How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality comes directly through our senses and what others tell us. They appeal to these external sources in order to know. The attainment of Theory of Mind (...) (ToM) at this age is commonly seen as the significant shift in development in understanding disagreements in knowledge claims. Children attaining ToM understand that someone exposed to incorrect or incomplete information might have false beliefs. Disagreement, then, is still attributed to objective sources of knowledge. The current study examines the later developing Interpretive Theory of Mind (iToM) as the basis for children’s understanding of how people with access to the same information might disagree and what this means for how to provide justification for a knowledge claim. Fourteen 2nd graders with the most iToM responses to four tasks and 14 with the fewest iToM responses were selected from a larger sample of 91. In analyses of interviews about a story in which two experts make different claims about a scientific phenomenon, those in the high iToM group noted subjective perspective and processes as the source of disagreement and suggested the need for investigation as the means to knowing. In contrast, those in the low iToM group mostly could not explain the source of disagreement and held that knowledge is acquired from external sources. A comparison of the interviews regarding the science story 2 years later allows for a qualitative description of the development. Those in the low iToM group showed more general recognition of subjective and constructive processes in knowing whereas those in the high iToM group identified interpretive processes and the relativity of perspectives with implications for how observations were conducted and interpreted. Only those in the high iToM group referred to the importance of evidence as a basis for knowledge claims at either point in the study. (shrink)

This paper offers a qualified defense of a historically popular view that I call sentimental perceptualism. At a first pass, sentimental perceptualism says that emotions play a role in grounding evaluative knowledge analogous to the role perceptions play in grounding empirical knowledge. Recently, András Szigeti and Michael Brady have independently developed an important set of objections to this theory. The objections have a common structure: they begin by conceding that emotions have some important epistemic role to play, but then (...) go on to argue that understanding how emotions play that role means that there must be some alternative, emotion-independent route to obtaining knowledge of value. If there has to be such an emotion-independent route, then the perceptual analogy breaks down in a significant way. In this paper, I argue that the right ways for sentimental perceptualists to respond to each of these objections are revealed by thinking through how analogous objections applied to perception and the empirical domain would be answered. Although Szigeti's and Brady's objections should not persuade sentimental perceptualists to give up their view, the objections do put important constraints on what a form of the view has to be like in order to do exciting metaethical work. (shrink)

Many philosophers assume that, when making moral decisions under uncertainty, we should choose the option that has the greatest expected moral value, regardless of how risky it is. But their arguments for maximizing expected moral value do not support it over rival, risk-averse approaches. In this paper, I present a novel argument for maximizing expected value: when we think about larger series of decisions that each decision is a part of, all but the most risk-averse agents would prefer that we (...) consistently choose the option with the highest expected value. To the extent that what we choose on a given occasion should be guided by the entire series of choices we prefer, then on each occasion, we should choose the option with the highest expected moral value. (shrink)

nated discussion of the semantics of such verbs. I will call this view.

Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode consists of two arguments but just one thought experiment, the thought experiment cannot (...) be the arguments. (shrink)

Solidarity is a widespread but under-explored phenomenon. In this paper, I give a philosophical account of solidarity, answering three salient questions: What motivates acts of solidarity? What unifies different acts into tokens of a single type of act, one of solidarity? And what values do acts of solidarity exhibit? The answer to all three, I argue, involves a certain way of relating to others: identifying with them on the basis of shared features, and identifying with the larger group that one (...) and the others both belong to. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, "the meaning of life" refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a (...) particular way—in terms of a unified life narrative—can supply us with many of those benefits. We might lose little if there is no such thing as the meaning of life, since there is still something that can provide much of what is valuable about it. (shrink)

Pautz has argued that the most prominent naive realist account of hallucination—negative epistemic disjunctivism—cannot explain how hallucinations enable us to form beliefs about perceptually presented properties. He takes this as grounds to reject both negative epistemic disjunctivism and naive realism. Our aims are two: First, to show that this objection is dialectically ineffective against naive realism, and second, to draw morals from the failure of this objection for the dispute over the nature of perceptual experience at large.

In het spoor van de moord op George Floyd door een politieagent in Minneapolis, vinden er wereldwijd ‘Black Lives Matter’ protesten plaats. De beeldenstorm in ons land sluit hierbij aan. Acties van fanatici, of hebben ze een punt dat we liever niet onder ogen zien? Beelden van dubieuze nationale helden horen in museum thuis, niet op straat.

