In his influential book Truth, Paul Horwich deploys a philosophical method focused on linguistic usage, that is, on the function(s) the concept of truth serves in actual discourse. In doing so Horwich eschews abstract metaphysics, arguing that metaphysical or ontological conceptions of truth rest on basic misconceptions. From this description, one might reasonably expect Horwich's book to have drawn inspiration from, or even embodied philosophical pragmatism of some kind. Unfortunately Horwich relies upon Russell's tired caricature of pragmatism about truth (''p' (...) is true if and only if it is useful to believe p' (Ibid., p. 34, p. 47)), and as a result underestimates the challenge it poses to Minimalism. This paper develops a pragmatist critique of minimalism that focuses on the seemingly central, plausibly constitutive role played by the concept of truth in the speech-act of assertion. The critique suggests that Horwich's Minimalism does not and cannot accomplish its stated goal of explaining all of the facts involving truth. Indeed, the kind of thorough-going deflationism sought by Horwich and others (including pragmatist sympathizer Bob Brandom) is incompatible with an adequate account of assertion, and perhaps other concepts (like belief, judgement and inquiry) as well. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behavior is fundamentally (...) messy. Both the fifth move and the sixth move involve vague concepts, and much of the essay is concerned with developing an approach to various problems and puzzles that attach to such concepts, most notably the sorites paradoxes. (shrink)

How do artifacts get their functions? It is typically thought that an artifact’s function depends on its maker’s intentions. This chapter argues that this common understanding is fatally flawed. Nor can artifact function be understood in terms of current uses or capacities. Instead, it proposes that we understand artifact function on the etiological model that Ruth Millikan and others have proposed for the biological realm. This model offers a robustly normative conception of function, but it does so naturalistically by employing (...) our best scientific theories, in particular natural selection. To help make this case, it proposes “living artifacts” (organisms designed for human purposes through artificial selection) as a bridge between the artifactual and the biological realms. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the political and philosophical issues pertaining to asexuality. The first section, “What Is Asexuality?,” offers an account of asexuality. The second section, “Asexuality as a Unique Sexual Orientation,” argues that asexuality should be understood as a unique sexual orientation. The third section, “Asexuality and Oppression,” discusses the various forms of oppression facing asexual persons today. The fourth section, “The Goods of Asexuality,” articulates some goods that asexuality brings to human lives, (...) and we do this with an eye toward conceiving of asexuality as something other than a mere deficit. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to characterize the issue whether tense is real. Roughly, this is the issue whether, given any tensed representation, its tense corresponds in some suitably direct way to some feature of reality. The task is to make this less rough. Eight characterizations of the issue are considered and rejected, before one is endorsed. On this characterization, the unreality of tense is equivalent to the unity of temporal reality. The issue whether tense is real, so characterized, (...) is then related to Kant’s deduction of the categories in his Critique of Pure Reason. It is argued that Kant’s deduction does not provide the argument for the unreality of tense that it may appear to. The conclusion drawn at the end of the essay is that the unreality of tense cannot be argued for—not because tense is real, but because, even if it is unreal, its unreality is basic. (shrink)

In the last two decades, the term “quality-of-life” has become popular in medicine and health care. There are, however, important differences in the meaning and the use of the term. The message of all quality-of-life talk is that medicine and health care are not valuable in themselves. They are valuable to the extent that they contribute to the quality of life of patients. The ultimate aims of medicine and health care are not health or prolongation of life as such, but (...) preservation or improvement of the quality of life. The primary aims of medicine and health care, such as the prolongation of life, can – but need not always – come into conflict with the ultimate ones: medical treatments do not always benefit a patient. In this article I will, first, summarize the results of my explorations of the use and the meaning of the term “quality-of-life.” The use and the meaning of the term turn out to depend on the contexts of medical decisionmaking in which it is used. I will show that there are at least three different concepts of quality-of-life. Second, I will argue that the different concepts of quality-of-life are not unrelated. They point to different components of and/or conditions for happiness. Third, I will analyze the relation between the three concepts of qualityof-life, health and happiness. (shrink)

There is a current debate about the grammar of intention: do I intend to φ, or that I φ? The equivalent question in Aristotle relates especially to choice. I argue that, in the context of practical reasoning, choice, as also wish, has as its object an act. I then explore the role that this plays within his account of the relation of thought to action. In particular, I discuss the relation of deliberation to the practical syllogism, and the thesis that (...) the conclusion of the second is an action. (shrink)

This essay constitutes an attempt to probe the very idea of a saying/showing distinction of the kind that Wittgenstein advances in the Tractatus—to say what such a distinction consists in, to say what philosophical work it has to do, and to say how we might be justified in drawing such a distinction. Towards the end of the essay the discussion is related to Wittgenstein’s later work. It is argued that we can profitably see this work in such a way that (...) a saying/showing distinction arises there too. In particular, in the final sub-section of the essay, it is suggested that we can see in Wittgenstein’s later work an inducement to say what we are shown. (shrink)

