An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate “is beautiful” expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to know (...) that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth. (shrink)

The underdetermination of theory by data obtains when, inescapably, evidence is insufficient to allow scientists to decide responsibly between rival theories. One response to would-be underdetermination is to deny that the rival theories are distinct theories at all, insisting instead that they are just different formulations of the same underlying theory; we call this the identical rivals response. An argument adapted from John Norton suggests that the response is presumptively always appropriate, while another from Larry Laudan and Jarrett Leplin suggests (...) that the response is never appropriate. Arguments from Einstein for the special and general theories of relativity may fruitfully be seen as instances of the identical rivals response; since Einstein’s arguments are generally accepted, the response is at least sometimes appropriate. But when is it appropriate? We attempt to steer a middle course between Norton’s view and that of Laudan and Leplin: the identical rivals response is appropriate when there is good reason for adopting a parsimonious ontology. Although in simple cases the identical rivals response need not involve any ontological difference between the theories, in actual scientific cases it typically requires treating apparent posits of the various theories as mere verbal ornaments or computational conveniences. Since these would-be posits are not now detectable, there is no perfectly reliable way to decide whether we should eliminate them or not. As such, there is no rule for deciding whether the identical rivals response is appropriate or not. Nevertheless, there are considerations that suggest for and against the response; we conclude by suggesting two of them. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate on whether or to what degree computer simulations can be likened to experiments. Many philosophers are sceptical whether a strict separation between the two categories is possible and deny that the materiality of experiments makes a difference (Morrison 2009, Parker 2009, Winsberg 2010). Some also like to describe computer simulations as a “third way” between experimental and theoretical research (Rohrlich 1990, Axelrod 2003, Kueppers/Lenhard 2005). In this article I defend the view that computer simulations are (...) not experiments but that they are tools for evaluating the consequences of theories and theoretical assumptions. In order to do so the (alleged) similarities and differences between simulations and experiments are examined. It is found that three fundamental differences between simulations and experiments remain: 1) Only experiments can generate new empirical data. 2) Only Experiments can operate directly on the target system. 3) Experiments alone can be employed for testing fundamental hypotheses. As a consequence, experiments enjoy a distinct epistemic role in science that cannot completely be superseded by computer simulations. This finding in connection with a discussion of border cases such as hybrid methods that combine measurement with simulation shows that computer simulations can clearly be distinguished from empirical methods. It is important to understand that computer simulations are not experiments, because otherwise there is a danger of systematically underestimating the need for empirical validation of simulations. (shrink)

The debates on the scientificity of social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, are recurring. From the original methodenstreitat the end the 19th Century to the contemporary controversy on the legitimacy of “regional epistemologies”, a same set of interrogations reappears. Are social sciences really scientific? And if so, are they sciences like other sciences? How should we conceive “research programs” Lakatos (1978) or “research traditions” for Laudan (1977) able to produce advancement of knowledge in the field of social and (...) human phenomena? Is the progress of knowledge in social sciences similar to the one generally observed in natural sciences? Is it possible to evaluate the relative merits of each one of these research programs? -/- These debates are important vectors of social and intellectual polarization. The historical divide between the positivist and the hermeneutics poles precedes the structure of the contemporary debate around the epistemic space of social sciences, It is not only a question of renewing the opposition between a monist view of sciences (e.g. McIntyre, 1996) and a dualistic one (e.g. Geertz, 1973) or even a trialist view of sciences (e.g. Lepenies, 1985). It is also a question of asserting dichotomies transformed into framework (including when it is a question of exceeding them): nature-culture, nomothetic-idiographic, models-narrative, structure-history, cause-reason, explanation-comprehension. -/- In this short introduction, we provide, in section 2, a first overview of this epistemological debate in social science. Section 3 proposes a different standpoint on the same questions, by introducing both ontological and methodological aspects in this basic epistemological debate. Namely, following (Hollis, 1994) oppositions of the explanation - understanding, causes - meaning, etc., types discussed in the firsts ection are comparatively examined together with oppositions of the structure - action, holism - individualism types. This allows us to discus show multi-agent design, by integrating various dimensions and standpoints in the same framework (Phan, Amblard, 2007, Chapters 1, 5, 14) can help us to shift these boundaries, and to bypass these oppositions. As model building and ontology design are at the core of this process (Phan, Amblard, 2007, Chapter 12), Section4 discusses various issues of the art of modelling, starting both from economists’ and sociologists’ current standpoints. (shrink)