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...) transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different in (...) kind from descriptive claims, with a wholly distinct practical and expressive character. This account suggests that there are no normative facts, and so nothing that needs any troublesome shoehorning into a scientific account of the world. This work explains that nevertheless, normative claims are constrained by the world, and answerable to reason and argumentation, in a way that makes them truth-apt and objective. (shrink)

The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, there is a crucial step that is left undefended, and that (...) without a defense of this step, the flight to reference is a fatally flawed strategy; it cannot succeed in resolving philosophical issues. In this paper we begin by setting out the flight to reference strategy and explaining what is wrong with arguments that invoke the strategy. We then illustrate the problem by considering arguments for and against eliminative materialism. In the final section we argue that much the same problem undermines Philip Kitcher's attempt to defend scientific realism. (shrink)

1. The primary evidence and motivation for externalism in the philosophy of mind is provided by the semantic facts that support direct reference theories of names, indexi- cal pronouns, and natural kind terms. But many externalists have forgotten their sem- antic roots, or so I shall contend here. I have become convinced of this by a common reaction among externalists to the main argument of my 1991 paper AAnti-Individual- ism and Privileged Access.@ In that argument, I concluded that externalism is (...) incompat- ible with the principle that we can have privileged, non-empirical knowledge of the contents of our own thoughts. The reaction in question amounts to a dismissive denial of one of my argument=s main premises. This premise, which I defended at length in the paper, is that an externalist thesis regarding a cognitive property should hold that possession of the property by a person _logically_, or _conceptually_, implies the existence of objects external to that person. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views (...) about what is involved in understanding, explanation, good reasoning, and about how we ought to do philosophy of science. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, scholars have reassessed the role of amour-propre in Rousseau’s thought. While it was once believed that he had an entirely negative valuation of the emotion, it is now widely held that he finds it useful and employs it to strengthen moral attachments, conjugal love, civic virtue and moral heroism. At the same time, scholars are divided as to whether this positive amour-propre is an antidote to the negative or dangerous form. Some scholars are confident that (...) ‘inflamed’ amour-propre can be overcome while others adopt a more fatalistic view. While mindful of Rousseau’s pessimism in his most famous works, this essay seeks to identify a middle position. By contending Rousseau’s discussion of amour-propre is largely concerned with the problems surrounding identity construction in commercial, urban societies, it will be argued that amour-propre can be lessened to manageable levels in more rural societies, that is, agrarian provincial life. (shrink)

Call ‘radical moral theorizing’ the project of developing a moral theory that not only tries to conform to our existing moral judgments, but also manifests various theoretical virtues: consistency, simplicity, explanatory depth, and so on. Many moral philosophers assume that radical moral theorizing does not require any particular metaethical commitments. In this paper, I argue against this assumption. The most natural justification for radical moral theorizing presupposes moral realism, broadly construed; in contrast, there may be no justification for radical moral (...) theorizing if moral anti-realism is true. (shrink)

This chapter explores Cicero’s reception in the German Enlightenment, a topic that has garnered less scholarly attention compared to his influence in the Anglosphere. Focusing on Johann Joachim Spalding and Christian Garve as case studies, we highlight Cicero’s profound and often underappreciated impact on German intellectual thought, particularly in shaping ideas about the human vocation (Bestimmung des Menschen)—a legacy that extends even to the towering figure of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant.

In this paper we respond to criticisms by Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea in their “In Defense of Sceptical Theism : A Reply to Almeida and Oppy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83.

It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that the sunk cost effect is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent (...) to mimic a resolute chooser, someone who adopts the best plan at the outset of a decision problem and sticks with it, even when resoluteness is unfeasible. I discuss several kinds of cases in which honoring sunk costs coincides with resolute choice. (shrink)

Kant refers to analytic cognition in several prominent places. The prevailing wisdom, however, denies the possibility of analytic cognition within his theory of cognition. I shall argue that this is mistaken. I show that we can account for analytic cognition’s possibility by appealing to variants of the more familiar conditions on the cognition of objects. I also highlight analytic cognition’s connection to insight and analytic knowledge. In the process, I provide a fuller account of Kant’s view of our mental lives (...) than has been typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Challenging the basic assumptions of a meat-eating society, Deep Vegetarianism is a spirited and compelling defense of a vegetarian lifestyle. Considering all of the major arguments both for and against vegetarianism and the habits of meat-eaters, vegetarians, and vegans alike, Michael Allen Fox addresses vegetarianism's cultural, historical, and philosophical background; details vegetarianism's impact on one's living and thinking; and relates vegetarianism to classical and recent defenses of the moral status of animals. Demonstrating how a vegetarian diet is related to (...) our awareness of the world and our ethical outlook on life, Fox looks at the different kinds of vegetarian commitments people make and their reasons for making them. In chapters that address such issues as the experiences, emotions, and grounds that are part of choosing vegetarianism, Fox discusses not only good health, animal suffering, and the environmental impacts of meat production, but such issues as the meaning of food, world hunger, religion and spirituality, and, significantly, the links share between vegetarianism and other human rights movements and ideologies, particularly feminism. In an extensive chapter that addresses arguments made by advocates of meat-eating, Fox speaks to claims of humans as natural carnivores, animals as replaceable, and vegetarians as anti-feminist. He also addresses arguments surrounding the eating habits of indigenous peoples, eating free-range animals, and carnivorous behavior among animals. The most complete examination of the vegetarian outlook to date, Deep Vegetarianism reveals the broad range of philosophical views that contribute to such a choice. It recognizes, and calls for, a conscious awareness of -- and an individual responsibility to -- the issues that exist in the moral, political, and social spheres of our existence. With its lively and controversial discussion, Deep Vegetarianism promises to appeal to anyone looking to explore the relationship between dietary choice, lifestyle, the treatment of animals and the environment, and personal ethical responsibility. It will also be particularly useful for students and teachers of moral philosophy, ethics, religion, comparative cultures, ecology, and feminism. (shrink)