[A. W. Moore] Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new (...) reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with solipsism, understood as the extreme sceptical view that I have no knowledge except of my subjective state. A less rough formulation of the view is mooted, inspired by a Quinean combination of naturalism and empiricism. An objection to the resultant position is then considered, based on Putnam’s argument that we are not brains in vats. This objection is first outlined, then pitted against a series of counter-objections. Eventually it is endorsed, but only at the price (...) of exposing the formulation of solipsism in question as not, after all, a satisfactory formulation. This leads to further speculation about the status of solipsism itself. Two of the possibilities that are considered are, firstly, that it is incoherent and, secondly, that it is inexpressible. (shrink)

This essay involves exploration of certain repercussions of Bernard Williams’ view that there is, in Wittgenstein’s later work, a transcendental idealism akin to that found in the Tractatus—sharing with it the feature that it cannot be satisfactorily stated. It is argued that, if Williams is right, then Wittgenstein’s later work precludes a philosophically substantial theory of meaning; for such a theory would force us to try to state the idealism. In a postscript written for the reprint of the essay, reasons (...) are given for thinking that Williams is not right: Wittgenstein’s later work actually helps us to repudiate as ill-conceived all those questions whose answers invite us to embrace any such idealism. But the main thesis of the essay remains intact. Indeed the idea that Wittgenstein’s later work precludes a philosophically substantial theory of meaning is reinforced. (shrink)

An interpretation of Kant's first antinomy is defended whereby both its thesis and its antithesis depend on a common basic principle that Kant endorses, namely that there cannot be an ‘infinite contingency’, by which is meant a contingent fact about how an infinite region of space or time is occupied. The greatest problem with this interpretation is that Kant explicitly declines to apply counterparts of the temporal arguments in the antinomy to the world’s future, even though, if the interpretation is (...) correct, such arguments are clearly there to be applied. This problem, it is argued, is surmountable. (shrink)

It is argued that the use/mention distinction, if it is to be a clear-cut one, cannot have the significance that it is usually thought to have. For that significance attaches to the distinction between employing an expression in order to draw attention to, or to talk about, some aspect of the world, as determined by the expression’s meaning, and employing it in order to draw attention to, or to talk about, the expression itself—and this distinction is not a clear-cut one. (...) In the final section of the essay this argument is extended to cast doubt on a rather glib appeal to the use/mention distinction that is frequently made in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Two of Quine's most familiar doctrines are: that there is a distinction between underdetermination and indeterminacy; and that there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. An argument is given that these two doctrines are incompatible. In terms wholly acceptable to Quine and based on the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, an exhaustive and exclusive distinction is drawn between two kinds of true sentences, which, it is argued, corresponds to the traditional analytic/synthetic distinction. An appendix is used to develop one aspect of (...) the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, as construed here, and to discuss, in passing, some of Quine’s more general views on truth. (shrink)

How, if at all, are we to distinguish between the works that we call ‘art’ and those that we call ‘pornography’? This question gets a grip because from classical Greek vases and the frescoes of Pompeii to Renaissance mythological painting and sculpture to Modernist prints, the European artistic tradition is chock-full of art that looks a lot like pornography. In this paper I propose a way of thinking about the distinction that is grounded in art historical considerations regarding the function (...) of erotic images in 16 th -century Italy. This exploration suggests that the root of the erotic art/pornography distinction was—at least in this context—class: in particular, the need for a special category of unsanctioned illicit images arose at the very time when print culture was beginning to threaten elite privilege. What made an erotic representation exceed the boundaries of acceptability, I suggest, was not its extreme libidinosity but, rather, its widespread availability and, thereby, its threat to one of the mechanisms of sustaining class privilege. (shrink)

It is argued that, although there are no ineffable truths, the concept of ineffability nevertheless does have application—to certain states of knowledge. Towards the end of the essay this idea is related to religion: it is argued that the language that results from attempting (unsuccessfully) to put ineffable knowledge into words is very often of a religious kind. An example of this is given at the very end of the essay. This example concerns the Euthyphro question: whether what is right (...) is right because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is right. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Graham Bird’s treatment, in The Revolutionary Kant, of Kant’s mathematical antinomies. On Bird’s interpretation, our error in these antinomies is to think that we can settle certain issues about the limits of physical reality by pure reason whereas in fact we cannot settle them at all. On the rival interpretation advocated in this essay, it is not true that we cannot settle these issues. Our error is to presuppose that the concept of the unconditioned has (...) application to physical reality. Once this presupposition has been abandoned, we can retrieve sound arguments from the antinomies, not indeed to demonstrate that the views originally being defended are correct, but to demonstrate that the views originally being attacked are incorrect. The essay concludes with some comments concerning how this disagreement relates to a broader disagreement about the best way to understand Kant. (shrink)

