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  1. By Which We May Be Judged: Moral Epistemology, Mind-Independent Truth Conditions And Sources Of Normativity.Maarten Van Doorn - 2022 - Dissertation, Central European University
    Many hope that our values, purged of messy human contingency, could aspire to correspond with mind-independent, rationally obligatory, and eternal ethical facts. But if the arguments of this thesis are on the right track, we should reject the search for non-natural and mind-independent moral truths.
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  • Five Kinds of Epistemic Arguments Against Robust Moral Realism.Joshua Schechter - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 345-369.
    This chapter discusses epistemic objections to non-naturalist moral realism. The goal of the chapter is to determine which objections are pressing and which objections can safely be dismissed. The chapter examines five families of objections: (i) one involving necessary conditions on knowledge, (ii) one involving the idea that the causal history of our moral beliefs reflects the significant impact of irrelevant influences, (iii) one relying on the idea that moral truths do not play a role in explaining our moral beliefs, (...)
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  • Modal Idealism.David Builes - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.
    I argue that it is metaphysically necessary that: (i) every fundamental entity is conscious, and (ii) every fundamental property is a phenomenal property.
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  • Ontological disagreements, reference, and charity: A challenge for Hirsch's deflationism.Delia Belleri - 2022 - Theoria 88 (5):982-996.
    Eli Hirsch argues that certain ontological disputes involve a conflict between “equivalent” languages, and that the principle of charity compels each disputant to interpret the other as speaking truly in their own language. For Hirsch, a language’s semantics maps sentences (in context) onto sets of possible worlds but assigns no role to reference. I argue that this method leads to an overly uncharitable portrayal of the disputes at issue – whereby ontologists who speak “equivalent” languages can only argue about syntax. (...)
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  • Metaphysical Realism and Anti-Realism.J. T. M. Miller - 2022 - Cambridge University Press.
    Minimally, metaphysical realists hold that there exist some mind-independent entities. Metaphysical realists also hold that we can speak meaningfully or truthfully about mind-independent entities. Those who reject metaphysical realism deny one or more of these commitments. This Element aims to introduce the reader to the core commitments of metaphysical realism and to illustrate how these commitments have changed over time by surveying some of the main families of views that realism has been contrasted with: such as scepticism, idealism, and anti-realism.
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  • An Explanationist Account of Genealogical Defeat.Daniel Z. Korman & Dustin Locke - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):176-195.
    Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...)
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  • Why Can’t There Be Numbers?David Builes - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    Platonists affirm the existence of abstract mathematical objects, and Nominalists deny the existence of abstract mathematical objects. While there are standard arguments in favor of Nominalism, these arguments fail to account for the necessity of Nominalism. Furthermore, these arguments do nothing to explain why Nominalism is true. They only point to certain theoretical vices that might befall the Platonist. The goal of this paper is to formulate and defend a simple, valid argument for the necessity of Nominalism that seeks to (...)
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  • Realism, reliability, and epistemic possibility: on modally interpreting the Benacerraf–Field challenge.Brett Topey - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4415-4436.
    A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...)
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  • Shadows of Syntax: Revitalizing Logical and Mathematical Conventionalism.Jared Warren - 2020 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. It (...)
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  • Debunking arguments.Daniel Z. Korman - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12638.
    Debunking arguments—also known as etiological arguments, genealogical arguments, access problems, isolation objec- tions, and reliability challenges—arise in philosophical debates about a diverse range of topics, including causation, chance, color, consciousness, epistemic reasons, free will, grounding, laws of nature, logic, mathematics, modality, morality, natural kinds, ordinary objects, religion, and time. What unifies the arguments is the transition from a premise about what does or doesn't explain why we have certain mental states to a negative assessment of their epistemic status. I examine (...)
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  • Morality and Mathematics.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2020 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    To what extent are the subjects of our thoughts and talk real? This is the question of realism. In this book, Justin Clarke-Doane explores arguments for and against moral realism and mathematical realism, how they interact, and what they can tell us about areas of philosophical interest more generally. He argues that, contrary to widespread belief, our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident or provable than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have better claim to (...)
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  • Qual a motivação para se defender uma teoria causal da memória?César Schirmer Dos Santos - 2018 - In Juliano Santos do Carmo & Rogério F. Saucedo Corrêa (eds.), Linguagem e cognição. NEPFil. pp. 63-89.
    Este texto tem como objetivo apresentar a principal motivação filosófica para se defender uma teoria causal da memória, que é explicar como pode um evento que se deu no passado estar relacionado a uma experiência mnêmica que se dá no presente. Para tanto, iniciaremos apresentando a noção de memória de maneira informal e geral, para depois apresentar elementos mais detalhados. Finalizamos apresentando uma teoria causal da memória que se beneficia da noção de veritação (truthmaking).
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  • What Are the Odds that Everyone is Depraved?Scott Hill - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (3):299-308.
