In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue (...) that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments. (shrink)

There has recently been an expansion of anti-abortion measures in the United States. Within these various measures there is a divide over certain exceptions: some States permit abortion for pregnancies caused by rape while other States do not. This paper explores the underlying moral justification for such exceptions. I argue that within the dominant moral framework for reproductive ethics these exceptions are incoherent by their own lights. But this is not a defense of an exceptionless anti-abortion position. Rather, because the (...) typical way of making such exceptions is incoherent, this shows why the anti-abortion movement is dangerous: as these incoherencies are acknowledged, this may lead to ever stricter measures being put in place. I end by suggesting that those who are sympathetic to these exceptions should find it easier to move to a pro-choice position rather than to a more extreme, exceptionless one. (shrink)

Metaethical Mooreanism is the view that without being able to explain how we know certain moral claims we can nevertheless be sure that we do know them. In this paper I focus on the Moorean argument against moral error theory. I conclude that it fails. To show this failure, I first distinguish Moorean claims from Moorean arguments, and then so-called presumptive support from dialogical support. With these distinctions in place, I argue that the key Moorean claim requires dialogical support in (...) order to be used within the Moorean argument against moral error theory, but metaethical Mooreans have only provided presumptive support for the Moorean claim. Not only is this presumptive support inadequate for fending off the moral error theory, it is doubtful that Mooreans can actually provide dialogical support for the key Moorean claim. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on (...) whether p? Plausibly not. But if not, how can we explain this impossibility? I suggest that the best resolution is to view the traditional core norms on belief as themselves conditional in a certain sense, one that I think has independent plausibility. The results of this investigation may also tell us something about epistemic norms on suspension, on the assumption, which I defend elsewhere, that suspension is waiting. (shrink)

We are all capable of arriving at views that are driven by corrupting non-epistemic interests. But we are nonetheless very skilled at performing a commitment to epistemic goods in such cases. I call this the ‘Problem of Mere Epistemic Performance’, and it generates a need to determine when these commitments are illusory and when they are in fact genuine. I argue that changing one’s mind, when done in response to the evidence and at a likely cost to oneself, are the (...) best indications that an agent is committed to epistemic goods, that they are genuinely in the game of giving and asking for reasons. This is because changing one’s mind in this way goes as far as we can in eliminating the possibility that the agent has an ulterior motivation for their epistemic practices. Moreover, this account shows that the consensus view of the ideal epistemic agent is mistaken. The ideal agent must have false beliefs or deficient epistemic practices because only then do they have the opportunity to change their mind and establish a commitment to epistemic goods – a commitment that even an agent with only true beliefs and maximal justification or understanding may lack. (shrink)

The discipline of knowledge translation (KT) emerged as a way of systematically understanding and addressing the challenges of applying health and medical research in practice. In light of ongoing and emerging critique of KT from the medical humanities and social sciences disciplines, KT researchers have become increasingly aware of the complexity of the translational process, particularly the significance of culture, tradition and values in how scientific evidence is understood and received, and thus increasingly receptive to pluralistic notions of knowledge. Hence, (...) there is now an emerging view of KT as a highly complex, dynamic, and integrated sociological phenomenon, which neither assumes nor creates knowledge hierarchies and neither prescribes nor privileges scientific evidence. Such a view, however, does not guarantee that scientific evidence will be applied in practice and thus poses a significant dilemma for KT regarding its status as a scientific and practice-oriented discipline, particularly within the current sociopolitical climate. Therefore, in response to the ongoing and emerging critique of KT, we argue that KT must provide scope for relevant scientific evidence to occupy an appropriate position of epistemic primacy in public discourse. Such a view is not intended to uphold the privileged status of science nor affirm the “scientific logos” per se. It is proffered as a counterbalance to powerful social, cultural, political and market forces that are able to challenge scientific evidence and promote disinformation to the detriment of democratic outcomes and the public good. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...) sketch an alternative picture on which the fundamental norm of assertion is to say what you believe, but both belief and assertion are weak. To help make sense of this, we propose that both belief and assertion involve navigating a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity, and so it can makes sense to believe/say something you only have weak evidence for, if it is informative enough. (shrink)

The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data (from Moorean conjunctions) adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals.