We present counterexamples to the widespread assumption that Moorean sentences cannot be rationally asserted. We then explain why Moorean assertions of the sort we discuss do not incur the irrationality charge. Our argument involves an appeal to the dual-process theory of the mind and a contrast between the conditions for ascribing beliefs to oneself and the conditions for making assertions about independently existing states of affairs. We conclude by contrasting beliefs of the sort we discuss with the structurally similar but (...) rationally impermissible beliefs of certain psychiatric patients. (shrink)

This essay appeared as a contribution to a special issue of European Journal of Philosophy to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense. In that book Strawson asks whether we should agree with Kant's claim, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that there can be only one world. What Kant means by this claim is that the four-dimensional realm that we inhabit must constitute the whole of empirical reality. Strawson gives reasons for (...) challenging this claim. This essay raises the question whether, even if Strawson is right, we may nevertheless have reason to believe that there can be only one world on a broader understanding of ‘world’. The aim is as much to clarify the issue as to settle it, although an attempt is made to motivate the view that there can indeed be only one world on this broader understanding. (shrink)

In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue (...) between analytic philosophers and those of other traditions. (shrink)

Wrong beliefs, known by some as ‘alternative facts’, have proliferated lately in important areas of human life, including social, political, and public health domains. This can be and has been damaging. This brief article proposes an epistemological category classification of these wrong beliefs, with the following mappings: a) ‘No-Information’ marked by willful blindness produces ‘Empty Beliefs’; b) ‘Mis-Information’ yields ‘Mis(taken) Beliefs’; and c) ‘Dis-Information’ predicated on blatant distortions produces ‘Dis(torted) Beliefs’. This simple classification system, is perhaps epistemologically satisfying, and moreover (...) could have positive policy implications. (shrink)

This essay is a critical notice of Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word. Though the essay evidences broad sympathy with the spirit of Nagel’s book, its main burden is to query the letter of the book. Nagel’s defence of the view that there are certain beliefs and ways of thinking that are not from any point of view, or that are ‘objective’ in his own terms, is criticized on the grounds that it is too facile. It is also criticized for not (...) being pitted against a critique of beliefs and ways of thinking that are from some point of view, or that are ‘subjective’ in his terms. (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to a symposium on Barry Stroud’s book The Quest for Reality. It exploits various analogies between tense and colour to defend the idea, about which Stroud is deeply sceptical, that we can successfully undertake what Stroud calls ‘the philosophical quest for reality’—more specifically, to defend the idea that we can do this by arguing that any fact can be represented from no point of view.

(2002). Phantasy and Wish: A Proper Function Account for Human A-Rational Primary Process Mediated Mentation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 1-16.

Our approach is based on a tri-partite method of integrating psychodynamic hypotheses, cognitive subliminal processes, and psychophysiological alpha power measures. We present ten social phobic subjects with three individually selected groups of words representing unconscious conflict, conscious symptom experience, and Osgood Semantic negative valence words used as a control word group. The unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words, presented subliminally and supraliminally, act as primes preceding the conscious symptom and control words presented as supraliminal targets. With alpha power as a (...) marker of inhibitory brain activity, we show that unconscious conflict primes, only when presented subliminally, have a unique inhibitory effect on conscious symptom targets. This effect is absent when the unconscious conflict primes are presented supraliminally, or when the target is the control words. Unconscious conflict prime effects were found to correlate with a measure of repressiveness in a similar previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). Conscious symptom primes have no inhibitory effect when presented subliminally. Inhibitory effects with conscious symptom primes are present, but only when the primes are supraliminal, and they did not correlate with repressiveness in a previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). We conclude that while the inhibition following supraliminal conscious symptom primes is due to conscious threat bias, the inhibition following subliminal unconscious conflict primes provides a neurological blueprint for dynamic repression: it is only activated subliminally by an individual's unconscious conflict and has an inhibitory effect specific only to the conscious symptom. These novel findings constitute neuroscientific evidence for the psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious conflict and repression, while extending neuroscience theory and methods into the realm of personal, psychological meaning. (shrink)

This is the first chapter to our edited collection of essays on the nature and ethics of blame. In this chapter we introduce the reader to contemporary discussions about blame and its relationship to other issues (e.g. free will and moral responsibility), and we situate the essays in this volume with respect to those discussions.

Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.

