6 found
Order:
  1. What reasoning might be.Markos Valaris - 2017 - Synthese 194 (6).
    The philosophical literature on reasoning is dominated by the assumption that reasoning is essentially a matter of following rules. This paper challenges this view, by arguing that it misrepresents the nature of reasoning as a personal level activity. Reasoning must reflect the reasoner’s take on her evidence. The rule-following model seems ill-suited to accommodate this fact. Accordingly, this paper suggests replacing the rule-following model with a different, semantic approach to reasoning.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  2. Reasoning and Regress.Markos Valaris - 2014 - Mind 123 (489):101-127.
    Regress arguments have convinced many that reasoning cannot require beliefs about what follows from what. In this paper I argue that this is a mistake. Regress arguments rest on dubious (although deeply entrenched) assumptions about the nature of reasoning — most prominently, the assumption that believing p by reasoning is simply a matter of having a belief in p with the right causal ancestry. I propose an alternative account, according to which beliefs about what follows from what play a constitutive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   38 citations  
  3. Transparency as Inference: Reply to Alex Byrne.Markos Valaris - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (2pt2):319-324.
    In his essay ‘Transparency, Belief, Intention’, Alex Byrne (2011) argues that transparency—our ability to form beliefs about some of our intentional mental states by considering their subject matter, rather than on the basis of special psychological evidence—involves inferring ‘from world to mind’. In this reply I argue that this cannot be correct. I articulate an intuitive necessary condition for a pattern of belief to count as a rule of inference, and I show that the pattern involved in transparency does not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  4. Attention and Synthesis in Kant's Conception of Experience.Merritt Melissa & Markos Valaris - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268):571-592.
    In an intriguing but neglected passage in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant appears to link the synthetic activity of the understanding in experience with the phenomenon of attention (B156-7n). In this paper, we take up this hint, and draw upon Kant's remarks about attention in the Anthropology to shed light on the vexed question of what, exactly, the understanding's role in experience is for Kant. We argue that reading Kant's claims about synthesis in this light allows us to combine two aspects (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  5.  3
    Reasoning, defeasibility, and the taking condition.Markos Valaris - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (28):1–16.
    According to the so-called ‘Taking Condition’ (a label due to Boghossian 2014) on inference, for a response R in circumstances C to count as an instance of reasoning or inferring, it must be the case that the agent’s taking it that R is warranted or justified in C plays (the right sort of) explanatory role in her R-ing. The Taking Condition has come under much criticism in the theory of reasoning. While I believe that these criticisms can be answered, my (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. Dogmatism and Moorean Reasoning.Markos Valaris - manuscript
    According to dogmatism, one may know a proposition by inferring it from a set of evidence even if one has no independent grounds for rejecting a skeptical hypothesis compatible with one’s evidence but incompatible with one’s conclusion. Despite its intuitive attractions, many philosophers have argued that dogmatism goes wrong because they have thought that it licenses Moorean reasoning — i.e., reasoning in which one uses the conclusion of an inference as a premise in an argument against a skeptical hypothesis that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark