This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David J. Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that category, (...) we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives. (shrink)

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

This is the introduction to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, eds. William Day & Victor J. Krebs (Cambridge UP, 2010), a collection of essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-seeing. Section 1: Why Seeing Aspects Now?; Section 2: The Importance of Seeing Aspects; Section 3: The Essays. (The front matter to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew appears above under "Books.").

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

This pair of articles provides a critical commentary on contemporary approaches to statistical mechanical probabilities. These articles focus on the two ways of understanding these probabilities that have received the most attention in the recent literature: the epistemic indifference approach, and the Lewis-style regularity approach. These articles describe these approaches, highlight the main points of contention, and make some attempts to advance the discussion. The first of these articles provides a brief sketch of statistical mechanics, and discusses the indifference approach (...) to statistical mechanical probabilities. (shrink)

The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...) by more briefly focusing on the idea of a significant reason. By placing these results against the broader historical and ongoing contexts in which the lives of those with disabilities have been deemed of inferior quality, we conclude with a call for greater humility about disability and well-being in thought and practice. (shrink)

Every account of moral responsibility has conditions that distinguish between the consequences, actions, or traits that warrant praise or blame and those that do not. One intuitive condition is that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors beyond the agent’s control. Several philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). I offer moral and metaphysical arguments against LFMR. First, I maintain that considerations (...) of fairness that often motivate LFMR do not require its adoption. Second, I contend that LFMR has counterintuitive implications for the nature and scope of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and that LFMR is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. Third, I state some common reasons for thinking that LFMR’s commitment to true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom is problematic, and I argue that if there are no such true counterfactuals and if LFMR is true, a person is praiseworthy and blameworthy at most for a tiny fraction of her actions. Fourth, I argue that proponents of LFMR cannot escape this skeptical cost by appealing to a different kind of counterfactual of freedom. Fifth, I develop an anti-skeptical motivation to affirm the idea that luck can affect moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper contains a critical examination of the prospects for analyses of knowledge that weaken the factivity condition such that knowledge implies approximate truth.

Many believe that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. I maintain that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts. On my view, objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind. After explaining my view, I defend it against a variety of objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland.

Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of “moral perception,” and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu.be/9cc_1zykq80.

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

Schrödinger discusses what an elementary particle is. This essay originally appeared in the journal Endeavour.

The is-ought gap is Hume’s claim that we can’t get an ‘ought’ from just ‘is’s. Prior (“The Autonomy of Ethics,” 1960) showed that its most straightforward formulation, a staple of introductory philosophy classes, fails. Many authors attempt to resurrect the claim by restricting its domain syntactically or by reformulating it in terms of models of deontic logic. Those attempts prove to be complex, incomplete, or incorrect. I provide a simple reformulation of the is-ought gap that closely fits Hume’s description of (...) it. My formulation of the gap avoids the proposed counterexamples from Prior and offers a natural explanation of why they seem compelling. Moreover, I show that my formulation of the gap is guaranteed by standard theories of the semantics of normative terms, and that provides a more general reason to accept it. (shrink)

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in (...) aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call (...) the Counterfactual Strengthening Test. Along the way I consider and reject a few other possible constraints on perceptual awareness. I defend the view that moral perception is restricted to the perception of evaluative and pro tanto deontic properties. I conclude with a few gestures toward what this limitation on moral perception may mean for broader moral epistemology. (shrink)

Our folk epistemology says that if someone knows that P and tells you that P, then, given the absence of defeaters, if you believe what they tell you, you will come to know that P as well. A speaker's knowledge that P is then, for the most part, enough for a hearer to come to know that P. But there are counterexamples to this principle: testimonial knowledge does not always transfer from the speaker to the hearer. Why should that be (...) so? Because testimonial knowledge arises through the flow of information--from conclusive grounds--from the speaker through the speaker's assertion to the hearer's state of comprehension as of the speaker's assertion. A speaker's belief can be based on conclusive grounds, but the speaker's assertion may fail to provide conclusive grounds to the hearer. Then the hearer won't acquire knowledge, even from a knowledgeable speaker. Knowledge from testimony then works more like knowledge through perception. But wait, you say, that can't be so because testimony involves free will but perception does not. The essay ends with a broadly Hume inspired reply to this objection. (shrink)

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but (...) fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness. “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life. (shrink)

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

Wissen wir, wer oder was unseren Lebensgang bestimmt? Wissen wir überhaupt, was in uns und ausserhalb von uns abläuft? Das einzig Gewisse ist unser Tod, doch was hilft die Gewissheit unseres Todes, wenn ungewiss bleibt, wann er kommt? Unsere Bedürfnisse kennen wir, aber wo sind die Grenzen der Befriedigung? Wenn unsicher geworden ist, wer oder was das bestimmt, was faktisch geschieht, wenn die Welt uns körperlich und seelisch bedrängt und die einzige Gewissheit in der Zukunft unser Tod ist, wenn uns (...) unsere Bedürfnisse und die Grenzen ihrer Befriedigung unklar geworden sind, dann hilft nichts mehr als das Nachdenken – das Nachdenken über unsere Natur und ihren Platz in der Welt, über die Hierarchie unserer Bedürfnisse, darüber, wie wir das Gelingen unseres Lebens mit Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit in Einklang bringen. Kurz, es hilft nichts als der Epikureismus. ********** Do we know who or what determines the course of our lives? Do we even know what is going on inside and outside of us? The only certain thing is our death, but what good is the certainty of our death if it remains uncertain when it will come? We know our needs, but where are the limits to their fulfilment? When it has become uncertain who or what determines what actually happens, when the world oppresses us physically and emotionally and the only certainty in the future is our death, when our needs and the limits of their fulfilment have become unclear to us, then nothing helps more than reflection - reflection on our nature and its place in the world, thinking about the hierarchy of our needs, about how we can harmonise the success of our lives with reason and justice. In short, nothing helps but Epicureanism. (shrink)

We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this “inner life” of thought? Is conscious thought necessarily carried out in language? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. Thus it would seem that thought must be independent of, and in some sense prior to, the speech that expresses it. (...) He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that exists independently of linguistic expression, and that this inner life rightly deserves the label “thought”. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. (shrink)

One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a (...) universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents. (shrink)

We address the ethics of scenarios in which one party entraps, intentionally tempts or intentionally tests the virtue of another. We classify, in a new manner, three distinct types of acts that are of concern, namely acts of entrapment, of intentional temptation and of virtue testing. Our classification is, for each kind of scenario, of itself neutral concerning the question whether the agent acts permissibly. We explain why acts of entrapment are more ethically objectionable than like acts of intentional temptation (...) and why these, in turn, are more ethically objectionable than like acts of virtue testing. Along the way, we scrutinize, and eventually reject, the view that acts of entrapment are ethically unacceptable because intentional temptation is involved in entrapment. (shrink)

With overwhelming conviction the standard-interpretation of the Aristotelian philosophy translates the Greek ousia with the Latin substantia. There are many reasons, that this translation and equation is false, in a short overview I name six of them.

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)

This paper brings together several strands of thought from both the analytic and phenomenological traditions in order to critically examine accounts of cognitive enhancement that rely on the idea of cognitive extension. First, I explain the idea of cognitive extension, the metaphysics of mind on which it depends, and how it has figured in recent discussions of cognitive enhancement. Then, I develop ideas from Husserl that emphasize the agential character of thought and the distinctive way that conscious thoughts are related (...) to one another. I argue that these considerations are necessary for understanding why forms of cognitive extension may diminish our cognitive lives in different ways. This does not lead to a categorical rejection of cognitive enhancement as unethical or bad for human flourishing, but does warrant a conservative approach to the design and implementation of cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