Freud proposes that in unconscious processing, logical connections are also (heavily) based upon phonological similarities. Repressed concerns, for example, would also be expressed by way of phonologic ambiguity. In order to investigate a possible unconscious influence of phonological similarity, 31 participants were submitted to a tachistoscopic subliminal priming experiment, with prime and target presented at 1ms. In the experimental condition, the prime and one of the 2 targets were phonological reversed forms of each other, though graphemically dissimilar (e.g., “nice” and (...) “sign”); in the control condition the targets were pseudo-randomly attributed to primes to which they don’t belong. The experimental task was to “blindly” pick the choice most similar to the prime. ERPs were measured with a focus on the N320, which is known to react selectively to phonological mismatch in supraliminal visual word presentations. The N320 amplitude-effects at the electrodes on the midline and at the left of the brain significantly predicted the participants’ net behavioral choices more than half a second later, while their subjective experience is one of arbitrariness. Moreover, the social desirability score (SDS) significantly correlates with both the behavioral and the N320 brain responses of the participants. It is proposed that in participants with low SDS the phonological target induces an expected reduction of N320 and this increases their probability to pick this target. In contrast, high defensive participants have a perplexed brain reaction upon the phonological target, with a negatively peaking N320 as compared to control and this leads them to avoid this target more often. Social desirability, which is understood as reflecting defensiveness, might also manifest itself as a defense against the (energy-consuming) ambiguity of language. The specificity of this study is that all of this is happening totally out of awareness and at the level of very elementary linguistic distinctions. (shrink)

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)

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, (...) which are in turn analyzed along reliabilist lines: an agent's reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other's explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...) of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)

We know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, (...) then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant agriculture; second, we try to show just how difficult it’s to come up with a plausible estimate of how many animals are killed by plant agriculture, and not just because of a lack of empirical information. Additionally, we show that there are significant philosophical questions associated with interpreting the available data—questions such that different answers generate dramatically different estimates of the scope of the problem. Finally, we document current trends in plant agriculture that cause little or no collateral harm to animals, trends which suggest that field animal deaths are a historically contingent problem that in future may be reduced or eliminated altogether. (shrink)

According to a well-known argument against dispositional essentialism, the nature of unmanifested token powers leaves dispositional essentialists with an objectionable commitment to the reality of non-existent entities. The idea is that, because unmanifested token powers are directed at their non-existent token manifestations, they require the reality of those manifestations. Arguably the most promising response to this argument works by claiming that, if properties are universals, dispositional directedness need only entail the reality of actually existing manifestation types. I argue that this (...) response fails, because no version of the response can adequately accommodate dispositions of the sort that follow from Coulomb’s law. This result both defeats an important argument that dispositional essentialists ought to be realists about universals and appears to leave dispositional essentialists with a problematic commitment to either non-relational connections or a Meinongian ontology. (shrink)

This paper develops a new challenge for moral noncognitivism. In brief, the challenge is this: Beliefs — both moral and non-moral — are epistemically evaluable, whereas desires are not. It is tempting to explain this difference in terms of differences in the functional roles of beliefs and desires. However, this explanation stands in tension with noncognitivism, which maintains that moral beliefs have a desire-like functional role. After critically reviewing some initial responses to the challenge, I suggest a solution, which involves (...) rethinking the functional relationship between desire and belief. (shrink)

This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

Research into two-stage models of “free will” – first “free” random generation of alternative possibilities, followed by “willed” adequately determined decisions consistent with character, values, and desires – suggests that William James was in 1884 the first of a dozen philosophers and scientists to propose such a two-stage model for free will. We review the later work to establish James’s priority. By limiting chance to the generation of alternative possibilities, James was the first to overcome the standard two-part argument against (...) free will, i.e., that the will is either determined or random. James gave it elements of both, to establish freedom but preserve responsibility. We show that James was influenced by Darwin’s model of natural selection, as were most recent thinkers with a two-stage model. In view of James’s famous decision to make his first act of freedom a choice to believe that his will is free, it is most fitting to celebrate James’s priority in the free will debates by naming the two-stage model – first chance, then choice -“Jamesian” free will. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, (...) this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

According to noncognitivism, normative beliefs are just desire-like attitudes. While noncognitivists have devoted great effort to explaining the nature of normative belief, they have said little about all of the other attitudes we take towards normative matters. Many of us desire to do the right thing. We sometimes wonder whether our conduct is morally permissible; we hope that it is, and occasionally fear that it is not. This gives rise to what Schroeder calls the 'Many Attitudes Problem': the problem of (...) developing a plausible noncognitivist account of the full range of attitudes that we take towards normative matters. This paper explores the problem and proposes a solution. (shrink)

Quasi-realists face the challenge of providing a plausible analysis of acknowledgments of moral fallibility. This paper devel...

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)