This is a book review of John MacFarlane's "Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.".

John MacFarlane has made relativism popular again. Focusing just on his original discussion, I argue that the data he uses to motivate the position do not, in fact, motivatie it at all. Many of the points made here have since been made, independently, by Hermann Cappelen and John Hawthorne, in their book Relativism and Monadic Truth.

Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g., “by spring 2023 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions (...) is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth-value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism uses to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals. Yet, it was found that participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed. Keywords: Epistemic Modals, Relativism, Norm Conflicts, Retraction, Semantics, Truth Conditions, Argumentation. (shrink)

These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].

John MacFarlane defends a radical form of truth relativism that makes the truth of assertions relative not only to contexts of utterance but also to contexts of assessment, or perspectives. Making sense of assessment-sensitive truth is a matter of making sense of the normative commitments undertaken by speakers in using assessment sensitive sentences. This paper argues against the possibility of making sense of such a practice. Evans raised a challenge to the coherence of relative truth. A modification of (...) the challenge can be given against MacFarlane’s revised views on assertion. The main objection to the relativist is that rational and earnest speakers are not bound by assessment-relative standards of correctness. (shrink)

John MacFarlane argues against objectivism about “tasty”/”not tasty” in the following way. If objectivism were true then, given that speakers use “tasty”/”not tasty” in accordance with a rule, TP, speakers would be using an evidently unreliable method to form judgements and make claims about what is tasty. Since this is implausible, objectivism must be false. In this paper, I describe a context in which speakers deviate from TP. I argue that MacFarlane's argument against objectivism fails when applied (...) to uses of “not tasty” within this context. So objectivism about “not tasty” is still a viable position within this context. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct David Foster Wallace’s argument against fatalism in his undergraduate honors thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”. My goal is to present the argument in a clear and concise way, so that it is easy to see its main line of reasoning and potential power. A secondary goal is to offer clarificatory and critical notes on some of the issues at stake. The reconstruction reveals interesting connections between Wallace’s argument and John (...) MacFarlane’s recent work on relative truth. (shrink)

In assessing the veridicality of utterances, we normally seem to assess the satisfaction of conditions that the speaker had been concerned to get right in making the utterance. However, the debate about assessor-relativism about epistemic modals, predicates of taste, gradable adjectives and conditionals has been largely driven by cases in which seemingly felicitous assessments of utterances are insensitive to aspects of the context of utterance that were highly relevant to the speaker’s choice of words. In this paper, we offer an (...) explanation of why certain locutions invite insensitive assessments, focusing primarily on ’tasty’ and ’might’. We spell out some reasons why felicitous insensitive assessments are puzzling and argue briefly that recent attempts to accommodate such assessments (including attempts by John MacFarlane, Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies) all fail to provide more than hints at a solution to the puzzle. In the main part of the paper, we develop an account of felicitous insensitive assessments by identifying a number of pragmatic factors that influence the felicity of assessments. Before closing, we argue that the role of these factors extend beyond cases considered in the debate about assessor-relativism and fit comfortably with standard contextualist analyses of the relevant locutions. (shrink)

John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism – Assessment Sensitivity – provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: statements about the future that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and solves the puzzle, Assessment Sensitivity is ultimately self-refuting.

According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It (...) turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane. (shrink)

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kölbel, Lasersohn and (...) class='Hi'>MacFarlane to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at (...) the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here. (shrink)

Is logic normative for reasoning? In the wake of work by Gilbert Harman and John MacFarlane, this question has been reduced to: are there any adequate bridge principles which link logical facts to normative constraints on reasoning? Hitherto, defenders of the normativity of logic have exclusively focussed on identifying adequate validity bridge principles: principles linking validity facts—facts of the form 'gamma entails phi'—to normative constraints on reasoning. This paper argues for two claims. First, for the time being at (...) least, Harman’s challenge cannot be surmounted by articulating validity bridge principles. Second, Harman’s challenge can be met by articulating invalidity bridge principles: principles linking invalidity facts of the form 'gamma does not entail phi' to normative constraints on reasoning. In doing so, I provide a novel defence of the normativity of logic. (shrink)

According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in ac- tion. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counter- example by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while act- ing, there is as yet no fact of the (...) matter as to whether the agent will succeed. Since his belief that he will is not yet true while his action is in progress, he can- not possibly know that he is indeed bringing about the intended goal. Knowl- edge in action is not only unnecessary for intentional action, it seems, but–at least as regards success-bound types of action–impossible to attain in the first place. -/- In this paper I argue that traditional strategies to counter these objections are unsatisfactory and propose a new account of knowledge in action which has two core features: (i) It invokes an externalist conception of justification which not only meets Davidson’s challenge, but also casts doubts on the tacit internalist premise on which his example relies. (ii) Drawing on recent work about by John MacFarlane, the proposed account conceives of claims to in action as assessment-sensitive so as to overcome the factivity objection. From a retrospective point of evaluation, previous claims about future events and actions can not only be deemed as having been true, but also as having been known. (shrink)

Review of John MacFarlane's book, "Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and Its Applications".