‘Gender disappointment’ is regularly reported by those whose child’s sex does not match the sex that they, the parent, desired. With symptoms ranging from mere fleeting sadness to documented cases of serious depression, alienation from one’s child, and emotional suffering, it is clear that so-called ‘gender disappointment’ is a serious issue, that has, as yet, seen little philosophical attention (though see Hendl and Browne 2020). In this chapter I explore gender disappointment, not from the perspective of a parent who ended (...) up with the child of the wrong sex at birth, but rather, from the perspective of a different kind of gender disappointment: the transgender person who grew up and only then disappointed their parents by turning out to be the ‘wrong’ gender. This perspective, I argue, reveals a great deal about the shared gender essentialism at the heart of patriarchal and cissexist ideology. Moreover, I will argue that it reveals the underlying propertarian relationship of parents to their children under contemporary capitalism – a troubling relationship that legitimates the treatment of children as objects to be designed and controlled as commodities at the whims of parents. In this way I disagree with Whyman when he writes that “a preference for having a child of one sex over the other should be considered one of those irrational things of which some sense can nevertheless be made – like aesthetic taste” (Whyman 2021, 113-114). I argue, to the contrary, that the desire for a child of one particular gender is not akin to a mere unproblematic aesthetic preference. Instead, and following the rich feminist tradition of thinking about the patriarchal origins of sexual desire, I argue that we must see these desires as troubling reflections of dominant patriarchal and cissexist ideology, underwritten by a particular neoliberal capitalist mode of production. Moreover, we can seek to change those desires. (shrink)

Preservationism states that memory preserves the justification of the beliefs it preserves. More precisely: if S formed a justified belief that p at t1 and retains in memory a belief that p until t2, then S's belief that p is prima facie justified via memory at t2. Preservationism is an unchallenged orthodoxy in the epistemology of memory. Advocates include Sven Bernecker, Tyler Burge, Alvin Goldman, Gilbert Harman, Michael Huemer, Matthew McGrath, and Thomas Senor. I develop three dilemmas for it, (...) in part by drawing on research in cognitive psychology. The dilemmas centre on preservationism's implications for certain cases involving either stored beliefs, forgotten evidence, or recollection failure. Each dilemma shows that preservationism either is false or lacks key support. (shrink)

Much of the discussion of the role of emerging technologies associated with AI, machine learning, digital simulacra, and relevant ethical considerations such as those discussed in the target article, take a relatively narrow and episodic view of a person’s healthcare needs. There is much speculation about diagnostic, treatment, and predictive applications but relatively little consideration of how such technologies might be used to address a person’s lived experience of illness and ongoing care needs. This is likely due to the greater (...) weight or priority given to acute care needs and the role of medical treatment in care provision, but it may also reflect the limitations of current technologies and our limited vision of their potential application. Such limitations are not surprising given that we are still grappling with the complexities and nuances of achieving the ethical and humanistic ideals of care, namely, care that addresses the hermeneutical, relational, contextual, temporal, and agential dimensions of a person’s health and wellbeing. (shrink)

What sort of philosophical work are natural kinds suited for? Scientific realists often contend that they provide the ‘aboutness’ of successful of scientific classification and explain their epistemic utility (among other side hustles). Recent history has revealed this to be a tricky job — particularly given the present naturalistic climate of philosophy of science. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of different sorts of theories. This phenomenon that has suggested to some that philosophical theorizing about natural kinds has reached (...) a sort of ‘scholastic twilight’ and that the concept (or family of concepts) has outlived its utility: perhaps there’s no work natural kinds are suited for. While I think this pessimistic take is unwarranted, I will argue that it is worth rethinking the roles to which a reasonably naturalistic account of natural kinds can be fruitfully put. Natural kinds deserve a shorter work week. (shrink)

A Lockean metaphysics of belief that understands outright belief as a determinable with degrees of confidence as determinates is supposed to effect a unification of traditional coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon of “mistuned (...) knowledge” – knowledge in the absence of rational confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured, even without token identity, given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t (...) ideal. My goal in this article is to begin to articulate a more general account of ‘natural kind phenomena’. While I do not claim that this account should satisfy everyone—it is built around a certain conception of the epistemic role of kinds and has an obvious pragmatic flavour—I believe that it has the resources to go further than extant alternatives, in particular the homeostatic property cluster view of kinds. (shrink)

Memory skepticism denies our memory beliefs could have any notable epistemic good. One route to memory skepticism is to challenge memory’s epistemic trustworthiness, that is, its functioning in a way necessary for it to provide epistemic justification. In this paper we develop and respond to this challenge. It could threaten memory in such a way that we altogether lack doxastic attitudes. If it threatens memory in this way, then the challenge is importantly self-defeating. If it does not threaten memory in (...) this way, then the challenge leaves a foundation for an inference to the best explanation response, one we articulate and support. (shrink)

