessary attitude involved in self-deception. My analysis shows that a special kind of instability inherent in the necessary attitude involved in self-deception is the key to establishing self-deception as a distinctive case of motivated irrationality. (shrink)