Perhaps the question “What is philosophy?” can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There are (...) cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question “between friends” as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the two-volume Cinema , The Logic of Sense , and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza . Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

Much recent academic literature on the afterlife has been focused on the justice of eternity and whether a good God could allow a person to experience eternal suffering in Hell. Two primary escapes are typically suggested to justify never-ending punishment for sinners: the traditional view focuses the blame for an individual’s condemnation away from God onto the sinner’s freely chosen actions; the universalist position denies the eternality of the punishment on the grounds that God’s inescapable love and eventual victory over (...) evil will bring all souls into His presence. I propose a third option that hinges on the possibility of Heaven itself being experienced as eternal punishment to demonstrate that if God’s presence is both the blessedness of Heaven for some and the agony of Hell for others, then the biblical affirmation of the universal restoration of all with the eternal punishment of some need not remain paradoxical. (shrink)

Might it be that world itself, independently of what we know about it or how we represent it, is metaphysically indeterminate? This article tackles in turn a series of questions: In what sorts of cases might we posit metaphysical indeterminacy? What is it for a given case of indefiniteness to be 'metaphysical'? How does the phenomenon relate to 'ontic vagueness', the existence of 'vague objects', 'de re indeterminacy' and the like? How might the logic work? Are there reasons for postulating (...) this distinctive sort of indefiniteness? Conversely, are there reasons for denying that there is indefiniteness of this sort? (shrink)

STIRNERs "Verdienst" geht im Grunde auf ein einziges Werk zurück: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum erschienen 1844/45 in Leipzig. Hören wir also, was "berufene" Geister der Geschichte über ihn zu schreiben wußten: ARNOLD RUGE ein führender Kopf des sogenannten Vormärz der 48er Revolution des letzten Jahrhunderts, hat das Buch bei seinem ersten Erscheinen als "frischen Morgenruf im Lager der schlafenden Theoretiker" begrüßt. LUDWIG FEUERBACH nannte es, trotz einiger Einwände; das "Werk des genialsten und freiesten Schriftstellers, den er kenne". MAX (...) NETTLAU schreibt 1925, daß nur wenige Bücher so mißverstanden oder so verschiedenartig beurteilt werden wie dieses, "und viele Leser bleiben bei einem auf die Spitze getriebenen Individualismus oder Egoismus stehen, den sie herauslesen wollen". (shrink)

Deontological internalism is the family of views where justification is a positive deontological appraisal of someone's epistemic agency: S is justified, that is, when S is blameless, praiseworthy, or responsible in believing that p. Brian Weatherson discusses very briefly how a plausible principle of ampliative transmission reveals a worry for versions of deontological internalism formulated in terms of epistemic blame. Weatherson denies, however, that similar principles reveal similar worries for other versions. I disagree. In this article, I argue that plausible (...) principles of ampliative transmission reveal a worry for deontological internalism in general. (shrink)

This paper examines narrativism’s claim that the historical past cannot be known once and for all because it must be continuously re-described from the standpoint of the present. We argue that this claim is based on a non sequitur. We take narrativism’s claim that the past must be re-described continuously from the perspective of the present to be the result of the following train of thought: 1) “all knowledge is conceptually mediated”; 2) “the conceptual framework through which knowledge of reality (...) is mediated changes with every new generation of historians”; therefore (narrativism’s claim) “the historical past changes with every new generation of historians”. The idea of an unchanging past, for the narrativist, requires denying premise 1 (all knowledge is conceptually mediated”) and therefore rests on a problematic commitment to the chimerical notion of the past as it is in-itself, wie es eigentlich gewesen. We argue that the narrativist’s conclusion does not follow unless one adds a further premise, namely 3) “it is not possible to view reality through the categorial framework of historical agents”. If one asserts the possibility of grasping reality through the categorial framework of others, be they contemporary or past agents (as much philosophy of history written in an idealist key does), then one no longer has to accept the narrativist’s inference that since the past cannot be known in-itself or independently of conceptual mediation, then it cannot be known as it always was for the historical agents. Narrativism’s inference that the past cannot be known as it always was does not follow from premises 1 and 2 unless one smuggles in another problematic premise, premise 3. In this paper we defend the claim that the past can be known as it always was (not as it is in-itself) by invoking a different conception of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge, one which assumes the possibility of viewing reality through the categorial framework of others. This notion of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge is prevalent in the idealist tradition but, in the interest of brevity, we will defend this notion of mediacy by specific reference to the idealist philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. (shrink)