In recent years, multiple authors have voiced discontent with the theoretical and practical neglect of the concept of ability. This includes, but is not limited to, philosophers of disability who have long assailed the implausible accounts of ability utilized by most social and political philosophers. Historically, most philosophers took it for granted that the meaning of ability will come easily, or is even a given, when higher-order questions are addressed. The aim of this chapter is to animate discussions about ability (...) trouble, which is to say, to animate (i) concern over the lack of philosophical inquiry that takes the concept of ability seriously as a problem in its own right and to animate (ii) novel interest in and further research on the concept of ability—and, correlatively, disability. We first analyze a famous argument concerning moral status that exemplifies how treating the concept of ability as a mere matter of common sense can lead philosophical inquiry awry. We then turn to the role of the concept of ability in an account that does, at least prima facie, take the concept seriously: Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. While better than common-sense approaches, we draw a cautionary tale, suggesting that even there the concept is simplified in theoretically and practically problematic ways. We conclude with a number of open questions offered in the hope of inspiring future non-ideal research on the topic. (shrink)

Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...) the relevance of non-epistemic factors we might call "future-comparative" – e.g., that you’ll have more decisive evidence on whether p tomorrow – to the justification of suspending judgment. The second, from Jane Friedman, is to explain the point of the neutral attitude without appealing to inquiry and thus taking goal-related factors, which are not epistemic, such as the value of the goal or the prospects for finding means to achieve it, to bear on the justification of the neutral attitude. My defense of traditionalism relies on distinguishing three ways of being neutral on a question: agnosticism, inquiry and suspension of judgment. Traditionalism is saved because, of these, agnosticism alone is a genuine doxastic attitude. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that Robert Nozick's experience machine argument poses an insurmountable obstacle to hedonism as a theory of well-being. After an initial attempt to demonstrate that the persuasiveness of this argument rests on a key ambiguity, I argue that the intuitions to which the thought experiment appeals are not nearly as clear as many philosophers suppose they are. I believe that a careful consideration of the origin of those intuitions -- especially in light of the so-called "paradox of hedonism" (...) -- reveals that they can, in fact, fit quite comfortably into a hedonistic theory of well-being. (shrink)

Kornblith’s “Epistemic Normativity” is a classic in the now voluminous literature on the source of epistemic normativity. His account is as simple as it is bold: the source is desire, not a desire for true belief, or knowledge, but any set of desires. No matter what desires you have, so long as you are a being of a kind that employs beliefs in cost-benefit analysis, certain sorts of truth-centered epistemic norms will have normative force for you. We can distinguish two (...) questions about epistemic normativity, both under discussion in Kornblith’s paper, but which he does not clearly distinguish: (i) why should we care about having beliefs that satisfy epistemic norms? (ii) how do epistemic considerations have reason-giving force with respect to particular propositions? I will argue that Kornblith’s proposal goes some distance toward answering the first question but is less helpful in answering the second. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion - roughly: one should not assert what one does not know - can explain a variety of Moorean conjunctions, a fact often cited as evidence in its favor. David Sosa ("Dubious Assertions," Phil Studies, 2009) has objected that the account does not generalize satisfactorily, since it cannot explain the infelicity of certain iterated conjunctions without appealing to the controversial "KK" principle. This essay responds by showing how the knowledge account can handle such conjunctions without use (...) of the KK principle. (shrink)

This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis of (...) these attributions. Attributionism is presented as rejecting the claim that agents are morally responsible only for what is under their voluntary control, as well as the claim that agents are responsible for wrongdoing only if they could have responded to the moral considerations that spoke against your behavior. These supposed conditions on moral responsibility are rejected for the same reason: agents may reveal features of their selves, in a way that is sufficient for moral responsibility, even in cases in which these conditions are not met. (shrink)

I argue that the Bradley of the 1883 The Principles of Logic marks and separates contents under tension in judgments. The separation comes in attending to content as a device for recuperation of scale. For Bradley that involves scaling material of immediate presentations under limits. As unrealised commitments of so- called real and ideal are an exclusionary condition of singular comprehension, singularity of judgments is mark of singular reflex with privative force; not some singularity in objects taken in episodic correspondence (...) forming distinctively in singular judgment. The distinguishing input, as it were, to judgment forms is via content in some consequential and fact-like limitive facing of the real. I want to approach Bradley in this slightly negative sense as imposing via inversion some sensible restrictions under some conditions of scaling rather than in direct contact with materials to which one stands in some act of obversion, finally. (shrink)

Matti Eklund has argued that a new problem in metanormative theory arises when we consider the possibility of "normative counterparts"—normative concepts with the same normative roles as OUGHT and RIGHT, but with different extensions. I distinguish two versions of the problem, and propose a solution: when we attend to the attitudinal commitments involved in the possession and application of some normative concepts, we find that tolerance for the possibility of normative counterparts is rationally ruled out.

