To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead on particular cases, seeking to uncover some central aspects of J. L. Austin’s and John Cook Wilson’s ordinary language based approach to philosophical method. I make a start at addressing three questions. First, what distinguishes their approach from other more traditional approaches? Second, (...) is their approach a form of experimental philosophy? Third, given their aims, should it have been? I offer the following preliminary answers. First, their approach distinctively emphasizes attention to what we should say when. Second, their approach is closer to contemporary experimental mathematics than it is to some prominent forms of contemporary experimental philosophy. Third, some purported grounds for pursuing their aims by way of surveying what individual speakers would say when are not compelling. (shrink)

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually-given reasons for belief and desire-based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our (...) believing-on-the-basis-of-perception and our acting-on-the-basis-of-desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal. (shrink)

This paper extends several themes from recent work on norms of assertion. It does as much by applying those themes to the speech act of asking. In particular, it argues for the view that there is a species of asking which is governed by a certain norm, a norm to the effect that one should ask a question only if one doesn’t know its answer.

The paper gives an a priori argument for the view that knowledge is unanalysable. To establish this conclusion I argue that warrant, i.e. the property, whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief, entails both truth and belief and thus does not exist as a property distinct from knowledge: all and only knowledge can turn a true belief into knowledge. The paper concludes that the project of trying to find a condition distinct from knowledge (...) that is necessary and together with truth and belief sufficient for knowledge must be doomed to failure. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that suspension of judgment is intimately tied to inquiry and in particular that one is suspending judgment about some question if and only if one is inquiring into that question.

In this paper I argue that there is a class of attitudes that have questions (rather than propositions or something else) as contents.

In most of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates professes to inquire into some virtue. At the same time, he professes not to know what the virtue in question is. How, then, can he inquire into it? Doesn't he need some knowledge to guide his inquiry? Socrates' disclaimer of knowledge seems to preclude Socratic inquiry. This difficulty must confront any reader of the Socratic dialogues; but one searches them in vain for any explicit statement of the problem or for any explicit solution (...) to it. The Meno, by contrast, both raises it explicitly and proposes a solution. (shrink)

The reflections recorded in this paper arise from three moments in the theory of definition and of conceptual analysis. The moments are: Frege’s review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, the discussion there of the paradox of analysis, and the division that Frege marks, ensuing upon his distinction of Sinn/sense from Bedeutung/reference, between two different conceptions of definition; Leibniz’s still serviceable account of a distinction between the clarity and the distinctness of ideas---a distinction that prompts the suggestion that the guiding purpose (...) of lexical definition is Leibnizian clarity whereas that of real definition is inseparable from the pursuit of Leibnizian distinctness; Leibniz’s speculations concerning the limit or terminus of analysis. The apparent failure of these speculations, casting doubt as it does upon the aspirations that give rise to them, points to the long-standing need to reconfigure the philosophical business of enquiry into concepts. (shrink)

Then you have a look around, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.

Scepticism is a disease in which healthy mental processes run pathologically unchecked. Our cognitive immunity system, designed to protect our conception of the world from harmful errors, turns destructively on that conception itself. Since we have false beliefs, we benefit from the ability to detect our mistakes; removing our errors tends to do us good. Our cognitive immunity system should be able to destroy bad old beliefs, not just prevent the influx of new ones. But that ability sometimes becomes indiscriminate, (...) and destroys good beliefs too. That can happen in several ways. I start by considering two of them. (shrink)

