Possible worlds models of belief have difficulties accounting for unawareness, the inability to entertain (and hence believe) certain propositions. Accommodating unawareness is important for adequately modelling epistemic states, and representing the informational content to which agents have in principle access given their explicit beliefs. In this paper, I develop a model of explicit belief, awareness, and informational content, along with an sound and complete axiomatisation. I furthermore defend the model against the seminal impossibility result of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, according (...) to which three intuitive conditions preclude non-trivial unawareness on any possible worlds model of belief. (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This document briefly summarizes several objections to Thomas Kuhn on science, including by Feyerabend, Davidson, and Fodor.

This paper responds to Kathleen Stock’s attempt to explain a puzzling fact, at least from her standpoint: widespread assertions that some people who are biologically male are women and some people who are biologically female are men. She regards these assertions as made while immersed in a fiction. Stock rejects an alternative explanation – that a lot of these people have read Judith Butler or 1970s feminism. Clarifying that explanation reveals it to be not so easy to dismiss.

Perceptual experience is often said to be transparent; that is, when we have a perceptual experience we seem to be aware of properties of the objects around us, and never seem to be aware of properties of the experience itself. This is a introspective fact. It is also often said that we can infer a metaphysical fact from this introspective fact, e.g. a fact about the nature of perceptual experience. A transparency theory fills in the details for these two facts, (...) and bridges the gap between them. We have three aims: to scrutinize Michael Tye’s transparency theory :137–151, 2002; Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009; Philos Stud 170:39–57, 2014a), introduce a new transparency theory, and advance a meta-theoretical hypothesis about the interest, and import, of transparency theories. (shrink)

This paper identifies three positions on the relationship between language and experience, the third of which I was not acquainted with before from my reading. It seems absurd.

In this paper, I present the problem of the poor king, from combining Descartes and Rousseau.

What did Max Gluckman actually say about apparently structureless societies? I introduce a fictional example to make sense of what he says regarding the Tonga.

I present an argument against the very idea that anthropology can contribute to the study of specialization. But an obvious reply is “Actually anthropologists at home can study specialization.” I provide some details concerning this reply, focusing on incentives to specialize directed at sensitive souls.

This paper engages two debates about trust, deriving from two distinct questions about the nature of trust. The first asks how to define trust. Does trusting B to φ involve anything more than relying on B to φ? The second asks about the normative structure of trust. Does trust most fundamentally embody a two-place or a three-place relation? I’ll defend a new position in the second debate that yields an equally new position in the first. The standard three-place model highlights (...) ‘A trusts B to φ.’ The two-place model prefers ‘A trusts B.’ On my new three-place model, both are less fundamental than ‘A φs through trust in B.’ We do, of course, trust people to do things. But the most fundamental form of trust lies in doing something through trust in a person. I call this the Assurance View of trust because I’ll argue that trusting involves accepting another’s invitation to trust – an assurance, in effect, that the other is relevantly trustworthy. Trust thereby differs from mere reliance by how it makes available a reason to rely on the trusted. In mere reliance, your reason to rely on B is exogenous to the reliance relation, emerging, for example, from B’s track record of relevant reliability. When you trust B, by contrast, you take yourself to have a reason to rely on B that is endogenous to your trust, a reason grounded not merely in B’s reliability, exogenously considered, but in B’s ongoing responsiveness to your relevant needs. The Assurance View’s key insight emerges, I’ll argue, from cases wherein trust is disappointed – the trusted does not do what you trusted her to do – yet not thereby betrayed. (shrink)

This paper offers a cheap solution to Laura Valentini’s paradox of ideal theory. An ideal theory cannot be sound by definition, since in the relevant sense of “ideal theory” it involves false propositions.

I propose a solution to the paradox of the kalela dance, as presented by Richard Werbner, based on a variety of liberalism I once identified.

In this paper, I present some advice in the style of Nietzsche for a university aspiring to move from being good to great, as a nearby university is.