Are corporations and other complex groups ever morally responsible in ways that do not reduce to the moral responsibility of their members? Christian List, Phillip Pettit, Kendy Hess, and David Copp have recently defended the idea that they can be. For them, complex groups (sometimes called collectives) can be irreducibly morally responsible because they satisfy the conditions for morally responsible agency; and this view is made more plausible by the claim (made by Theiner) that collectives can have minds. In this (...) paper I give a new argument against the idea that collectives can be irreducibly morally responsible in the ways that individuals can be. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind (what Uriah Kriegel calls "the phenomenal intentionality research program") and moral theory (David Shoemaker's tripartite theory of moral responsibility), I argue that for something to have a mind, it must be phenomenally conscious, and that the fact that collectives lack phenomenal consciousness implies that they are incapable of accountability, an important form of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well have good reason to avoid (...) engineering. In their recent ‘What is a Conspiracy Theory?’, M. Giulia Napolitano and Kevin Reuter argue that the disagreement between generalists and particularists in the literature on conspiracy theories is best characterized as a set of dueling conceptual engineering projects. While I agree with their turn to this metaphilosophical literature, I give a very different account of its applicability. Particularists, on my account, are better read as aiming to diagnose the ways in which many discussions of the concept of conspiracy theories are a form of conceptual domination, where this broader context should then prompt us to abandon or block any concept of conspiracy theory that treats its referents as inherently defective. Broader metaphilosophical lessons are drawn. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

A far-reaching and influential view in evolutionary biology claims that species are cohesive units held together by gene flow. Biologists have recognized empirical problems facing this view; after sharpening the expression of the view, we present novel conceptual problems for it. At the heart of these problems is a distinction between two importantly different concepts of cohesion, what we call integrative and response cohesion. Acknowledging the distinction problematizes both the explanandum of species cohesion and the explanans of gene flow that (...) are central to the view we discuss. We conclude by tracing four broader implications for the study and conceptualization of species. (shrink)

Recent work has defended “Euclidean” theories of set size, in which Cantor’s Principle (two sets have equally many elements if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them) is abandoned in favor of the Part-Whole Principle (if A is a proper subset of B then A is smaller than B). It has also been suggested that Gödel’s argument for the unique correctness of Cantor’s Principle is inadequate. Here we see from simple examples, not that Euclidean theories of set (...) size are wrong, but that they must be either very weak and narrow or largely arbitrary and misleading. (shrink)

Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...) of its own norm, and he tied his maxim of Quality to knowledge. I also develop a simple Gricean-inspired argument showing that the Quality maxim is not dependent on the Cooperative Principle. If it is not thus dependent, then the Cooperative Principle cannot be the explanation of, or source of normativity for, the Quality maxim. Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. (shrink)

Pathologies of agency affect both groups and individuals. I present a case study of agential pathology in a group, in which supposedly rogue members of a group act in light of what they take the group’s interests and attitudes to be, but in a way that goes against the group’s explicitly stated agential point of view. I consider several practical concerns brought out by rogue member action in the context of a group agent, focusing in particular on how it undermines (...) the agency of the group and whether or not the group agent itself may be responsible for it. (shrink)

Constitutivists hope to locate the foundations of ethics in the nature of action. They hope to find norms that are constitutive of agency. Recently David Enoch has argued that even if there are such norms, they cannot provide the last word when it comes to normativity, since they cannot tell us whether we have reason to be agents rather than shmagents. I argue that the force of the shmagency objection has been considerably overestimated, because philosophers on both sides of the (...) debate have failed to grasp the true source of the authority of agency’s constitutive norm. Some constitutivists believe that this authority is rooted in the inescapability of agency. Yet agency is not, in fact, inescapable. What actually grounds the authority of agency’s constitutive norm is the fact that there is no standpoint outside of agency from which we can intelligibly ask normative questions. (shrink)

