This paper is a critical analysis towardcritical pedagogy in education using the concept of the pedagogy of shalom. Critical analysis is undertakennot to imply that critical pedagogy as formulated by Giroux is a wrong conceptbut this paper aims to recover the fragility and refining that has not been perfect through the values of the divine pedagogy of shalom. Critical pedagogy and shalom pedagogy struggle to question and challenge the mindset and lifestyle underlying the pedagogy of neoliberal that emphasisses market (...) fundamentalism and ultimately create oppression, social injustice and revokedemocracy. Based on this orientation, pedagogy of shalomis introduced to reinforce the foundations and basic theories of critical pedagogy so it doesnnot merely align to activism, withoutreconciliation and to avoid arrogant of social movements and the criticism to power but without theestablishmentof love. The main objective is to achieve social and political changes to thebetter so that public can live injust, free, prosperous and equitablesociety.This article further seeks possibility to apply the concept of the pedagogy of shalom in the context of Christian education in Indonesia. (shrink)

Daniel Bell and Wang Pei’s recent monograph, Just Hierarchy, seeks to defend hierarchical relationships against more egalitarian alternatives. This paper addresses their argument, offered in one chapter of the book, in favour of a hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. This relationship, Bell and Pei argue, should conform to what they call “subordination without cruelty:” it is permissible to subordinate and exploit animals for human ends, provided that we do not treat them cruelly. We focus on three aspects of (...) their view: their argument for a hierarchical view; their understanding of cruelty; and their account of the heightened duties they claim we owe to nonhuman animals who are intelligent, domesticated, and/or “cute.” We argue that the reasons that Bell and Pei offer fail to support their conclusions, and that, even if one accepts a hierarchical view, the conclusions that Bell and Pei draw about the permissibility of practices such as killing animals for food do not follow. We conclude by emphasizing philosophers’ responsibility to thoroughly test their arguments and to engage with existing debates, especially when the practices they seek to justify involve harms of great magnitude. (shrink)

I introduce game-theoretic models for threats to the discussion of threats in speech act theory. I first distinguish three categories of verbal threats: conditional threats, categorical threats, and covert threats. I establish that all categories of threats can be characterized in terms of an underlying conditional structure. I argue that the aim—or illocutionary point—of a threat is to change the conditions under which an agent makes decisions in a game. Threats are moves in a game that instantiate a subgame in (...) which the addressee is ‘under threat’. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his exploration, (...) Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

Plus qu’un régime ou un mode de vie, le véganisme est un mouvement social et politique visant à libérer les animaux du joug humain. S’opposant au carnisme, les véganes renoncent autant que possible à utiliser des produits ou des services issus de leur exploitation. Leurs arguments rencontrent aujourd’hui un écho de plus en plus favorable parmi les consommateurs, alors même que les animaux, sur terre et dans la mer, n’ont jamais été tués dans de si grandes proportions. Cet essai est (...) l’occasion pour ses auteurs de montrer que la société que les véganes appellent de leurs vœux (et préfigurent par leurs pratiques quotidiennes) repose sur une conception élargie de la justice. Une justice qui devrait embrasser l’ensemble des êtres doués de sensibilité. (shrink)

Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical (...) notion of the average, people tend to use a value-laden notion of the normal. Similarly, historical research on the scientific practices used in other time periods indicates that, prior to the nineteenth century, scientists tended to make use of a notion of the normal that was overtly value-laden. These findings give us reason to rethink certain familiar facts about scientific practice. In particular, they suggest that the fact that scientists so often make use of the statistical average should be seen as a highly surprising fact, the sort of thing that calls out for explanation. (shrink)

The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews, concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth areas correspond to the three basic principles of biomimicry as laid out by Janine Benyus. “Nature as model” is the poetic principle of biomimicry, for it tells us how it is that things are to be “brought forth”. “Nature as measure” is the ethical (...) principle of biomimicry, for it tells us that Nature places ethical limits or standards on what it is possible for us to accomplish. And “Nature as mentor” is the epistemological principle of biomimicry, for it affirms that Nature is the ultimate source of truth, wisdom, and freedom from error. Within this overall framework, I argue that seeing Nature as physis—understood as “self-production” or “self-placing-into-the-open”—constitutes the requisite ground for the poetic, ethical, and epistemological principles of biomimicry, and that biomimicry thus conceived involves a new philosophical paradigm, which I call “enlightened naturalism”. (shrink)