What I call the Doxastic Puzzle, is the impression that while each of these claims seems true, at least one of them must be false: (a) Claims of the form ‘S ought to have doxastic attitude D towards p at t’ are sometimes true at t, (b) If Φ-ing at t is not within S’s effective control at t, then it is false, at t, that ‘S ought to Φ at t’, (c) For all S, p, and t, having doxastic (...) attitude D towards p at t is not within S’s effective control at t. All three natural replies to the puzzle have been pursued. Some have claimed that doxastic attitudes like believing that p are, in fact, within our effective control, or sufficiently so. Others have claimed that doxastic ought-claims, strictly speaking, are always false. And some have denied that effective control is required for the adequacy of doxastic ought-claims in general. I here pursue and examine a different strategy. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these claims are not only each true but actually not in tension with each other in the first place. Instead of attempting to dispel the puzzle, this solution proposes to evade it instead: to solve it by properly understanding, and by thereby accepting without contradiction, all of its constitutive claims. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the evasive strategy forces us to re-think our understanding of the place of normative reasons in epistemology. More exactly, it seems to come at the cost of one central way of thinking about our reasons for having doxastic attitudes, one where such reasons are good-standing exemplars of normative reasons in general. The evasive strategy, that is, threatens to lead us very quickly to a deflationary picture of epistemic normativity: it rescues normative talk, but sacrifices normative substance. I conclude by explaining why I think this is more consequential than some have made it out to be, and by suggesting that these consequences are welcome nonetheless. (shrink)

The word pro-tasis is etymologically a near equivalent of pre-mise, pro-position, and ante-cedent—all having positional, relational connotations now totally absent in contemporary use of proposition. Taking protasis for premise, Aristotle’s statement (24a16) -/- A protasis is a sentence affirming or denying something of something…. -/- is not a definition of premise—intensionally: the relational feature is absent. Likewise, it is not a general definition of proposition—extensionally: it is too narrow. This paper explores recent literature on these issues.

There is a widespread view that Buddhist philosophy embodies logical contradictions such that there would be 'true' contradictions, This article explains that this is not the case and that Buddhist philosophy, more generally the Perennial philosophy, denies all contradictions for the sake of a doctrine of Unity.

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film (...) Arrival, which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-ownership cannot be universalized, as this leads to contradictions in conception. The second shows that physical coercion against (...) rational agents involves a profound status wrong--namely, their treatment as children or animals--and that this system of differential status and treatment (including self-ownership rights for rational agents) can be morally justified by our capacity for autonomy. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist (...) assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of egalitarian justice have often focused on the issue of expensive taste. G.A. Cohen has recently abandoned the view that all chosen disadvantages are non-compensable, now maintaining that chosen expensive judgmental tastes—those endorsed by valuational judgment—are compensable as it is unreasonable to expect persons not to develop them. But chosen expensive brute taste—the main type of non-compensable expensive taste on the new scheme—cannot be described in such a way that there is a normative difference between it and chosen (...) expensive judgmental taste. As there are related problems with denying compensation for the other kind of expensive taste that might remain non-compensable, Cohen's position on taste appears to be either implausible or virtually indistinguishable from that of equality of welfare. However, compensation for valuational judgment-based expensive taste might be justified on grounds of responsibility. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

Determinism which denies freedom of action is a common philosophical view. Is the action of such determinists incompatible with Kant’s claim that a rationally willed being “cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom” [G 4, 448]? In my paper, I examine Kant’s argument for this claim at the beginning of the Third Section of the Groundwork and argue that it amounts to the assertion that one cannot act while being aware of being guided by invalid principles. Belief in (...) determinism does not necessarily amount to such awareness. A structurally similar argument based on the contrast between deliberation and prediction is examined and similarly found wanting. (shrink)