This chapter identifies a novel family of metaethical theories that are non-descriptive and that aim to explain the action-guiding qualities of normative thought and language. The general strategy is to consider different relations language might bear to a given content, where we locate descriptivity (or lack of it) in these relations, rather than locating it in a theory that begins with the expression of states of mind, or locating it in a special kind of content that is not way-things-might-be content. (...) One such view is sketched, which posits two different content-fixing cognitive roles for bits of language. One role fixes a descriptive relation to content and another role fixes a non-descriptive relation to content. In addition to non-descriptivity and action guidance, the chapter briefly considers the appearance of mind-independent authoritative force, disagreement, and Frege–Geach concerns. (shrink)

Soofi1 aims to develop an account of dignity in dementia care based on Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. He does this by drawing on the Kitwood and Bredin2 list of well-being indicators, in order to fill out her account of human flourishing to cover aspects such as practical reasoning that appear beyond the reach of those with relatively severe dementia. As Soofi points out, Nussbaum’s claim that such lost abilities can be compensated through guardianship measures is implausible. He asserts in response that (...) his account of dignity is sufficient to address the desiderata he sets out at the start, including especially the problem of exclusionary implications any putative account should address. So far, so good, but an objection Soofi raises for his own account is that it seems unable to cover cases of severe late-stage dementia. His response is, > …that there is insufficient factual evidence to suggest that people at the very advanced stages of dementia lose all capabilities. But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that this is true. This, however, still does not undermine the conceptual rigour of the modified version of Nussbaum’s account. This is because the list of the dementia-specific capabilities that I …. (shrink)

Scholars often assert that Plato and Aristotle share the view that discursive thought is internal speech. However, there has been little work to clarify or substantiate this reading. In this paper I show Plato and Aristotle share some core commitments about the relationship of thought and speech, but cash out TIS in different ways. Plato and Aristotle both hold that discursive thinking is a process that moves from a set of doxastic states to a final doxastic state. The resulting judgments (...) can be true or false. Norms govern these final judgments and, in virtue of that, they govern the process that arrives at those judgments. The principal norm is consistency. However, the philosophers differ on the source of this norm. For Plato, persuasiveness and accuracy ground non-contradiction because internal speech is dialogical. For Aristotle, the Principle of Non-Contradiction grounds a Doxastic Thesis that no judgment can contradict itself. For Aristotle, metaphysics grounds non-contradiction because internal speech is monological. (shrink)

Implicit in much of the recent literature on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics is the assumption that when speakers argue that we should talk or think about a concept in a specific way, they are doing so as inquirers—as speakers who are invested in arriving at the correct or best view of this concept. In this paper I question that assumption and argue that philosophers have been too quick to project idealized versions of themselves into the contexts of conceptual articulation (...) and conceptual dispute. Speakers often engage in this activity to further interests of theirs that have nothing to do with inquiry, instead carrying out what I call ‘conceptual domination’. Speakers are engaged in conceptual domination when they aim to bring about and enforce widespread uptake for a view of a concept by exploiting institutions and institutional authority. They do so because this view best serves interests that are either irrelevant to or actively interfere with inquiry concerning this concept—paradigmatically their material interests. I consider sources of evidence for assessing whether speakers are engaging in conceptual domination, analyze two case studies, and consider how to push back against conceptual dominators. (shrink)

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to (...) our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

I argue that that an influential strategy for understanding conspiracy theories stands in need of radical revision. According to this approach, called ‘generalism’, conspiracy theories are epistemically defective by their very nature. Generalists are typically opposed by particularists, who argue that conspiracy theories should be judged case-by-case, rather than definitionally indicted. Here I take a novel approach to criticizing generalism. I introduce a distinction between ‘Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’ and ‘Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’. Generalists uncritically center (...) the latter in their analysis, but I show why the former must be centered by generalists’ own lights: they are the clearest representatives of their views, and they are by far the most harmful. Once we make this change in paradigm cases, however, various typical generalist theses turn out to be false or in need of radical revision. Conspiracy theories are not primarily produced by extremist ideologies, as generalists typically claim, since mainstream, purportedly non-extremist political ideologies turn out to be just as, if not more responsible for such theories. Conspiracy theories are also, we find, not the province of amateurs: they are often created and pushed by individuals widely viewed as experts, who have the backing of our most prestigious intellectual institutions. While generalists may be able to take this novel distinction and shift in paradigm cases on board, this remains to be seen. Subsequent generalist accounts that do absorb this distinction and shift will look radically different from previous incarnations of the view. (shrink)