How seriously should we take the idea that the mind employs mental files? Goodman and Gray (2022) argue that mental filing – a thinker rationally treating her cognitive states as being about the same thing – can be explained without files. Instead, they argue that the standard commitments of mental file theory, as represented by Recanati’s indexical model, are better seen in terms of a relational representational feature of object representations, which in turn is based on the epistemic links a (...) thinker bears to objects. This paper argues that this revision is misguided. Neither the representational property nor any basic role for epistemic links are needed for an adequate explanatory theory that makes use of the image of a mental filing system. A better alternative to the indexical model does posit files, albeit as causal-functional entities. This makes additional representational features redundant, and shows that epistemic links play a secondary role. (shrink)

We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that such evidence supports belief in non-quantificational generic generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of confirmation. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to approximate the predictions that formal epistemology would make.

In our day-to-day lives, we form responsibility judgements about one another – but we are imperfect beings, and our judgments can be mistaken. This paper suggests that we get things wrong not merely by chance, but predictably and systematically. In particular, these miscues are common when we are dealing with large gaps in social status and power. That is, when we form judgements about those who are much more or less socially powerful than ourselves, it is increasingly likely that “epistemic (...) distorters” will reliably disrupt our reasoning. In response to this situation, I argue for the introduction of a new norm concerning blame and social status: “Powerful Restraint.” This norm suggests that the socially powerful ought to blame the socially dispossessed less frequently, and that social pressure be applied to achieve that compliance. I argue that such a norm is justified given the pernicious down-stream moral effects of the up-stream epistemic distortion I describe. I defend it against objections that it suggests a normative solution to an epistemic problem, that it is paternalistic, and that it involves a kind of disrespect to the less socially powerful. (shrink)

This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...) face serious problems of their own. (shrink)

In light of recent breakneck pace in machine learning, questions about whether near-future artificial systems might be conscious and possess moral status are increasingly pressing. This paper argues that as matters stand these debates lack any clear criteria for resolution via the science of consciousness. Instead, insofar as they are settled at all, it is likely to be via shifts in public attitudes brought about by the increasingly close relationships between humans and AI users. Section 1 of the paper I (...) briefly lays out the current state of the science of consciousness and its limitations insofar as these pertain to machine consciousness, and claims that there are no obvious consensus frameworks to inform public opinion on AI consciousness. Section 2 examines the rise of conversational chatbots or Social AI, and argues that in many cases, these elicit strong and sincere attributions of consciousness, mentality, and moral status from users, a trend likely to become more widespread. Section 3 presents an inconsistent triad for theories that attempt to link consciousness, behaviour, and moral status, noting that the trends in Social AI systems will likely make the inconsistency of these three premises more pressing. Finally, Section 4 presents some limited suggestions for how consciousness and AI research communities should respond to the gap between expert opinion and folk judgment. (shrink)

Coordination in thought is the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. Such treatment can be indirect, via an identity belief, or direct. Direct coordination presents a problem concerning how this treatment is justified. Dickie accounts for the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to a motivational state: coordination serves to fulfil a need to represent things outside the mind. I argue that this account gets the problem coordination presents wrong, and so does not (...) present an adequate solution. While the material of that account may be reconfigured to provide a more promising proposal, I argue that this depends on a specious psychology of belief, and will anyway end up being circular. I propose an account that, while similar in some ways, improves on both the official and reconfigured Dickie-style accounts, and points to some broader conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel conception of mental files, aimed at addressing Frege puzzles. Classical Frege puzzles involve ignorance and discovery of identity. These may be addressed by accounting for a more basic way for identity to figure in thought—the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. This manifests itself in rational inferences that presuppose the identity of what the beliefs are about. Mental files help to provide a functional characterization of a mind capable of (...) this presupposition, but more must be said to show how it may be rational. I argue that this can be done by drawing out the way in which mental files interact with a thinker's motivational states and so come to have normative functional properties. I show how this theory works better than some other treatments of mental files. (shrink)

A general article discussing philosophical issues arising in connection with Aristotle's "Generation of Animals" (Chapter from Blackwell's Companion to Aristotle).

The possibility of employing human enhancement interventions to aid in future space missions has been gaining attention lately. These possibilities have included one of the more controversial kinds of enhancements: biomedical moral enhancement. However, the discussion has thus far remained on a rather abstract level. In this paper we further this conversation by looking more closely at what type of interventions with what sort of effects we should expect when we are talking about biomedical moral enhancements. We suggest that a (...) more grounded way to picture moral enhancement, at least in the near term, is to envision a form of cognitive enhancement that also provides some moral benefits by heightening the enhanced person's capability for acting according to their own subjective moral code. While this concept of moral adherence enhancement also has relevance for the moral enhancement discussion more widely, in this paper we apply it specifically in the context of space missions. We argue that there are weighty reasons to consider making biomedical enhancements of the proposed kind a mandatory feature of early-phase long-distance space travel because these missions are high-stakes in nature and take place in an environment where the enhancement could be seen as conferring important advantages while negating many of the traditional arguments weighed against it. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the risks and benefits of Social AI, understood as conversational AI systems that cater to human social needs like romance, companionship, or entertainment. Section 1 of the paper provides a brief history of conversational AI systems and introduces conceptual distinctions to help distinguish varieties of Social AI and pathways to their deployment. Section 2 of the paper adds further context via a brief discussion of anthropomorphism and its relevance to assessment of human-chatbot relationships. Section (...) 3 of the paper provides a survey of potential and in some cases demonstrated harms associated with user interactions with Social AI systems. Finally, Section 4 discusses how the benefits and harms of Social AI can best be addressed, with a primary focus on how frameworks from AI ethics can inform their development. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is (...) insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...) this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them. (shrink)

Triviality arguments against the computational theory of mind claim that computational implementation is trivial and thus does not serve as an adequate metaphysical basis for mental states. It is common to take computational implementation to consist in a mapping from physical states to abstract computational states. In this paper, I propose a novel constraint on the kinds of physical states that can implement computational states, which helps to specify what it is for two physical states to non-trivially implement the same (...) computational state. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such (...) externalist theories within a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment to making her _own_ beliefs and applications consistent allows one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically individualistic. Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand languages as shared temporally extended practices about which they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs. Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite 'non-individualistic' ascriptions.. (shrink)

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to which they are (...) entitled by their speech. In cases of incapacitation, a speaker’s standing to expect certain outcomes is itself undermined. I also discuss how individual speakers are subject to interference along two dimensions: as exercisers of certain non-linguistic capacities, and as producers of meaningful speech. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to motivate and defend a recognizable version of N. L. Wilson's "Principle of Charity" Doing so will involve: (1) distinguishing it fromthe significantly different versions of the Principle familiar through the work of Quine and Davidson; (2) showing that it is compatible with, among other things, both semantic externalism and "simulation" accounts of interpretation; and (3) explaining how it follows from plausible constraints relating to the connection between interpretation and self-interpretation. Finally, it will be (...) argued that Charity represents a type of "minimal individualism" that is closely tied to first person authority, and that endorsing Charity in our interpretations of others reflects a commitment to capturing, from the third-person starting point, their first-personal point of view. (shrink)

The study examines the relative merits of a noncompatibility and a restructuring explanation of the recurrent empirical finding that a prominent attribute looms larger in choices than in judgments. Pairs of equally attractive options were presented to 72 undergraduates who were assigned to six conditions in which they performed (1) only preference judgments or choices, (2) preference judgments or choices preceded by judgments of attractiveness of attribute levels, or (3) preference judgments or choices accompanied by think-aloud reports. The results replicated (...) the prominence efTect for choices, but a prominence effect was also found for preference judgments. In accordance with the restructuring explanation, the think-aloud protocols indicated that options were more often restructured in choices than in preference judgments. However, restructuring could not explain the prominence effect observed for preference judgments. A modified compatibility hypothesis is offered as an alternative explanation. (shrink)

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and linguistic questions about (...) the way we categorize the many and the much. (shrink)

Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...) complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world. (shrink)

While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...) surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p.