There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished—the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct (...) the history of the arguments for and against this idea. Then, I propose my own version of the Thin Red Line theory which is immune to the major objections found in the literature. I argue that the semantic disagreement is grounded in distinct metaphysical presuppositions. My solution is expressed in a conceptual framework proposed by John MacFarlane, who distinguishes semantics from postsemantics. I extend his distinction and introduce a new notion of presemantics to elucidate my idea. (shrink)

Assessment relativism, as developed by John MacFarlane, is the view that the truth of our claims involving a variety of English expressions—‘tasty’, ‘knows’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘might’, and ‘ought’—is relative not only to aspects of the context of their production but also to aspects of the context in which they are assessed. Assessment relativism is thus a form of truth relativism which is offered as a new way of understanding perspectival thought and talk. In this article, I present the main (...) theses of assessment relativism, focusing in particular on highlighting the points of commonality and contrast with other forms of truth relativism. I then offer some critical remarks concerning the motivation of assessment relativism in relation to matters of taste. (shrink)

Here we focus on two questions: What is the proper semantics for deontic modal expressions in English? And what is the connection between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons? Our contribution towards thinking about the first, which makes up the bulk of our paper, considers a representative sample of recent challenges to a Kratzer-style formal semantics for modal expressions, as well as the rival views—Fabrizio Cariani’s contrastivism, John MacFarlane’s relativism, and Mark Schroeder’s ambiguity theory—those challenges are thought (...) to motivate. These include the Professor Procrastinate challenge to Inheritance (the principle that ‘If ought p and p entails q, then ought q), as well as Parfit’s miners puzzle regarding information-sensitive deontic modals. Here we argue that a Kratzer-style view is able to meet all of the challenges we’ll consider. In addition, we’ll identify challenges for each of those rival views. Our overall conclusion is that a Kratzer-style semantics remains the one to beat. With this assumption in place, we then ask how we should understand the relationship between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons. Should, for example, we hold that the truth of such a statement entails the existence of a normative reason for some agent to comply? Here we argue that, in many cases, acceptance of Kratzer’s semantics for deontic modals leaves open for substantive normative theorizing the question of whether an agent has a normative reason to comply with what she ought to do. (shrink)

This essay explores the thesis that for vague predicates, uncertainty over whether a borderline instance x of red/large/tall/good is to be understood as practical uncertainty over whether to treat x as red/large/tall/good. Expressivist and quasi-realist treatments of vague predicates due to John MacFarlane and Daniel Elstein provide the stalking-horse. It examines the notion of treating/counting a thing as F , and links a central question about our attitudes to vague predications to normative evaluation of plans to treat a (...) thing as F . The essay examines how the account applies to normatively defective or contested terms. The final section raises a puzzle about the mechanics of MacFarlane’s detailed implementation for the case of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

The paper discusses an objection, put forward by - among others - John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse. The objection goes roughly as follows: while it is usually possible to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse without being a relativist about anything else, relativism about semantic discourse entails global relativism, which in turn entails subjective idealism, which we can reasonably assume to be false. The paper’s first section sketches Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s (...) ideas about semantic discourse and gives a fully explicit formulation of the objection. The second section describes and briefly discusses the formal apparatus needed to evaluate the objection - which is basically equivalent to John MacFarlane’s recent development of David Kaplan’s classic semantic framework. Finally, the third section explains in detail why the objection fails. I show that even though relativism about semantic discourse does entail a form of global relativism, the relativism in question does not entail anything like Berkeleyan or Fichtean idealism. This particular kind of relativism holds that which character (in Kaplan’s sense) is associated to a given utterance depends on what MacFarlane calls “the context of assessment”. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that our use of vague language poses an intractable problem for any account of content and communication on which (i) the things we assert are propositions and (ii) understanding an assertion requires recognizing which proposition the speaker asserted. John MacFarlane has argued that this problem concerning vague language is itself a species of an even more general problem for such traditional accounts—the problem posed by “felicitous” underspecification. Repurposing certain ideas from Allan Gibbard, (...) class='Hi'>MacFarlane offers a novel theory of vagueness, plan-expressivism, as an account that can handle both vagueness and such underspecification in communication. In this paper, I argue that despite its many virtues, plan-expressivism fails as a general account of meaning and communication. In particular, I show that when it comes to the problem of felicitous underspecification, plan-expressivism fares no better than the more traditional accounts of content and communication it is intended to replace. Along the way, I argue that the problem of felicitous underspecification puts considerable pressure on an assumption that is at the core of both plan-expressivism and the accounts of its more traditionalist rivals – namely, that in cases of successful linguistic communication, we must always be able to find something – whether a propositional content or a conversational update – that the speaker is intending to share with her audience. (shrink)