We argue that contemporary conceptualizations of “persons” have failed to achieve the moral goals of “person-centred care” (PCC, a model of dementia care developed by Tom Kitwood) and that they are detrimental to those receiving care, their families, and practitioners of care. We draw a distinction between personhood and selfhood, pointing out that continuity or maintenance of the latter is what is really at stake in dementia care. We then demonstrate how our conceptualization, which is one that privileges the lived (...) experiences of people with dementia, and understands selfhood as formed relationally in connection with carers and the care environment, best captures Kitwood’s original idea. This conceptualization is also flexible enough to be applicable to the practice of caring for people at different stages of their dementia. Application of this conceptualization into PCC will best promote the well-being of people with dementia, while also encouraging respect and dignity in the care environment. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumption is implausible, as updating beliefs with conditional information does not (...) in general preserve independencies. We conclude that the approach taken by van Rooij and Lassiter does not succeed in resolving the proviso problem. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs, and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in Philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it is still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomena. However, such arguments turn out to rest upon how we define what gets counted (...) both as a ‘conspiracy’ and a ‘conspiracy theory’, and such arguments rest upon shaky assumptions. It turns out that it is not clear that conspiracy theories are prima facie unlikely, and so the claim that such theories do not typically appear in our accounts of the best explanations for particular kinds of events needs to be reevaluated. (shrink)

When we make ethical claims, we invoke a kind of objective authority. A familiar worry about our ethical practices is that this invocation of authority involves a mistake. This worry was perhaps best captured by John Mackie, who argued that the fabric of the world contains nothing so queer as objective authority and thus that all our ethical claims are false. Kantians such as Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman offer accounts of the objectivity of ethics that do without the controversial (...) realist assumptions which gives rise to Mackie’s skepticism. They contend that our ethical claims correctly invoke objective authority not by corresponding to some normative pocket of the fabric of reality, but rather by expressing commitments that are inescapable. This Kantian strategy is often advertised as an alternative to traditional but “boring” metaethics. Its proponents promise to vindicate our ethical practices without entangling us in familiar metanormative disputes about the metaphysics, epistemology and semantics of ethics. In this paper, I argue that the Kantian strategy cannot make good on this promise. Considered as an attempt to sidestep traditional metaethics, it lacks the resources to produce the desired normative conclusions. The outlook for the Kantian strategy becomes more promising, though, if we pair it with one of two familiar metanormative theories: expressivism or reductionism. The resulting metaethically-loaded versions of the Kantian strategy can deliver the promised conclusions, but only by plunging straight into the quagmire of traditional metaethics. And there all of the familiar objections to expressivism and reductionism await. (shrink)

During the coronavirus pandemic, communities have faced shortages of important healthcare resources such as COVID-19 vaccines, medical staff, ICU beds and ventilators. Public health officials in the U.S. have had to make decisions about two major issues: which infected patients should be treated first, and which people who are at risk of infection should be inoculated first. Following Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, adopted guidelines have tended to value both whole lives and life-years. This process of collective moral reasoning has revealed (...) our common commitment to both Kantian and utilitarian principles. For Kant, respecting people’s rights entails that we ought to value whole lives equally. Therefore we ought to allocate resources so as to maximise the number of patients who survive to discharge. By contrast, the principle of utility has us maximise life-years so that people can satisfy more of their considered preferences. Although people are treated impartially in the utilitarian calculus, it does not recognise their equal worth. Subjecting Kantian ethics and utilitarianism to the process of reflective equilibrium lends support to the idea that we need a pluralistic approach that would accommodate our moral intuitions regarding both the equal value of whole lives and the additive value of life-years. (shrink)

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently (...) by Blackburn, Gibbard, and others. So, my first aim (§1) in this paper is to pose this question about expressivism’s commitments in the theory of meaning and to characterize the answer I think is most natural, given the place expressivist accounts attempt to occupy metaethics. This involves appeal to an ideationalist account of meaning. Unfortunately for the expressivist, however, this answer generates a problem; it’s my second aim (§2) to articulate this problem. Then, my third aim (§3) is to argue that this problem doesn’t extend to the sort of account of the meaning of ethical claims that I favor, which is like expressivism in rejecting a representationalist order of semantic explanation but unlike expressivism in basing an alternative order of semantic explanation on inferential role rather than expressive function. (shrink)