[This draft is dated November 2007. I wrote it while I was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, in 2005-06, and published it only on the Center's website as a working paper. Many of the core ideas in this paper wound up in "Receptivity and the Will," Nous 2009, "Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge," Nous 2013, and "Assurance and Warrant," Philosophers' Imprint 2014 -- though formulated rather differently. What follows is the original abstract.] This working paper (...) extends a project that I’ve been developing for several years on the role of trust, including self-trust, in rationality and personal autonomy. I’m interested equally in epistemic questions (what to believe) and in practical questions (how to act), though the present paper addresses only the former. In an earlier paper on the epistemic side of my project, “Telling as Inviting to Trust” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 2005), I offered an explanation of how you can get an entitlement to believe something simply by trusting someone when she tells you it’s so, the entitlement deriving not merely from the assurance but from the trustworthy character of the one who gives it. The present paper adapts my explanation of believing-on-another’s-word to belief as such, via the observation that you can’t form a belief without trusting someone’s judgment – if only your own. I view intrapersonal reasoning about what to believe as an internalization of the interpersonal cases I analyzed in that earlier paper. In each instance, belief-formation has a second-personal dynamic: an invitation to trust on one side, trusting acceptance of that invitation on the other. If I’m right, the dynamic at the heart of all belief manifests not autonomy but a trusting heteronomy, whereby you render yourself appropriately receptive to judgment – your own or another’s. (The idea that judging is inviting self-trust first occurred to me in 2002, but I didn’t get a chance to develop it properly till 2005-06, my fellowship year at the Center for 21st Century Studies. I appreciate the support.). (shrink)

This paper proposes a solution to a puzzle regarding when people switch from one skilled area of specialization to another, in which they have had little training. Certain analogies between the previous area and the area switched to enable this. I use Susan Carey as an example.

J. McTaggart argues that the philosophical conception of time is constituted by the notions of fluid and static time. Since, on his view, neither notion is philosophically viable, he concludes that time is nothing but an illusion that arises from our distorted perception of essentially atemporal reality. In the paper, I argue that despite McTaggart’s failure to prove the unreality of time as such, he does succeed in establishing his lesser claim that the concept of fluid time is without any (...) ontological import whatsoever. (shrink)

This is a one page handout, presenting a puzzle from J.G. Frazer regarding why, to become the priest of Diana at Nemi, one had to first break a bough in the sacred grove.

Jeanette Edwards sounds as if she wishes to reject the question “Why did you do fieldwork there?” I propose a metaphysical route to this, which is to say, “The self before fieldwork is not my self,” but this conflicts with the traditional Lockean account of personal identity.

This is my response to a premise-by-premise argument in Anca Gheaus’s “Biological Parenthood: Gestational, Not Genetic.”.

Why are some disciplines lacking in members from certain groups, for example why has there been female underrepresentation in English-speaking analytic philosophy or a shortage of ethnic minorities? In this paper, I distinguish between two versions of the hostile atmosphere hypothesis.

This document gathers together, in summary form, objections scattered across many papers and multiple online databases. Nevertheless, it omits some objections, notably complicated ones.

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

I respond to the charge that one of my objections to Marilyn Strathern’s rejection of feminist anthropology is the same as an objection made by Kamala Visweswaran. They may seem very similar to begin with, but I argue that there is both a difference in focus - in which premises we are concentrating on - and in method.

This paper responds to the question of whether the Internet has made lectures obsolete and Matthew Pickles’ investigation of why lectures persist. It is written as a pastiche of R.K. Narayan, about whom a somewhat parallel question is probably asked. Pickles refers to a logic lecturer so dry people went swimming, and a pastiche approach is an alternative.

The title question arises because the philosophy seems the same as asking, “What if everyone did that?” In this paper, I give a partial response to the question. In an appendix, I consider the question of why should we tell you the answer?