The supervaluationist approach to branching time (‘SBT-theory’) appears to be threatened by the puzzle of retrospective determinacy: if yesterday I uttered the sentence ‘It will be sunny tomorrow’ and only in some worlds overlapping at the context of utterance it is sunny the next day, my utterance is to be assessed as neither true nor false even if today is indeed a sunny day. John MacFarlane (“Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths” 81) has recently criticized a promising (...) solution to this puzzle for falling short of an adequate account of ‘actually’. In this paper, I aim to rebut MacFarlane's criticism. To this effect, I argue that: (i) ‘actually’ can be construed either as an indexical or as a nonindexical operator; (ii) if ‘actually’ is nonindexical, MacFarlane's criticism is invalid; (iii) there appear to be independent reasons for SBT-theorists to claim that ‘actually’ is a nonindexical expression. (shrink)

Some philosophers, like Mark Richard and Paul Boghossian, have argued against relativism that it cannot account for the possibility of faultless disagreement. However, I will contend that the objections they moved against relativism do not target its ability to account for the possibility of faultless disagreement per se. Ra- ther, they should be taken to challenge its capacity to account for another element of our folk conception of disagreement in certain areas of discourse—what Cris- pin Wright has dubbed parity. What (...) parity demands is to account for the possibil- ity of coherently appreciating, within a committed perspective, that our oppo- nent’s contrary judgement is somehow on a par with our own judgement. Under- stood in this way, Boghossian’s and Richard’s objections put indeed considerable pressure on relativism—or so I will argue. I will consider John MacFarlane’s at- tempt to resist their objections and I will show that, once their arguments are properly understood as targeting parity, the attempt is not successful. In the last section of the paper I will offer a diagnosis of what is at the heart of the relativist inability to account for parity—namely its assumption of a monistic conception of the normativity of truth. (shrink)

In the recent philosophy of language literature there is a debate over whether contextualist accounts of the semantics of various terms can accommodate intuitions of disagreement in certain cases involving those terms. Relativists such as John MacFarlane have claimed that this motivates adopting a form of relativist semantics for these terms because the relativist can account for the same data as contextualists but doesn’t face this problem of disagreement (MacFarlane 2005, 2007 and 2009). In this paper I (...) focus on the case of epistemic predicates and I argue that on a certain assumption about what is involved in assessing an utterance the epistemic contextualist can solve her problem of disagreement. This undercuts a motivation for epistemic relativism. (shrink)

The similarities between the philosophical debates surrounding assessment sensitivity and moral luck run so deep that one can easily adapt almost any argument from one debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the other. This article takes Brian Rosebury's strategy for resisting moral luck in “Moral Responsibility and ‘Moral Luck' ” (1995) and turns it into a strategy for resisting assessment sensitivity. The article shows that one of Bernard Williams's examples motivating moral (...) luck is very similar to one of the examples John MacFarlane uses to motivate the assessment sensitivity of epistemic modals, and in particular the assessment sensitivity of the auxiliary verb “might.” This means that, if Rosebury is right and we do not actually need moral luck to explain Williams's example, we may not need assessment sensitivity to account for the semantic behaviour of the epistemic modal verb “might” either. (shrink)

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call (...) reversibility. We argue that the invariantist account of disagreement is incompatible with reversibility, and we go on to show that reversible sentences cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement, even without assuming invariantism. Our argument therefore undermines much of the motivation for invariantism, and provides a new source for constraints on the proper explanation of purported data about disagreement. (shrink)

We are living through an era of increased robotisation. Some authors have already begun to explore the impact of this robotisation on legal rules and practice. In doing so, many highlight potential liability gaps that might arise through robot misbehaviour. Although these gaps are interesting and socially significant, they do not exhaust the possible gaps that might be created by increased robotisation. In this article, I make the case for one of those alternative gaps: the retribution gap. This gap arises (...) from a mismatch between the human desire for retribution and the absence of appropriate subjects of retributive blame. I argue for the potential existence of this gap in an era of increased robotisation; suggest that it is much harder to plug this gap than it is to plug those thus far explored in the literature; and then highlight three important social implications of this gap. (shrink)