Many feminists (e.g. T. Bettcher and B. R. George) argue for a principle of first person authority (FPA) about gender, i.e. that we should (at least) not disavow people's gender self-categorisations. However, there is a feminist tradition resistant to FPA about gender, which I call "radical feminism”. Feminists in this tradition define gender-categories via biological sex, thus denying non-binary and trans self-identifications. Using a taxonomy by B. R. George, I begin to demystify the concept of gender. We are also able (...) to use the taxonomy to model various feminist approaches. It becomes easier to see how conceptualisations ofgender which allow for FPA often do not allow for understanding female subjugation as being rooted in reproductive biology. I put forward a conceptual scheme: radical FPA feminism. If we accept FPA, but also radical feminist concerns, radical FPA feminism is an attractive way of conceptualising gender. (shrink)

Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...) go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success. (shrink)

Post-Cartesian Occasionalism argues that the power of causing an effect depends on knowledge of the means by which the effect is produced. The argument is used to deny finite beings the power to act. Arnold Geulincx expresses this thesis in the principle Quod nescis quomodo fiat id non facis. Here, my purpose is to show that: 1. The philosophical problem that is at the origin of the principle Quod nescis quomodo fiat id non facis originates in Galen’s De foetuum (...) formatione, a work translated into Latin only in 1535. 2. Important works of early modern philosophy, such as Campanella’s Del senso delle cose e della magia, discuss Galen’s text. 3. Due to their rejection of teleology, Descartes’ physics and metaphysics are completely foreign to the Quod nescis principle. Comparing the Cartesian theory of animal-machines with the theory of animal behavior of Pierre Chanet, a philosopher who adopts the principle, confirms this claim. (shrink)

Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...) play a role in bringing about belief without being a motivating reason for belief, thereby leaving room for practical considerations to serve as motivating reasons. I present two ways in which this can happen. First, agents can use evidence as a mere means by which to believe, with practical considerations serving as motivating reasons for belief, just as we use tools (e.g. a brake pedal) as mere means by which to do something (e.g. slow down) which we are motivated to do for practical reasons. Second, evidence can make it possible for one to choose whether or not to believe – a choice one can then make for practical reasons. These arguments push the debate between the evidentialist and the pragmatist into new territory. It is no longer enough for an evidentialist to insist that belief is impossible without evidence. Even if this is right, the outcome of the debate remains unsettled. It will hang on the ability of the evidentialist to respond to the new pragmatist strategy presented here. (shrink)

Picking up on Marx’s and Hegel’s analyses of human beings as social and individual, the article shows that what is at stake is not merely the possibility of individuality, but also the correct conception of the universal good. Both Marx and Hegel suppose that individuals must be social or political as individuals, which means, at least in Hegel’s case, that particular interests must form part of the universal good. The good and the rational is not something that requires sacrificing one’s (...) interests for the community or denying one’s particular character so as to become an equal rational agent. Very much to the contrary, the rational or the common good is nothing but the harmonious structuring of particular interests. While Section I introduces Marx’s and Hegel’s conceptions of individual and social beings, Sections II and III discuss their respective views of individuality, and Sections IV and V discuss the notion of a universal good containing individual interests. (shrink)

This paper considers the place of reasons in the metaphysics of epistemic normativity and defends a middle ground between two popular extremes in the literature. Against members of the ‘reasons first’ movement, we argue that reasons are not the sole fundamental constituents of epistemic normativity. We suggest instead that the virtue-theoretic property of competence is the key building block. To support this approach, we note that reasons must be possessed to play a role in the analysis of central epistemically normative (...) properties, and argue that the relation of possession must be analyzed in terms of competence. But while we diverge with reasons-firsters on this score, we also distance ourselves from those who deny reasons any important role in epistemology. For we maintain that possessed reasons do help to ground deontic facts in the epistemic domain (e.g., facts about what one epistemically ought to believe, may believe, or is justified in believing). Indeed, we present an argument that the possession of sufficient epistemic reasons is necessary and sufficient for propositional justification, and that proper basing on such reasons yields doxastic justification. But since possession and proper basing are themselves grounded in competence, reasons are not the end of the explanatory road: competence enables them to do their work, putting them—and us—in the middle. (shrink)