Evidential Uniqueness is the thesis that, for any batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that a subject with that evidence should have. One of the most common kinds of objections to views that violate Evidential Uniqueness are arbitrariness objections – objections to the effect that views that don’t satisfy Evidential Uniqueness lead to unacceptable arbitrariness. The goal of this paper is to examine a variety of arbitrariness objections that have appeared in the literature, and to assess the extent (...) to which these objections bolster the case for Evidential Uniqueness. After examining a number of different arbitrariness objections, I’ll conclude that, by and large, these objections do little to bolster the case for Evidential Uniqueness. (shrink)

There has recently been a revived interest in temporal justice among political philosophers. For example, lone mothers have, on average, 30 h less free time per week than people in couples without children. Recent work has focussed on free time as a distinct distributive good, but this paper argues that it would be a mistake for a theory of temporal justice to focus only on shares of free time. First, I argue that the concept of free time does not succeed (...) in tracking discretionary control over time. All of time is a resource, and the particular moral relevance of free time must be established otherwise. Second, hours of time differ in use value, and we cannot fully track our concerns about the allocation of time, whether free or necessary, without taking this into account. We care about free time but also about ‘quality time’. To explain this observation, I develop an account of the value of time as a resource. The value of time periods differs with the prospects for which a time period can be used, that is, what we can do and be with it. What we are allocating when we are allocating time is not just hours; it is hours of time with a certain value. Finally, I argue that a concern for the value of time is compatible with a resourcist theory of temporal justice. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of empathy as the form of experience directed at embodied unities of expressive movement. After outlining the key differences between simulation theory and the phenomenological approach to empathy, the paper argues that while the phenomenological approach is closer to respecting a necessary constitutional asymmetry between first-personal and second-personal senses of embodiment, it still presupposes a general concept of embodiment that ends up being problematic. A different account is proposed that is neutral on the explanatory role (...) of the first-person sense of embodiment, which leads to an emphasis on the transformative nature of empathy and a broadening of the scope of possible targets of empathic awareness. (shrink)

The causal efficacy of a material system is usually thought to be produced by the law-like actions and interactions of its constituents. Here, a specific system is constructed and explained that produces a cause that cannot be understood in this way, but instead has novel and autonomous efficacy. The construction establishes a proof-of-feasibility of strong emergence. The system works by utilizing randomness in a targeted and cyclical way, and by relying on sustained evolution by natural selection. It is not vulnerable (...) to standard arguments against strong emergence, in particular ones that assume that the physical realm is causally closed. Moreover, it does not suffer from epiphenomenalism or causal overdetermination. The system uses only standard material components and processes, and is fully consistent with naturalism. It is discussed whether the emergent cause can still be viewed as ‘material’ in the way that term is commonly understood. (shrink)

We explain and explore class-theoretic potentialism—the view that one can always individuate more classes over a set-theoretic universe. We examine some motivations for class-theoretic potentialism, before proving some results concerning the relevant potentialist systems (in particular exhibiting failures of the $\mathsf {.2}$ and $\mathsf {.3}$ axioms). We then discuss the significance of these results for the different kinds of class-theoretic potentialists.

The classical theory of probability has long been abandoned and is seen by most philosophers as a non-contender—a mere precursor to newer and better theories. In this paper I argue that this is a mistake. The main reasons for its rejection—all related to the notorious principle of indifference—are that it is circular, of limited applicability, inconsistent, and dependent upon unjustified empirical assumptions. I argue that none of these claims is true and that the classical theory remains to be refuted.

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.

I argue that rejection is a speech act that cannot be reduced to assertion. Adapting an argument by Huw Price, I conclude that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. This can be naturally understood as registering *norm violations* where speech acts are characterised by their essential norms. However, I argue that rejection itself is not to be (...) characterised by a norm. Instead, registering violations is a necessary condition for understanding the normative framework in the first place. The core observation is that the concept of an 'illegal move' is intelligible, so a speech act can be (say) an assertion, despite violating the essential norm of asserting. Rejection has the function of pointing out that a move is illegal. But registering rule violations is a precondition of playing games with rules (it is part of the concept 'game'), not itself a rule in a game. A similar special role of rejection (that it is not explicable in the terms provided by a framework, but needed to conceptualise these terms) likely occurs in other frameworks as well, e.g. characterising speech acts by commitments or their effect on a common ground. (shrink)