A continuous Oxford tradition on knowledge runs from John Cook Wilson to John McDowell. A central idea is that knowledge is not a species of belief, or that, in McDowell's terms, it is not a hybrid state; that, moreover, it is a kind of taking in of what is there that precludes one's being, for all one can see, wrong. Cook Wilson and McDowell differ on what this means as to the scope of knowledge. J.L. Austin set out the requisite (...) foundations for McDowell to be right. McDowell has shown why the tradition, and his version of it, need to be right. But he does not accept Austin's innovation. That is a shame. For, despite McDowell's very great insightfulness, precisely that much separates him from a very powerful, and correct, view of what knowledge is. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an account of the meaning of must and can within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The paper consists of two parts: the first argues for a relative concept of modality underlying modal words like must and can in natural language. I give preliminary definitions of the meaning of these words which are formulated in terms of logical consequence and compatibility, respectively. The second part discusses one kind of insufficiency in the meaning definitions given in (...) the first part, which arise from the ex falso quodlibet paradox of logical consequence. In stepwise fashion, I make an attempt to avoid most of the consequences of this paradox for the meaning definitions of must and can. (shrink)

G.E. Moore’s open question arguments have been targeted by unsympathetic philosophers for close to a century. Perhaps the most serious criticism directed towards Moore’s OQAs is that they be...

This paper elucidates the sense in which belief is a question-settling attitude. In her recent work, Jane Friedman suggests that we understand the settledness of belief in terms of a normative principle about belief and inquiry: one ought not inquire into a question and believe the answer to the question at the same time. On the basis of the distinction between dispositional and occurrent belief, I argue against Friedman that there is no principle linking belief and inquiry that is both (...) plausible and normative: on the dispositional reading of ‘belief’, such a principle is implausible; on the occurrent reading of ‘belief’, such a principle is not normative. I argue instead that the settledness should be understood as a descriptive relation between occurrent belief and inquiry: one cannot inquire into whether p while at the same time occurrently believing that p. (shrink)

In their chapter “Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes,” Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne present several challenges to the doctrine of pragmatic encroachment. In this brief reply to their chapter two things are aimed at. First, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which their case against pragmatic encroachment is a bit weaker, and another sense in which that case is much stronger, than Anderson and Hawthorne’s own argument would suggest. Second, the chapter highlights and then builds upon their (...) extremely interesting reflections on one sort of practical matter that has not received proper attention in the literature: the epistemic significance of double-checking. This is done with an eye towards pointing in the direction of further work. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the circularity reading of Frege's argument for the indefinability of truth. According to this reading, Frege is appealing to a sort of circularity in the argument. I argue that the circularity reading is interpretatively incorrect, or makes Frege's argument a non‐starter.

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle's distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, an ‘intellectualist’ opponent of Ryle's, brings out this problem by arguing that Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so-called. I develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle's distinction is a unified vision of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’, covering both knowledge-how and knowledge-that. I show (...) how Ryle specifies the general notion into knowledge-how and knowledge-that and discuss the mutual interdependence exhibited by the two forms of knowledge. Ryle's positive view of knowledge, properly understood, emerges as an important, neglected, alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation about practical and theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle's distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, an ‘intellectualist’ opponent of Ryle's, brings out this problem by arguing that Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so-called. I develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle's distinction is a unified vision of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’, covering both knowledge-how and knowledge-that. I show (...) how Ryle specifies the general notion into knowledge-how and knowledge-that and discuss the mutual interdependence exhibited by the two forms of knowledge. Ryle's positive view of knowledge, properly understood, emerges as an important, neglected, alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation about practical and theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

Metaphysicians of modality are increasingly critical of possible-worlds talk, and increasingly happy to accept irreducibly modal properties – and in particular, irreducible dispositions – in nature. The aim of this paper is to provide the beginnings of a modal semantics which uses, instead of possible-worlds talk, the resources of such an 'anti-Humean' metaphysics. One central challenge to an anti-Humean view is the context-sensitivity of modal language. I show how that challenge can be met and a systematic modal semantics provided, given (...) an independently plausible metaphysics of dispositional properties or potentialities. (shrink)