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as: He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable and (...) in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged. 1. (shrink)

I propose some arguments suggested by Descartes' text for the conclusion that we are not identical to our bodies. I suggest that a natural extension of those arguments leads to Plantinga's Replacement Argument. I conclude that even if such an argument is plausible, its conclusion does not establish the further claim that we can exist without a body.

Imprecise probabilities are often modelled with representors, or sets of probability functions. In the recent literature, two ways of interpreting representors have emerged as especially prominent: vagueness interpretations, according to which each probability function in the set represents how the agent's beliefs would be if any vagueness were precisified away; and comparativist interpretations, according to which the set represents those comparative confidence relations that are common to all probability functions therein. I argue that these interpretations have some important limitations. I (...) also propose an alternative—the functional interpretation—according to which representors are best interpreted by reference to the roles they play in the theories that make use of them. (shrink)

Is there anything new to be said about Anselm's ontological argument? Recent work by Lynne Baker and Gareth Matthews raises some interesting and important questions about the argument. First, Anselm's argument is set in the context of a prayer to God, whose existence Anselm seeks to prove. Is that peculiar or paradoxical? Does it imply that Anselm's prayer is insincere? Baker and Matthews have offered a novel interpretation of Anselm's argument, designed to solve a crucial problem with it. Does their (...) interpretation succeed in solving that problem? This paper addresses both of these questions. (shrink)

This paper interprets Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as presenting an objection to diffusionism: the diffusionist theory cannot account for the isolation of the rite Frazer focuses on, in the societies studied by classicists.

Jeanette Edwards observes a pattern of questions of the form “Why do anthropology fieldwork in location X?” - she only hears the question posed of some places - and she explains this pattern by saying that some places are taken to be obviously legitimate for anthropology fieldwork whereas others are not. I draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate, obviously legitimate and not obviously legitimate, and better and worse. The distinctions lead to a different explanation.

Humanitarian aid workers typically reject the accolade of hero as both untrue and undesirable. Untrue when they claim not to be acting beyond the call of duty, and undesirable so far as celebrating heroism risks elevating “heroic” choices over safer, and perhaps wiser ones. However, this leaves unresolved a tension between the denial of heroism and a sense in which certain humanitarian acts really appear heroic. And, the concern that in rejecting the aspiration to heroism an opportunity is lost to (...) inspire more and better humanitarian action. Having set out this problem in more detail in Part I, the argument in Part II will suggest that a virtue ethics approach to humanitarian moral obligations can make good sense of our intuitions concerning the role of heroism in humanitarian action. In Part III I will argue that at least “professional” humanitarians, instead of rejecting heroism, should aim to be heroes, in the sense of displaying a virtue of humanity in high-stakes contexts, because this is consistent with the aim of humanitarian action. Finally, some lingering problems of demandingness and motivation are considered. (shrink)

This brief paper asks how Lorenzo Cañás Bottos could bring himself to write comments on Nigel Rapport, after his Key Concepts in Social and Cultural Anthropology, with Joanna Overing! The title of my paper may be a bit misleading, but I present two futures for Argentine families, which start out similar, relating their conceptions of society to British anthropology.

Moral naturalists are often said to have trouble making sense of inter-communal moral disagreements. The culprit is typically thought to be the naturalist’s metasemantics and its implications for the sameness of meaning across communities. The most familiar incarnation of this metasemantic challenge is the Moral Twin Earth argument. We address the challenge from the perspective of analytic naturalism and argue that making sense of inter-communal moral disagreement creates no special issues for this view.

Some of the most influential moral philosophers in the English-speaking world say or suggest that we should only pay attention to moral judgments made in certain states of mind, where these states exclude anxious states. In this paper, I argue that this position faces at least two major problems.

The paradox asserts “to be a decent human being, you have to treat people like they're special; but to be a decent sociologist, you have to remember they're not.” How then can a sociologist be a decent human being? I distinguish between rights and other things, such as beliefs or tastes, and draw attention to how respect for rights is compatible with a focus on the typical in research.