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer have recently provided an evolutionary argument for utilitarianism. They argue that most of our deontological beliefs were shaped by evolution, from which they conclude that these beliefs are unjustified. By contrast, they maintain that the utilitarian belief that everyone’s well-being matters equally is immune to such debunking arguments because it wasn’t similarly influenced. However, Guy Kahane remarks that this belief lacks substantial content unless it is paired with an account of well-being, and he adds (...) that utilitarian beliefs about wellbeing—e.g. the belief that pleasure is good and pain is bad—were probably shaped by evolution. Logically, de Lazari-Radek and Singer should therefore reject these beliefs along with the deontological beliefs that evolved. The present paper is a defense of their argument. After considering a number of unsuccessful replies to Kahane’s objection, I put forward a more promising solution: de Lazari-Radek and Singer should combine their objectivist view in metaethics with a subjectivist account of well-being, such as the desire theory. Such a hybrid account would tackle Kahane’s challenge because subjective accounts of value are immune from evolutionary debunking arguments. And it would be compatible with utilitarianism, which doesn’t fit very well with metaethical subjectivism. Before concluding, I deal with two concerns that this solution might raise: I argue that the desire theory is actually subjective enough to escape Kahane’s objection, and I deny that retreating to the combination of ethical objectivism and prudential subjectivism is ad hoc. (shrink)

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...) maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. -/- We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos. (shrink)

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...) are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition. (shrink)

In this paper, we articulate a version of non-standard A-theory—which we call Flow Fragmentalism—in relation to its take on the issue of supervenience of truth on being. According to the Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) Principle, the truth of past- and future-tensed propositions supervenes, respectively, on past and future facts. Since the standard presentist denies the existence of past and future entities and facts concerning them that do not obtain in the present, she seems to lack the resources to accept (...) both past and future-tensed truths and the TSB Principle. Contrariwise, positions in philosophy of time that accept an eternalist ontology (e.g., B-theory, moving spotlight, and Fine’s and Lipman’s versions of fragmentalism) allow for a “direct” supervenience base for past- and future-tensed truths. We argue that Flow Fragmentalism constitutes a middle ground, which retains most of the advantages of both views, and allows us to articulate a novel account of the passage of time. (shrink)

According to an influential view about directed expressive duties (e.g., duties to express gratitude to benefactors, remorse to victims, forgiveness to wrongdoers), these duties do not have rights as their correlates, because they are not demandable and enforceable. The chapter argues that this view is mistaken. Like other directed duties, directed expressive duties are demandable and enforceable. While this does not entail that these duties have rights as their correlates, it does create a strong presumption of this being the case. (...) This shifts the burden of proof from those who hold that expressive duties correlate with rights to those who deny it. (shrink)

Jack Spencer has recently argued for the striking thesis that, possibly, an agent is able to do the impossible—that is, perform an action that is metaphysically impossible for that person to perform. Spencer bases his argument on (Simple G), a case in which it is impossible for an agent G to perform some action but, according to Spencer, G is still intuitively able to perform that action. I reply that we would have to give up at least four action-theoretical principles (...) if we accept that G is able to do the impossible. We may be best off retaining the principles and thus rejecting Spencer's intuition that G is able to do the impossible. I then consider an argument for the claim that G is able to do the impossible that goes through the Snapshot Principle. I, however, deny that any true variant of the Snapshot Principle shows that G is able to do the impossible. Moreover, the counterexample to the Snapshot Principle that I develop also suggests that G is unable to do the impossible in (Simple G). The most natural explanation for why an agent is unable to perform some action in this counterexample extends to (Simple G). Next, I develop three error theories for why we might initially share Spencer's intuition that G is able to do the impossible in (Simple G). Finally, I consider a couple other "G-cases" of Spencer's and find them all wanting. Perhaps we are unable to do the impossible. (shrink)

As the English word “scientism” is currently used, it is a trivial verbal truth that scientism—an inappropriately deferential attitude to science—should be avoided. But it is a substantial question when, and why, deference to the sciences is inappropriate or exaggerated. This paper tries to answer that question by articulating “six signs of scientism”: the honorific use of “science” and its cognates; using scientific trappings purely decoratively; preoccupation with demarcation; preoccupation with “scientific method”; looking to the sciences for answers beyond their (...) scope; denying the legitimacy or worth of non-scientific (e.g., legal or literary) inquiry, or of writing poetry or making art. (shrink)