AS SOME PHILOSOPHERS KNOW, the paradox about inquiry at 80d-e of Plato’s Meno is more than a tedious sophism. Plato is one such philosopher. The puzzle is an obstacle to his project of discovering definitions, and is introduced as such. And it is met with an elaborate response: the theory of recollection, explicitly presented as an answer to the obstacle. But then what of the famous conversation in which Socrates coaxes a geometrical theorem from a slave boy Is the theory (...) not designed to explain the boy’s ability to respond to the coaxing? It is, certainly, but that is not its only purpose. The structure of the passage is this: the theory is there to disarm the paradox, and the conversation is there to support the theory. To see this structure is to understand a notorious and otherwise troubling fact, that Plato is so very quick to take the slave’s behavior—which he might have tried to explain in some other way-to be clear evidence for recollection. The reason why he so takes it is that the paradox has led him to think that only if recollection occurs is fruitful inquiry possible—and he is very anxious indeed to be assured that it is possible. He would not have been so enticed by explanations of the boy’s behavior which did not also seem to him to dispose of the puzzle. Here now is Plato’s setting of the paradox. (shrink)

The founder of modern logic and grandfather of analytic philosophy was 70 years old when he published his paper 'Der Gedanke' (The Thought ) in 1918. This essay contains some of Gottlob Frege's deepest and most provocative reflections on the concept of truth, and it will play a prominent role in my lectures. The plan for my lectures is as follows. What is it that is (primarily) true or false? 'Thoughts', is Frege's answer. In §1, I shall explain and defend (...) this answer. In §2, I shall briefly consider his enthymematic argument for the conclusion that the word 'true' resists any attempt at defining it. In §3, I shall discuss his thesis that the thought that things are thus and so is identical with the thought that it is true that things are thus and so. The reasons we are offered for this thesis will be found wanting. In §4, I shall comment extensively on Frege's claim that, in a non-formal language like the one I am currently trying to speak, we can say whatever we want to say without ever using the word 'true' or any of its synonyms. I will reject the propositional-redundancy claim, endorse the assertive-redundancy claim and deny the connection Frege ascribes to them. In his classic 1892 paper 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung' (On Sense and Signification) Frege argues that truth-values are objects. In §5, I shall scrutinize his argument. In §6, I will show that in Frege's ideography (Begriffsschrift) truth, far from being redundant, is omnipresent. The final §7 is again on truth-bearers, this time as a topic in the theory of intentionality and in metaphysics. In the course of discussing Frege's views on the objecthood, the objectivity of thoughts and the timelessness of truth(s), I will plead for a somewhat mitigated Platonism. (shrink)

§13 of Principia Ethica contains G. E. Moore’s most famous open question arguments. Several of Moore’s contemporaries defended various forms of metaethical nonnaturalism—a doctrine Moore himself endorsed—by appeal to OQAs. Some contemporary cognitivists embrace the force of Moore’s OQAs against metaethical naturalism. And those who posit noncognitivist meaning components of ethical terms have traditionally used OQAs to fuel their own emotivist, prescriptivist, and expressivist metaethical programs. Despite this influence, Moore’s OQAs have been ridiculed in recent decades. Their deployment has been (...) labeled “accident prone,” “simple to dismiss,” and just plain invalid. Critics accuse Moore of begging the question. Others argue that his OQAs founder upon the paradox of analysis. And still others argue that Moore’s open question argumentation is incompatible with the Kripke–Putnam causal theory of reference and thus it “simply fails; it is bankrupt”. I aim to show that there is something of continuing value in Moore’s open question efforts. I present and criticize Nicholas Sturgeon’s influential interpretation of Moore’s OQAs as a means to motivate and explicate my own interpretation of Moore’s thoughts in §13 of Principia Ethica. I then articulate the role that OQAs are intended to play in Moore’s overall argumentative strategies to undermine metaethical naturalism and thereby provide some theoretical support for metaethical nonnaturalism. Finally, I attend to the most prominent objections to Moore’s theorizing and attempt to evaluate the extent to which Moore’s efforts are successful. My hope is to display both the promising portions of Moore’s metaethical argumentation in Principia Ethica as well as its limitations. (shrink)