This paper explores religious belief in connection with epistemological disjunctivism. It applies recent advances in epistemological disjunctivism to the religious case for displaying an attractive model of specifically Christian religious belief. What results is a heretofore unoccupied position in religious epistemology—a view I call ‘religious epistemological disjunctivism’. My general argument is that RED furnishes superior explanations for the sort of ‘grasp of the truth’ which should undergird ‘matured Christian conviction’ of religious propositions. To this end I first display the more (...) familiar perceptual epistemological disjunctivism, contrasting it with both externalist and classically internalist views. This prepares the way for introducing RED with its own distinctive factive mental state operator—pneuming that p. In this second section I present the RED model, not failing to address a potential problem concerning religious disagreement. I also clarify RED’s distinctive internalist aspect, describing how it comports with contemporary internalist thinking in epistemology. I then move in section three to criticize externalist and classical internalist views, showing where they fail to make proper sense of the sort of knowing which should ground mature Christian conviction. Specifically, I highlight three intuitions which I think any theory of religious belief should capture: what I call the case-closed intuition, the good believer intuition, and the Plantingian platitude. This is all to set up for the final section where I argue that RED is superior for understanding proper religious believing—capturing the aforementioned intuitions. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The use of "levels of abstraction" in philosophical analysis (levellism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, we argue that a refined version of epistemological levellism should be retained as a fundamental method, which we call the method of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section two we make clear the nature and applicability of the (epistemological) method of levels of abstraction. In section three, we show the fruitfulness of the new method by applying it to five case studies: (...) the concept of agenthood, the Turing test, the definition of emergence, quantum observation and decidable observation. In section four, we further characterise and support the method by distinguishing it from three other forms of "levellism": (i) levels of organisation; (ii) levels of explanation and (iii) conceptual schemes. In this context, we also briefly address the problems of relativism and antirealism. In the conclusion, we indicate some of the work that lies ahead, two potential limitations of the method and some results that have already been obtained by applying the method to some long-standing philosophical problems. (shrink)

Minimalism about truth is one of the main contenders for our best theory of truth, but minimalists face the charge of being unable to properly state their theory. Donald Davidson incisively pointed out that minimalists must generalize over occurrences of the same expression placed in two different contexts, which is futile. In order to meet the challenge, Paul Horwich argues that one can nevertheless characterize the axioms of the minimalist theory. Sten Lindström and Tim Button have independently argued that Horwich’s (...) attempt to formulate minimalism remains unsuccessful. We show how to properly state Horwich’s axioms by appealing to propositional functions that are given by definite descriptions. Both Lindström and Button discuss proposals similar to ours and conclude that they are unsuccessful. Our new suggestion avoids these objections. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that three of the most prominent theories of conditional acceptance face very serious problems. David Lewis' concept of imaging, the Ramsey test and Jonathan Bennett's recent hybrid view all face viscious regresses, or they either employ unanalyzed components or depend upon an implausibly strong version of doxastic voluntarism.

The controversy around the accommodation of conscientious objections in medicine persists, especially for such contentious services as abortions. COs are typically considered in their negativ...

Is reality the basis of everything or has reality itself an other basis? What makes reality – not the real things – to be active, to exist? The question of what is real seems to be an easy question, because in our daily lives we are and must be naive realists. We ourselves, the things around us, the world, the facts, all that is real. there must be several concepts of reality if we want to say that not only physical (...) or material things of everyday life are real, e. g. numbers, π, Dr. Faustus, thoughts, emotions and other things. On the other hand, given the difference of classical physics and modern physics, we see that even that form of knowledge, which seems to be most responsible for reality, natural science, cannot give the desired uniqueness in terms of what itself wants or needs to understand as real. Alternatively, when we see that nothing can be and nothing can be real without being in a world, and when we understand the world as the order of things, which I call worldI , then this leads us to the speculative answer that it is exactly the “unreal” worldI which is the reason why the everyday reality, worldI I , is real. The worldI is the basis for the reality of our empirical worldI I . The considerations presented here have nothing to do with the idealistic conception of possibility, founded in the power of the subject, nor with the existential concept of potentiality, founded in the Entwurf des Daseins. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Michael Friedman's conception of the contitutive a priori faces two serious problems. These two problems show that the view collapses into a form of conventionalism.