Mary Beard argues against the claim that its relationship to British colonialism adequately explains why The Golden Bough was popular, drawing attention to other stuff in the book aside from information about British colonies. I make an objection that British colonialists would have been interested in expanding their empire.

The all-or-nothing problem, formulated by Joe Horton, presents us with a situation in which you can do nothing or save one child or save two. It is dangerous to save any, making doing nothing morally permissible, but there is no extra danger in saving two, so it seems wrong to just save one. But then doing nothing is morally better than saving one. I present a solution in response to this problematic result, which is that doing nothing is not an (...) accurate description of a permissible option. (shrink)

This paper presents what I call “the flowchart solution” to Joe Horton’s all-or-nothing problem. Rather than three options – don’t save any child, save one, or save two – there is a flowchart with a choice of don’t save or save, and then within save, save one or save two.

This paper evaluates an argument for the conclusion that in order to produce a viable objection to a particular error theory, the objection must not be applicable to any error theory. The reason given for this conclusion is that error theories about some discourses are uncontroversial. But the examples given of uncontroversial error theories are not good ones, nor do there appear to be other examples available.

I argue that absolutism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is possible, is to blame for both the paradoxes that arise in naive set theory and variants of these paradoxes that arise in plural logic and in semantics. The solution is restrictivism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is not possible. -/- It is generally thought that absolutism is true and that restrictivism is not only false, but inexpressible. As a result, the paradoxes are blamed, not on illicit quantification, but (...) on the logical conception of set which motivates naive set theory. The accepted solution is to replace this with the iterative conception of set. -/- I show that this picture is doubly mistaken. After a close examination of the paradoxes in chapters 2--3, I argue in chapters 4 and 5 that it is possible to rescue naive set theory by restricting quantification over sets and that the resulting restrictivist set theory is expressible. In chapters 6 and 7, I argue that it is the iterative conception of set and the thesis of absolutism that should be rejected. (shrink)

I draw attention to how Annie Saumont’s “You Should Have Changed at Dol” provides a solution to the paradox. With appropriate background knowledge, Saumont’s story, despite its modern form, displays various convergences with Descartes’ meditations; likewise the Bisa dance may feature convergences with traditional dance.

In his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes how he was fired from his job and secretly wrote astrology columns. I register a puzzle that various readers should feel about this information, owing to the distinctive style of Kundera: how can this be kept a secret? I also propose solutions.

This paper responds to Mary Beard’s assessment of the claim that Frazer’s book The Golden Bough was popular because it provided practical aid for colonialists. Beard rejects this as an inadequate explanation: reference to colonialism is part of an adequate explanation, but a full explanation must go beyond this particular ism. I present two objections to the case she makes for her inadequacy conclusion, though I don’t think his book aided much with colonialism.

This paper presents an obvious explanation for why Oedipus even attempted to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, given the high cost of failure.

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

Influenced by Martha Kuhlman, I am disposed to read Milan Kundera as personally disliking crowds. But I speculate that there is a practical reason for his writing against crowds, if we see him as part of a system of novelists.

This paper quotes a story about Bronislaw Malinowski trying to find out a myth and extracts a dilemma from it. The story content seems related to self-referential puzzles.

The preface to A Theory of Justice includes the interesting suggestion that John Rawls’s system is consistent with W.V. Quine’s system. I raise a problem for achieving fair equality of opportunity granting Quine’s system: that one does not have to respond to apparent evidence that two candidates are equally suitable for a job in the desired way. There does not appear to be a logical inconsistency between the systems at this point, but in practice regular positive discrimination schemes are probably (...) required. (shrink)

A quite recent book casts the anthropologist Elizabeth Colson as a systems skeptic, with Max Gluckman attempting to counter her skepticism. In this paper, I offer clarifications of the skepticism and of the counter.