James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more (...) naturalistically respectable material such as our evaluative practices, but in doing so, he also faces up to the possibility that this objectivity is something we may fail to achieve. This comparatively pessimistic prospect in turn explains his surprising pivot toward the divine at the end of the “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (MPML) James’s appeal to the divine is characteristically idiosyncratic, however, and this paper will attempt to explain how it fits in with the more generally naturalistic framework that dominates the rest of the paper. (shrink)

Several studies have shown that preference is not necessarily synonymous with choice. In particular, the most preferred object from a set of objects presented in a non—choice context is not necessarily chosen when the same objects are options in a choice situation (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 1971, 1973; Tversky, Sattah, & Slovic, 1988) . Our research on the choice—preference discrepancy replicates these findings and thus bears some resemblance to the study by Tversky, Sattah, and Slovic (1988). Two competing explanations are tested.

Aldo Leopold accorded great significance to the images he used to describe both the land and humankind’s relation to it. Focusing on three key images of Leopold’s “ecological imaginary”—the balance, the pyramid, and the round river—this article argues that the most profound of these is the round river. Contrasting this image with James Lovelock’s portrayal of the earth as Gaia, it further argues that Leopold’s round river can be interpreted as a contemporary, ecological reworking of the primordial, Homeric experience of (...) Being, according to which the foundation of the world is a round river, Oceanus. (shrink)

The Nyāya school of classical Indian epistemology defended (by today’s standards) a radical version of epistemic externalism. They also gave arguments from their epistemological positions to an early version of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. In this paper I assess the value of such an argument, concluding that a modified version of the Nyāya argument may be defensible.

This paper has three objectives. The first is to show how David Lewis' influential account of how a population is related to its language requires that speakers be 'conceptually autonomous' in a way that is incompatible with content ascriptions following from the assumption that its speakers share a language. The second objective is to sketch an alternate account of the psychological and sociological facts that relate a population to its language. The third is to suggest a modification of Lewis' account (...) of convention that will allow one to preserve the claim that there are conventions of language. (shrink)

William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed to a conception of language as (...) private, and the most notorious instance of this commitment can purportedly be found in his discussion of the feelings associated with logical terms like ‘and’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ in the Principles’s chapter, ‘The Stream of Thought’. However, the received view stands in need of serious re-evaluation. In particular, there is little reason to think that James’s notorious discussion of the ‘if-feeling’ should be understood as an attempt to give an account of the meaning of ‘if ’ (indeed, there is little reason to even think that Wittgenstein interpreted him this way). The picture of our ideas developed in ‘The Stream of Thought’ sits badly with any theory that identifies meanings with ideas in this way, and while James’s chapter on ‘Conception’ (as well as some portions of Some Problems of Philosophy) has also been portrayed as committing James to the in principle privacy of language, it will be argued here that James’s account of our ‘conceptions’ is radically different from that of the private linguist. (shrink)

The following argument is widely assumed to be invalid: there is a pain in my finger; my finger is in my mouth; therefore, there is a pain in my mouth. The apparent invalidity of this argument has recently been used to motivate the conclusion that pains are not spatial entities. We argue that this is a mistake. We do so by drawing attention to the metaphysics of pains and holes and provide a framework for their location which both vindicates the (...) argument's validity and explains why it appears invalid. To this end, we show that previously proposed explanations for the apparent invalidity of the argument fail. Moreover, we show that our account accommodates and explains seemingly opposing linguistic data. We conclude that the ‘pain-in-mouth argument’ does not undermine the view that pains are spatial entities. (shrink)

