By “epistemic modals,” I mean epistemic uses of modal words: adverbs like “necessarily,” “possibly,” and “probably,” adjectives like “necessary,” “possible,” and “probable,” and auxiliaries like “might,” “may,” “must,” and “could.” It is hard to say exactly what makes a word modal, or what makes a use of a modal epistemic, without begging the questions that will be our concern below, but some examples should get the idea across. If I say “Goldbach’s conjecture might be true, and it might be false,” (...) I am not endorsing the Cartesian view that God could have made the truths of arithmetic come out differently. I make the claim not because I believe in the metaphysical contingency of mathematics, but because I know that Goldbach’s conjecture has not yet been proved or refuted. Similarly, if I say “Joe can’t be running,” I am not saying that Joe’s constitution prohibits him from running, or that Joe is essentially a non-runner, or that Joe isn’t allowed to run. My basis for making the claim may be nothing more than that I see Joe’s running shoes hanging on a hook. (shrink)

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

To assert something is to perform a certain kind of act. This act is different in kind both from other speech acts, like questions, requests, commands, promises, and apologies, and from acts that are not speech acts, like toast buttering and inarticulate yodeling. My question, then is this: what features of an act qualify it as an assertion, and not one of these other kinds of act? To focus on a particular example: in uttering “Bill will close the window,” one (...) might be practicing English pronunciation, asserting that Bill will close the window, or requesting that Bill close the window. What makes it the case that one is doing one of these and not another? (shrink)

In modal logic, propositions are evaluated relative to possible worlds. A proposition may be true relative to a world w, and false relative to another world w'. Relativism is the view that the relativization idea extends beyond possible worlds and modalities. Thus, in tense logic, propositions are evaluated relative to times. A proposition (e.g. the proposition that Socrates is sitting) may be true relative to a time t, and false relative to another time t'. In this paper I discuss, and (...) attempt to rebut, two classical objections to Relativism. The first objection, due to Frege, is the objection from incompleteness. I distinguish two possible relativist responses to that objection, one of which corresponds to the view I actually defend : Moderate Relativism. The second objection is due to Mark Richard, who argued that the objects of belief cannot be relativistic. I show that that objection can be met within the Moderate Relativist framework. In the last section, I deal with special forms of disagreement that have loomed large in recent discussions of Relativism. (shrink)

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)

This paper works within a particular framework for reasoning about actions—sometimes known as the framework of “stit semantics”—originally due to Belnap and Perloff, based ultimately on the theory of indeterminism set out in Prior’s indeterministic tense logic, and developed in full detail by Belnap, Perloff, and Xu [3]. The issues I want to consider arise when certain normative, or decision theoretic, notions are introduced into this framework: here I will focus on the notion of a right action, and so on (...) the formulation of act utilitarianism within this indeterministic setting. The problem is simply that there are two different, and conflicting, ways of defining this notion, both well-motivated, and both carrying intuitive weight. (shrink)

Biographical Information: The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Europe and Latin America, including at the Università di Roma ``La Sapienza'' and, during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernández and Jürg Fröhlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992).

Speech act theory is one of the more lasting products of the linguistic movement in philosophy of the mid−Twentieth century. Within philosophy itself the movement's products did not in general prove so durable. Particularly striking in this respect is the perceived fate of what was one of the most characteristic applications of the linguistic turn in philosophy, namely the view that many traditional philosophical problems are such as to yield to an understanding of the distinctive function of a particular part (...) of language. Most typically, the crucial insight was held to be that despite appearances, the function of the part of language in question is not assertoric, or descriptive, and that the traditional problems arose at least in part from a failure to appreciate this point. Thus problems in moral philosophy were thought to yield to an appreciation that moral discourse is expressive rather than descriptive, problems in the philosophy of mind to an understanding of distinctive r×le of psychological ascriptions, and so on. The philosophical journals of the 1950s are rich with views like these. (No general term for this approach seems to have become widely accepted at the time. I shall call it "non−factualism", for what it denies, most characteristically, is the fact−stating r×le of language of a certain kind.). (shrink)

For some relativists some of the time the evidence for their view is a puzzling data pattern: On the one hand, there's evidence that the terms in question exhibit some kind of content stability across contexts. On the other hand, there's evidence that their contents vary from one context of use to another. The challenge is to reconcile these two sets of data. Truth relativists claim that their theory can do so better than contextualism and invariantism. Truth relativists, in effect, (...) use an argument to the best explanation: they present data they claim to be able to handle better than any competing theory2. (shrink)

The standard philosophical project of analysing the concept of knowledge has radical defects in its arbitrary restriction of the subject matter, and its risky theoretical presuppositions. Edward Craig suggests a more illuminating approach, akin to the `state of nature' method found in political theory, which builds up the concept from a hypothesis about the social function of knowledge and the needs it fulfils. Light is thrown on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, about its analysis and the obstacles to (...) its analysis, and on the debate over scepticism. It becomes apparent why many languages not only have such constructions as `knows whether' and `knows that', but also have equivalents of `knows how to' and `know' followed by a direct object. Thus the inquiry is both broadened in scope and made theoretically less fragile. (shrink)

This chapter defends a version of the indexical contextualist form of moderate relativism: the attempt to endorse appearances of faultless disagreement within the framework in which a sentence at a context at the index of the context determines its appropriate truth-value. Many object that any such an indexical proposal would fail to account for intuitions of (genuine) disagreement as revealed in ordinary disputes in the domain. The defence from this objection exploits presuppositions of commonality to the effect that the addressee (...) is relevantly like the speaker of the context. (shrink)

Harman’s lottery paradox, generalized by Vogel to a number of other cases, involves a curious pattern of intuitive knowledge ascriptions: certain propositions seem easier to know than various higher-probability propositions that are recognized to follow from them. For example, it seems easier to judge that someone knows his car is now on Avenue A, where he parked it an hour ago, than to judge that he knows that it is not the case that his car has been stolen and driven (...) away in the last hour. Contextualists have taken this pattern of intuitions as evidence that ‘knows’ does not always denote the same relationship; subject-sensitive invariantists have taken this pattern of intuitions as evidence that non-traditional factors such as practical interests figure in knowledge; still others have argued that the Harman Vogel pattern gives us a reason to abandon the principle that knowledge is closed under known entailment. This paper argues that there is a psychological explanation of the strange pattern of intuitions, grounded in the manner in which we shift between an automatic or heuristic mode of judgment and a controlled or systematic mode. Understanding the psychology behind the pattern of intuitions enables us to see that the pattern gives us no reason to abandon traditional intellectualist invariantism. The psychological account of the paradox also yields new resources for clarifying and defending the single premise closure principle for knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

I argue for an alternative to invariantist, contextualist, and relativist semantics for ‘know’. This is that our use of ‘know’ is inconsistent; it is governed by several mutually inconsistent inference principles. Yet this inconsistency does not prevent us from assigning an effective content to most individual knowledge ascriptions, and it leads to trouble only in exceptional circumstances. Accordingly, we have no reason to abandon our inconsistent knowledge-talk.

This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic modals. It is argued that QPs cannot bind their traces across an epistemic modal, though it is shown that scoping mechanisms of a differentnature are permitted to cross epistemic modals. The nature and source of this constraint are investigated.