Cartesian skepticism has its roots in classical skepticism and is geared to undermine our confidence even in immediate perceptual statements as `I see things in front of me'. We investigate with some assumptions which have as consequence that Cartesian skepticism is avoided in some contexts. I assume that Gettier style difficulties are not engendered by immediate perceptual statements, and I invoke things in general to not make assumptions in the metaphysics of objects. As Gettier issues are side stepped for such (...) statements as mentioned we have that I know that I see things in front of me if, and only if it is true that I see things in front of me, I am justified in believing that I see things in front of me and I believe that I see things in front of me. We assume epistemological deontologism, so that I am justified in believing something iff I am permitted to believe it. We assume Kant’s Law so that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. As a matter of fact it is impossible for me to not believe that I see things in front of me; it follows by Kant’s Law that it is not the case that it ought to be the case that I do not believe that I see things in front of me; so I am permitted to believe that I see things in front of me, thence by epistemic deontologism I am justified in believing that I see things in front of me. Even the skeptic may not reasonably deny that it is true that I see things in front of me, and the skeptic does also not deny that I believe that I see things in front of me. Given our assumption that Gettier style difficulties do not apply for immediate perceptual statements it follows that I know that I see things in front of me. Needless to say, but one may challenge some of the assumptions we made to reach an anti skeptical conclusion. One may also explore the viability of extending the approach we have put forth here, and it can be of interest to explore further consequences for epistemology in general. The deontological conception of epistemic justification, e.g. in the version according to which a person is justified in holding p just in the case she is in some sense, normatively permitted to believe that p, has come under attack. According to William Alston, the major defect of epistemic deontologism is that it presupposes doxastic voluntarism, i.e. the view that we have direct voluntary control over whether to believe something or not. But Alston thinks that we have no such direct voluntary control, or rather that we only quite rarely have such control. And given this alleged failure of the prevalence of voluntary control, Alston maintains that "it is futile to discuss whether I am permitted to believe that p at t or whether I would be irresponsible in choosing to believe that p at t.". (shrink)

It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (Horn 3) deny (...) that the relevant sort of control is volitional control. This paper argues that we should take Horn 3. (shrink)

This article is devoted to analysing the ethical commitments underlying research methodology on “brain drain” and leading participants in the public debate to deny the human right of emigration for skilled persons. Here, we identify five such commitments : to consequentialism, prioritarianism and nationalism, we add sedentarism and elitism. Based on this analysis, we argue that even though the emigration of the most talented would be a loss for the country of origin, this loss is not sufficient to require that (...) migrants themselves compensate it – either by tax payments (e.g. Bhagwati’s tax proposal) or by not exercising their right to emigrate. Moreover, to interpret public investment in education as the source of migrants’ further obligations to their country is to view education rather as a source of dividends than an access to opportunity that present generations owe to futures ones. (shrink)

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

You may not know me well enough to evaluate me in terms of my moral character, but I take it you believe I can be evaluated: it sounds strange to say that I am indeterminate, neither good nor bad nor intermediate. Yet I argue that the claim that most people are indeterminate is the conclusion of a sound argument—the indeterminacy paradox—with two premises: (1) most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations); (2) (...) fragmentation entails indeterminacy. I support (1) by examining psychological experiments in which most participants behave deplorably (e.g., by maltreating “prisoners” in a simulated prison) or admirably (e.g., by intervening in a simulated theft). I support (2) by arguing that, according to certain plausible conceptions, character evaluations presuppose behavioral consistency (lack of fragmentation). Possible reactions to the paradox include: (a) denying that the experiments are relevant to character; (b) upholding conceptions according to which character evaluations do not presuppose consistency; (c) granting that most people are indeterminate and explaining why it appears otherwise. I defend (c) against (a) and (b). (shrink)

In 2009, we celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his book The Origin of Species. This seems to be a good opportunity to evaluate the importance of Darwin’s work for the social sciences, mainly for philosophical anthropology. The aim of this paper is to discuss the traditional anthropocentric conceptions of man, which consider our biological species to be exceptional – qualitatively higher than other living organisms. Over the course of the (...) 20th century, philosophers have argued for the claim in a number of ways: man is supposed to be the only animal capable of laughter, love, thought or language. It has also been claimed that only members of Homo sapiens have free will, morality or religion. The paper refutes these arguments on the basis of contemporary studies by M. Davila Ross, H. Fischer, K. Arnold, K. Zuberbühler, G. Konopka, B. Libet, F. De Waal, M. Bekoff, P. Boyer, B. Hood, G. Paul and others. The author argues that the only differences between man and other animals are quantitative, and therefore the nature of humans should be studied using the methods of naturalized philosophy, with respect to the natural sciences. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