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...) paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought. (shrink)

'Interpretational' accounts of meaning are frequently treated as incompatible with accounts stressing language's 'social' character. However, this paper argues that one can reconcile interpretational and social accounts by distinguishing "methodological" from "ascriptional" individualism. While methodological individualism requires only that the meaning of one's terms ultimately be grounded in facts about oneself, ascriptional individualism requires that the meaning of one's terms be independent of how others use theirs. Interpretational accounts are committed only to methodological individualism, while arguments for languages social character (...) are best understood as attacks on ascriptional individualism. As a result, one can recognize language's social character and still be an interpretationalist. (shrink)

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands (...) semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts. (shrink)

'Epistemic' theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries, it's just that we can't know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain 'presentist' assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and if (...) allows that the meaning constitutive elements of our linguistic practices can extend into the future, the possibility of a new sort of 'normative epistemicism' emerges. (shrink)

I argue that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an act counts as an assertion are sufficient for that act to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information – or conversational common ground – maintained by conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. (...) I suggest that the function of assertion is not to share information, but to signal that we can be relied on to act as though some information is true, and to foster that same reliability in others. (shrink)

My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane – kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) elements and compounds. The other I’ll call the object-concept in the abstract sense of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege in their logico-semantical enquiries. The material object-concept constitutes the heart of our received logico / ontic system, still massively influenced (...) by Aristotle after almost 2.5 millennia. On such an account, the fundamentality of material objects and their attributes are the metaphysical basis of the cosmos, as reflected in our received logic, Quine’s ‘canonical notation’ – derived via the empiricism of Russell from Frege’s function-based Begriffschrifft, and consisting of concrete singular terms and variables, quantifiers and predicate-expressions. The inadequacy of Frege’s approach to understanding concepts is reflected in his initial question. Frege enquires of ‘what it is that we are calling an object’, remarking that he regards a regular definition as impossible: “we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis”. The imagined ultimacy or simplicity of the idea of a single object (arithmetically, just a unit – one as against two, three, four, etc.) as foundational to the calculus is just that – imagined. It is also guaranteed to block the comprehension of the substance-concept. (shrink)

Modal epistemologists parse modal conditions on knowledge in terms of metaphysical possibilities or ways the world might have been. This is problematic. Understanding modal conditions on knowledge this way has made modal epistemology, as currently worked out, unable to account for epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths, and unable to characterise widely discussed issues such as the problem of religious diversity and the perceived epistemological problem with knowledge of abstract objects. Moreover, there is reason to think that this (...) is a congenital defect of orthodox modal epistemology. This way of characterising modal epistemology is however optional. It is shown that one can non-circularly characterise modal conditions on knowledge in terms of epistemic possibilities, or ways the world might be for the target agent. Characterising the anti-luck condition in terms of epistemic possibilities removes the impediment to understanding epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths and opens the door to using these conditions to shed new light on some longstanding epistemological problems. (shrink)

Wiggins’ (2012) argument against propositional accounts of knowing how is based on a development of some considerations taken from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle argued that the knowledge needed for participation in an ethos cannot be codified in propositional form so as to let it be imparted to someone who did not already have it. This is because any putative codification would be incomplete, and require that knowledge in order to extend it to novel cases. On a reasonable interpretation of his (...) argument, Wiggins claims that the same goes for practical knowledge in general, and that this shows that a propositional view of knowing how is incorrect. This paper shows that this argument is unsound. (shrink)

Hillary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, his original use of the brain in a vat scenario was meant to illustrate a point about the "mind/world relationship." In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of (...) a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's conclusions about the scenario are, however, actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world. Reflections on semantics give us no compelling reason to suppose that claims like "I am a brain in a vat" could not turn out to be true. (shrink)

This paper argues that treating James' "The Will to Believe" as a defense of prudential reasoning about belief seriously misrepresents it. Rather than being a precursor to current defenses of prudential arguments, James paper has, if anything, more affinities to certain prominent strains in contemporary naturalized epistemology.