One of the most noticeable trends in recent years has been the increasing reliance of public decision-making processes on algorithms, i.e. computer-programmed step-by-step instructions for taking a given set of inputs and producing an output. The question raised by this article is whether the rise of such algorithmic governance creates problems for the moral or political legitimacy of our public decision-making processes. Ignoring common concerns with data protection and privacy, it is argued that algorithmic governance does pose a significant threat (...) to the legitimacy of such processes. Modelling my argument on Estlund’s threat of epistocracy, I call this the ‘threat of algocracy’. The article clarifies the nature of this threat and addresses two possible solutions. It is argued that neither solution is likely to be successful, at least not without risking many other things we value about social decision-making. The result is a somewhat pessimistic conclusion in which we confront the possibility that we are creating decision-making processes that constrain and limit opportunities for human participation. (shrink)

Suppose we are about to enter an era of increasing technological unemployment. What implications does this have for society? Two distinct ethical/social issues would seem to arise. The first is one of distributive justice: how will the efficiency gains from automated labour be distributed through society? The second is one of personal fulfillment and meaning: if people no longer have to work, what will they do with their lives? In this article, I set aside the first issue and focus on (...) the second. In doing so, I make three arguments. First, I argue that there are good reasons to embrace non-work and that these reasons become more compelling in an era of technological unemployment. Second, I argue that the technological advances that make widespread technological unemployment possible could still threaten or undermine human flourishing and meaning, especially if they do not remain confined to the economic sphere. And third, I argue that this threat could be contained if we adopt an integrative approach to our relationship with technology. In advancing these arguments, I draw on three distinct literatures: the literature on technological unemployment and workplace automation; the antiwork critique—which I argue gives reasons to embrace technological unemployment; and the philosophical debate about the conditions for meaning in life—which I argue gives reasons for concern. (shrink)

From a moral point of view we think of ourselves as capable of responsible actions. From a scientific point of view we think of ourselves as animals whose behaviour, however highly evolved, conforms to natural scientific laws. Natural Agency argues that these different perspectives can be reconciled, despite the scepticism of many philosophers who have argued that 'free will' is impossible under 'scientific determinism'. This scepticism is best overcome, according to the author, by defending a causal theory of action, that (...) is by establishing that actions are constituted by behavourial events with the appropriate kind of mental causal history. He sets out a rich and subtle argument for such a theory and defends it against its critics. Thus the book demonstrates the importance of philosophical work in action theory for the central metaphysical task of understanding our place in nature. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. After introducing, clarifying, and motivating Perceptual Confidence, I catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, a distinction that is sometimes said to carry a lot of metaphysical weight. I also explain how Perceptual Confidence fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception and why it implies that experiences don't have objective accuracy conditions.

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My (...) evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons. (shrink)

Synthesizing the domains of investigation highlighted in current research in distributed cognition and related fields, this paper offers an initial taxonomy of the overlapping types of resources which typically contribute to distributed or extended cognitive systems. It then outlines a number of key dimensions on which to analyse both the resulting integrated systems and the components which coalesce into more or less tightly coupled interaction over the course of their formation and renegotiation.

Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows and judgments about how a person should act. But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.

Researchers have debated whether knowledge or certainty is a better candidate for the norm of assertion. Should you make an assertion only if you know it's true? Or should you make an assertion only if you're certain it's true? If either knowledge or certainty is a better candidate, then this will likely have detectable behavioral consequences. I report an experiment that tests for relevant behavioral consequences. The results support the view that assertability is more closely linked to knowledge than to (...) certainty. In multiple scenarios, people were much more willing to allow assertability and certainty to come apart than to allow assertability and knowledge to come apart. (shrink)

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. By asserting we share knowledge, coordinate behavior, and advance collective inquiry. Accordingly, assertion is of considerable interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. This paper advances our understanding of the norm of assertion. Prior evidence suggests that knowledge is the norm of assertion, a view known as “the knowledge account.” In its strongest form, the knowledge account says that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for assertability: you should (...) make an assertion if and only if you know that it is true. The knowledge account has been rejected on the grounds that it conflicts with our ordinary practice of evaluating assertions. This paper reports four experiments that address an important objection of this sort, which focuses on a class of examples known as “Gettier cases.” The results undermine the objection and, in the process, provide further evidence for the knowledge account. The findings also teach some important general lessons about intuitional methodology and the curation of genres of thought experiment. (shrink)

An impressive case has been built for the hypothesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion, otherwise known as the knowledge account of assertion. According to the knowledge account, you should assert something only if you know that it’s true. A wealth of observational data supports the knowledge account, and some recent empirical results lend further, indirect support. But the knowledge account has not yet been tested directly. This paper fills that gap by reporting the results of such a test. (...) The knowledge account passes with flying colors. (shrink)