Materialism is nearly universally assumed by cognitive scientists. Intuitively, materialism says that a person’s mental states are nothing over and above his or her material states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have introduced concepts (e.g., realization, supervenience) to assist in formulating the theses of materialism and dualism with more precision, and distinguished among importantly different versions of each view (e.g., eliminative materialism, substance dualism, emergentism). They have also clarified the logic of arguments that use empirical findings to support materialism. Finally, (...) they have devised various objections to materialism, objections that therefore serve also as arguments for dualism. These objections typically center around two features of mental states that materialism has had trouble in accommodating. The first feature is intentionality, the property of representing, or being about, objects, properties, and states of affairs external to the mental states. The second feature is phenomenal consciousness, the property possessed by many mental states of there being something it is like for the subject of the mental state to be in that mental state. (shrink)

Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underpinnings of deviant phenomenal knowledge. I argue that physicalists are in a superior (...) position to account for the conditions in virtue of which states of deviants constitute representations of phenomenal facts. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate about literary interpretation, the actual intentionalist claims, and the anti-intentionalist denies, that an acceptable interpretation of fictional literature must be constrained by the author’s intentions. I argue that a close examination of the two most influential recent strands in this debate reveals a surprising convergence. Insofar as both sides (a) focus on literary works as they are, where work identity is determined in part by certain (successfully realized) categorial intentions concerning, e.g., title, genre, and large-scale instances (...) of allusion, allegory, and irony and (b) allow that works can acceptably be interpreted for unintended meanings—since an intentional act can, under a different description, exhibit unintended features—then they turn out to share the same interpretive policy concerning authorial intention. This suggests that philosophers should shift the interpretation debate away from issues of authorial intention and toward issues about the aims of interpretation. (shrink)

According to psychological constructivism, emotions result from projecting folk emotion concepts onto felt affective episodes (e.g., Barrett 2017, LeDoux 2015). Moreover, while constructivists acknowledge there’s a biological dimension to emotion, they deny that emotions are (or involve) affect programs. So they also deny that emotions are natural kinds. However, the essential role constructivism gives to felt experience and folk concepts leads to an account that’s extensionally inadequate and functionally inaccurate. Moreover, biologically-oriented proposals that reject these commitments are not similarly encumbered. (...) Recognizing this has two implications: biological mechanisms are more central to emotion than constructivism allows, and the conclusion that emotions aren’t natural kinds is premature. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

.... The strategy I have defended involves drawing a distinction between those who can and cannot legitimately hold an agent responsible in circumstances when the agent is being covertly controlled (e.g. through implantation processes). What is intuitively unacceptable, I maintain, is that an agent should be held responsible or subject to reactive attitudes that come from another agent who is covertly controlling or manipulating him. This places some limits on who is entitled to take up the participant stance in relation (...) to agents who are rational self-controllers but nevertheless subject to covert control.26 In this way, what is compromised by conditions of covert control is not the responsibility of the agent as such. It is, rather, the participant stance of those other agents who covertly control him. Clearly it is possible to establish these specific limits on who can hold these agents responsible without denying that the agents themselves remain free and responsible. When we take this approach we will find that we are no longer faced with an unattractive choice between simply “biting the bullet” or having to “spit it out”. All we need to do is chew carefully, until there is nothing left that we find too hard to swallow. (shrink)

There has been no shortage of such conceptual analyses and no shortage of counterexamples to all of them. The counterexamples exploit, at least partly, situations in which we are presumed to have clear intuitions about what causes what, but which intuitions are not being respected by the suggested philosophical analysis. The counterexamples typically lead to a battery of sophisticated attempts to revise or amend the philosophical analysis so that it is saved from refutation. These attempts, typically, either deny the intuitions (...) on which the counterexamples are based or accommodate the problematic cases within the theory by adding further clauses to the original philosophical analysis. The result of all this is that where the original philosophical theory rested on a simple, forceful and intuitively plausible idea (e.g., that causation consists in a relation of counterfactual dependence between discrete events), the modified philosophical theory becomes very convoluted, somewhat ad hoc and implausible. (shrink)