    Why does God allow evil? One hypothesis is that God desires the existence and activity of free creatures but He was unable to create a world with such creatures and such activity without also allowing evil. If Molinism is true, what probability should be assigned to this hypothesis? Some philosophers claim that a low probability should be assigned because there are an infinite number of possible people and because we have no reason to suppose that such creatures will choose one (...)
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  • Is there a reliability challenge for logic?Joshua Schechter - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):325-347.
    There are many domains about which we think we are reliable. When there is prima facie reason to believe that there is no satisfying explanation of our reliability about a domain given our background views about the world, this generates a challenge to our reliability about the domain or to our background views. This is what is often called the reliability challenge for the domain. In previous work, I discussed the reliability challenges for logic and for deductive inference. I argued (...)
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  • Sider on the Epistemology of Structure.Jared Warren - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (9):2417-2435.
    Theodore Sider’s recent book, “Writing the Book of the World”, employs a primitive notion of metaphysical structure in order to make sense of substantive metaphysics. But Sider and others who employ metaphysical primitives face serious epistemological challenges. In the first section I develop a specific form of this challenge for Sider’s own proposed epistemology for structure; the second section develops a general reliability challenge for Sider’s theory; and the third and final section argues for the rejection of Siderean structure in (...)
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  • Metaphysical Explanations for Modal Normativists.Theodore Locke - 2020 - Metaphysics 3 (1):33-54.
    I expand modal normativism, a theory of metaphysical modality, to give a normativist account of metaphysical explanation. According to modal normativism, basic modal claims do not have a descriptive function, but instead have the normative function of enabling language users to express semantic rules that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary. However, a worry for modal normativism is that it doesn’t keep up with all of the important and interesting metaphysics we can do by giving and evaluating metaphysical explanations. (...)
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  • Review of The Social Psychology of Morality. [REVIEW]Michael Klenk - 2016 - Metapsychology Online 20 (48):1-8.
    If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...)
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  • Expressivism and the Reliability Challenge.Camil Golub - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4):797-811.
    Suppose that there are objective normative facts and our beliefs about such facts are by-and-large true. How did this come to happen? This is the reliability challenge to normative realism. As has been recently noted, the challenge also applies to expressivist “quasi-realism”. I argue that expressivism is useful in the face of this challenge, in a way that has not been yet properly articulated. In dealing with epistemological issues, quasi-realists typically invoke the desire-like nature of normative judgments. However, this is (...)
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  • The A Priori Without Magic.Jared Warren - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    The distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori is an old and influential one. But both the distinction itself and the crucial notion of a priori knowledge face powerful philosophical challenges. Many philosophers worry that accepting the a priori is tantamount to accepting epistemic magic. In contrast, this Element argues that the a priori can be formulated clearly, made respectable, and used to do important epistemological work. The author's conception of the a priori and its role falls short (...)
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  • Ontological disagreements, reliability, and standoffs: The pluralist option.Delia Belleri - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (3-4):348-362.
    The reliability challenge to ontology can be summarized as the complaint that no satisfying explanation is available of how one can have true ontological beliefs, given that the relevant belief-forming methods are noncausal (for example, not perception based or memory based). This paper first presents a version of the reliability challenge against realist approaches to ontology, put forward by Jared Warren. It then explores a response to the challenge on behalf of the realist that appeals to the use of abduction. (...)
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  • A Metasemantic Challenge for Mathematical Determinacy.Jared Warren & Daniel Waxman - 2020 - Synthese 197 (2):477-495.
    This paper investigates the determinacy of mathematics. We begin by clarifying how we are understanding the notion of determinacy before turning to the questions of whether and how famous independence results bear on issues of determinacy in mathematics. From there, we pose a metasemantic challenge for those who believe that mathematical language is determinate, motivate two important constraints on attempts to meet our challenge, and then use these constraints to develop an argument against determinacy and discuss a particularly popular approach (...)
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  • The uncanny accuracy of God's mathematical beliefs.Robert Knowles - 2021 - Religious Studies 57 (2):333-352.
    I show how mathematical platonism combined with belief in the God of classical theism can respond to Field's epistemological objection. I defend an account of divine mathematical knowledge by showing that it falls out of an independently motivated general account of divine knowledge. I use this to explain the accuracy of God's mathematical beliefs, which in turn explains the accuracy of our own. My arguments provide good news for theistic platonists, while also shedding new light on Field's influential objection.
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  • Counterpossibles for modal normativists.Theodore D. Locke - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1235-1257.
    Counterpossibles are counterfactuals that involve some metaphysical impossibility. Modal normativism is a non-descriptivist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility according to which modal claims, e.g. ‘necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’, do not function as descriptive claims about the modal nature of reality but function as normative illustrations of constitutive rules and permissions that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary, e.g. ‘bachelor’. In this paper, I assume modal normativism and develop a novel account of counterpossibles and claims about metaphysical similarity (...)
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