Defenders of doxastic voluntarism accept that we can voluntarily commit ourselves to propositions, including belief-contravening propositions. Thus, defenders of doxastic voluntarism allow that we can choose to believe propositions that are negatively implicated by our evidence. In this paper it is argued that the conjunction of epistemic deontology and doxastic voluntarism as it applies to ordinary cases of belief-contravening propositional commitments is incompatible with evidentialism. In this paper ED and DV will be assumed and this negative result will be used (...) to suggest that voluntary belief-contravening commitments are not themselves beliefs and that these sorts of commitments are not governed by evidentialism. So, the apparent incompatibility of the package views noted above can be resolved without ceding evidentialism with respect to beliefs. (shrink)

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out (...) moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model. (shrink)

The leading question of our lecture series is in which areas and in which sense fractures and incompleteness are relevant for us. Are brokenness and incompleteness only accidental and singular, or do they belong to the style of things in general? Is wholeness and perfection the rule, and fracture the exception? The same question must be applied to the distinction between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. Is brokenness and incompleteness due to the things themselves, or only (...) to our perception and knowledge of them? - For the time being, the term "world" will be used in the sense of the "whole of things", which is usual, later this term of the world will be supplemented by a second one. (shrink)

In The Realm of Reason (2004), Christopher Peacocke develops a “generalized rationalism” concerning, among other things, what it is for someone to be “entitled”, or justified, in forming a given belief. In the course of his discussion, Peacocke offers two arguments to the best explanation that aim to undermine scepticism and establish a justification for our belief in the reliability of sense perception, respectively. If sound, these ambitious arguments would answer some of the oldest and most vexing epistemological problems. In (...) this paper I will evaluate these arguments, concluding that they are inconclusive at best. Despite offering some interestingly original arguments, Peacocke gives us no reason to think that scepticism is false, and that perception is generally reliable. (shrink)

THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE PAPER. The New Testament speaks of our having faith rather than sight. This distinction is not made to distinguish faith from knowledge. Rather, it is to distinguish one kind of knowledge from another. We may know by trust in reliable authority; this knowledge is necessarily secondhand, but it is knowledge all the same. This, I argue, is the New Testament idea of faith. Another way of knowing is firsthand. Sight in the New Testament, (...) I argue, is a metonym for firsthand knowledge. In this article I consider the meaning of faith and sight in the relevant New Testament passages, with an extended exegesis of 2 Cor. 5:7 and Heb. 11:1. (shrink)

"The Personal is Political": This was an often-heard slogan of feminist groups in the late sixties and early seventies. The slogan is no doubt open to many interpretations. There is one interpretation which touches on the epistemology of social facts, viz. the slogan claims that in assessing the features of a political system, personal experiences have privileged evidentiary value. For instancte, in the face of third person reports about political corruption, I may remain unmoved in my belief that the political (...) powers are morally upstanding, and it is only when I myself am adversely affected, that I come to change my views. There are two standard patterns of explanation of this type of belief formation: (i) We know that third-person reports may be lessreliable than first-person experiences; (ii) If the third-person reports are no less reliable than first-person experiences, we may just be dealing with a standard pattern of epistemic irrationality. However, we argue that there is also a much more surprising pattern of explanation: under certain conditions, a Bayesian argument can be proffered to the effect that it is rational to change one's beliefs in the face of personal experiences and not in the face of third-person reports, even if these experiences and reports are equally reliable. Hence, the feminist slogan (at least on one particular interpretation of it) receives unexpected support from Bayesian comers. We also show that this pattern of explanation has surprising repercussions on the question of the evidentiary value of miracles in philosophy of religion. (shrink)