The minimalist view of truth endorsed by Paul Horwich denies that truth has any underlying nature. According to minimalism, the truth predicate ‘exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need’; ‘the function of the truth predicate is to enable the explicit formulation of schematic generalizations’. Horwich proposes that all there really is to truth follows from the equivalence schema: The proposition that p is true iff p, or, using Horwich’s notation, ·pÒ is true ´ p. The (unproblematic) instances (...) of the schema form ‘the minimal theory of truth’. Horwich claims that all the facts involving truth can be explained on the basis of the minimal theory. However, it has been pointed out, e.g. by Gupta (1993), that the minimal theory is too weak to entail any general facts about truth, e.g. the fact that.. (shrink)

The article contains a critical analysis of the skeptical solution to the rule- following problem. The skeptical solution denies the existence of “superlative” R-facts that would make statements of the form “P means R by ‘+’ ” true. The role of the sources for the meaning of ‘+’ here is played by the patterns of solidarity behavior of members of some community to which P belongs. The correct use of ‘+’ would be one that is approved by the competent majority (...) of this community, and there can be no other sense in which it would be correct or wrong. Boyd’s hypothesis denies the communal character of the ‘+’ meaning. While there are no “superlative” R-facts, there should be C-facts not about the R as the standard that P or its community follows in their practice of using ‘+’, but about whether they do it correctly. The proof of the Boyd hypothesis is based on the example of an imaginary Ω-community, whose agents use a finite set of simple symbols for the needs of their arithmetic: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘J’. Each symbol denotes a subset of identical, from the Ω-community point of view, numerical values. The symbol ‘A’ is used, for ex- ample, for a subset of the natural numbers 1, 10, 19, 28, 37, 46, etc.; ‘B’ for 2, 11, 20, 29, 38, 47, etc.; ‘C’ for 3, 12, 21, 30, 39, 48, etc. The Ω-community’s arithmetic uses the only local function ⊕ whose range of values forms a finite set of mathematical propositions {α} that are true. The Ω-community’s arithmetic, like our own, is open to many skeptical challenges. Is there a fact that determines the meaning of ‘⊕’? What do agents do when they calculate with ‘⊕’ (say, solve examples ‘A⊕B = ?’, ‘C⊕E=?’, etc.)? Do they Add, Badd or Dadd? To answer them would require a “superlative” R-fact. For the calculation practice with ‘⊕’, it could be a certain R-fact that determines the only possible order for the sequence of numerals ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘J’ such that {α} is true. An analysis of the calculation practice using the local arithmetic function ⊕ shows that for it there are no such R-facts that would determine the only correct standard R – even if the agents in the Ω-community were trained in such calculations on a full set of cases for the application of that function. However, for such practice there are C-facts (independent in their existence from R-facts) that make it possible to distinguish between what seems to be right and what is right. The solitary agent P and the Ω-community are in the same position regarding the knowledge of C-facts. The Ω-community’s point of view has no advantage in matters of C-facts knowledge over the solitary agent P’s point of view. The Ω-community arithmetic shows that if a solitary agent P had the suitable knowledge of C-facts about the practice of calculations with ‘⊕’, it would allow him/her to disagree with the not correct answers of other members of the community even when they would constitute an absolute majority. (shrink)

The debate about scientific realism is concerned with the relation between our scientific theories and the world. Scientific realists argue that our best theories or components of those theories correspond to the world. Anti-realists deny such a correspondence. Traditionally, this central issue in the philosophy of science has been approached by focusing on the theories themselves (e.g., by looking at theory change or the underlying experimental context). I propose a relatively unexplored way to approach this old debate. In addition to (...) focusing on the theory, we should focus on the theorizer. More precisely, in order to determine on which component of a theory we should hinge a realist commitment, we should analyze the cognitive processes underlying scientific theorizing. In this paper I do just that. Drawing from recent developments in the cognitive sciences and evolutionary epistemology, I formulate some tentative conclusions. The aim of this paper is not so much to defend a particular position in the debate on scientific realism but to showcase the value of taking a cognitive perspective in the debate. (shrink)