According to factive accounts of the norm of belief and decision-making, you should not believe or base decisions on a falsehood. Even when the evidence misleadingly suggests that a false proposition is true, you should not believe it or base decisions on it. Critics claim that factive accounts are counterintuitive and badly mischaracterize our ordinary practice of evaluating beliefs and decisions. This paper reports four experiments that rigorously test the critic’s accusations and the viability of factive accounts. The results undermine (...) the accusations and provide the best evidence yet of factive norms of belief and decision-making. The results also help discriminate between two leading candidates for a factive norm: truth and knowledge. Knowledge is the superior candidate. (shrink)

If the contents of our thoughts are partly determined by facts outside our heads, can we still know those contents directly, without investigating our environment? What if we were surreptitiously switched to Twin-Earth? Would we know the contents of our thoughts under these unusual circumstances? By looking carefully at what determines the content of a second-order thought, a candidate for self-knowledge, the paper argues that we can know the contents of our thoughts directly, even after being switched. Learning about the (...) switch, however, does raise some interesting difficulties. (shrink)

Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding (...) retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory. (shrink)

Recent work in philosophy and cognitive science shows that knowledge is the norm of our social practice of assertion, in the sense that an assertion should express knowledge. But why should an assertion express knowledge? I hypothesize that an assertion should express knowledge because the point of assertion is to transmit knowledge. I present evidence supporting this hypothesis.

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social (...) cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes. (shrink)

I report two experiments studying the relationship among explicit judgments about what people see, know, and should assert. When an object of interest was surrounded by visibly similar items, it diminished people’s willingness to judge that an agent sees, knows, and should tell others that it is present. This supports the claim, made by many philosophers, that inhabiting a misleading environment intuitively decreases our willingness to attribute perception and knowledge. However, contrary to stronger claims made by some philosophers, inhabiting a (...) misleading environment does not lead to the opposite pattern whereby people deny perception and knowledge. Causal modeling suggests a specific psychological model of how explicit judgments about perception, knowledge, and assertability are made: knowledge attributions cause perception attributions, which in turn cause assertability attributions. These findings advance understanding of how these three important judgments are made, provide new evidence that knowledge is the norm of assertion, and highlight some important subtleties in folk epistemology. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that interesting forms of epistemic evaluation are insensitive to truth in a very specific way. Suppose that two possible agents believe the same proposition based on the same evidence. Either both are justified or neither is; either both have good evidence for holding the belief or neither does. This does not change if, on this particular occasion, it turns out that only one of the two agents has a true belief. Epitomizing this line of thought are thought (...) experiments about radically deceived “brains in vats.” It is widely and uncritically assumed that such a brain is equally justified as its normally embodied human “twin.” This “parity” intuition is the heart of truth-insensitive theories of core epistemological properties such as justification and rationality. Rejecting the parity intuition is considered radical and revisionist. In this paper, I show that exactly the opposite is true. The parity intuition is idiosyncratic and widely rejected. A brain in a vat is not justified and has worse evidence than its normally embodied counterpart. On nearly every ordinary way of evaluating beliefs, a false belief is significantly inferior to a true belief. Of all the evaluations studied here, only blamelessness is truth-insensitive. (shrink)

I propose and defend the hypothesis that understanding is the norm of explanation. On this proposal, an explanation should express understanding. I call this the understanding account of explanation. The understanding account is supported by social and introspective observations. It is also supported by the relationship between knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and assertion and explanation, on the other.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases are a group of neuromuscular diseases that often cause suffering and premature death. New mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs) may offer women with mtDNA diseases the opportunity to have healthy offspring to whom they are genetically related. MRTs will likely be ready to license for clinical use in the near future and a discussion of the ethics of the clinical introduction ofMRTs is needed. This paper begins by evaluating three concerns about the safety of MRTs for clinical (...) use on humans: (1) Is it ethical to use MRTs if safe alternatives exist? (2) Would persons with three genetic contributors be at risk of suffering? and (3) Can society trust that MRTs will be made available for humans only once adequate safety testing has taken place, and that MRTs will only be licensed for clinical use in a way that minimises risks? It is then argued that the ethics debate about MRTs should be reoriented towards recommendingways to reduce the possible risks of MRT use on humans. Two recommendations are made: (1) licensed clinical access to MRTs should only be granted to prospective parents if they intend to tell their children about their MRT conception by adulthood; and (2) sex selection should be used in conjunction with the clinical use ofMRTs, in order to reduce transgenerational health risks. (shrink)