This article is an explication and defense of Kant’s view that ‘imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A120, fn.). Imagination comes into perception at a far more basic level than Strawson allows, and it is required for the constitution of intuitions (= sense experiences) out of sense impressions. It also plays an important part in explaining how it is possible for intuitions to have intentional contents. These functions do not involve the application of contents, (...) and I offer a schematic account of how they arise from preconceptual synthesis. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that dissociative identity disorder (DID) is best interpreted as a causal model of a (possible) post-traumatic psychological process, as a mechanical model of an abnormal psychological condition. From this perspective we examine and criticize the evidential status of DID, and we demonstrate that there is really no good reason to believe that anyone has ever suffered from DID so understood. This is so because the proponents of DID violate basic methodological principles of good causal modeling. (...) When every ounce of your concentration is fixed upon blasting a winged pig out of the sky, you do not question its species' ontological status. James Morrow, City of Truth (1990). (shrink)

Discusses the old problem of how to characterize apparently intentional states that appear to lack objects. In tandem with critically discussing a recent proposal by Tim Crane, I develop the line of reasoning according to which talking about intentional objects is really a way of talking about intentional states—in particular, it’s a way of talking about their satisfaction-conditions.

Is morality relative? Might what is morally ‘right’ for one culture be morally ‘wrong’ for another? Issue two contained two pieces arguing against this kind of moral relativism. Here, Michael Lacewing suggests that there may be more truth in relativism than was suggested.

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Tyler Burge's (1979) famous thought experiment concerning 'arthritis' is commonly assumed to show that all ascriptions of content to beliefs and other attitudes are dependent for their truth upon facts about the agent's social and linguistic environment. It is also commonly claimed that Burge's argument shows that Putnam's (1975) result regarding natural kind terms applies to all general terms whatever, and hence shows that all such terms have wide meanings.1 But I wish to show here, first, that neither Burge's initial (...) thought experiment nor a second type of example that Burge describes supports either of these conclusions. Second, I will identify the proper conclusion to draw from Burge's discussion and show that this conclusion does not really pose a serious problem for individualism about the mental. And finally, I will argue that Burge's discussion does not in fact provide a conclusive reason for believing its proper conclusion. (shrink)

Could the concept of 'evil' apply to AI? Drawing on PF Strawson's framework of reactive attitudes, this paper argues that we can understand evil as involving agents who are neither fully inside nor fully outside our moral practices. It involves agents whose abilities and capacities are enough to make them morally responsible for their actions, but whose behaviour is far enough outside of the norms of our moral practices to be labelled 'evil'. Understood as such, the paper argues that, when (...) it comes to AI and evil, we have more to fear from semi-autonomous, hybrid agents: agents who have enough of a capacity to operate within a minimal form of human practices of participation and responsibility, yet remain partially outside of it, capable of acting from outside the parameters of ordinary interactions in certain circumstances, perhaps sometimes for reasons unknown. (shrink)

In this paper I first introduce Tomasello’s notion of thought and his account of its emergence and development through differentiation, arguing that it calls into question the theory bias of the philosophical tradition on thought as well as its frequent atomism. I then raise some worries that he may be overextending the concept of thought, arguing that we should recognize an area of intentionality intermediate between action and perception on the one hand and thought on the other. After that I (...) argue that the co-operative nature of humans is reflected in the very structure of their intentionality and thought: in co-operative modes such as the mode of joint attention and action and the we-mode, they experience and represent others as co-subjects of joint relations to situations in the world rather than as mere objects. In conclusion, I briefly comment on what Tomasello refers to as one of two big open questions in the theory of collective intentionality, namely that of the irreducibility of jointness. (shrink)

We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent's hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment's outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered a (...) way of measuring how self-reflective an agent is. We give examples of extended environments and introduce a simple transformation which experimentally seems to increase some standard RL agents' performance in a certain type of extended environment. (shrink)

Kant's arguments for the synthetic a priori status of geometry are generally taken to have been refuted by the development of non-Euclidean geometries. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that, on the contrary, the development of non-Euclidean geometry has confirmed Kant's views, for since a demonstration of the consistency of non-Euclidean geometry depends on a demonstration of its equi-consistency with Euclidean geometry, one need only show that the axioms of Euclidean geometry have 'intuitive content' in order to show that both (...) Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are bodies of synthetic a priori truths. Michael Friedman has argued that this defence presumes a polyadic conception of logic that was foreign to Kant. According to Friedman, Kant held that geometrical reasoning itself relies essentially on intuition, and that this precludes the very possibility of non-Euclidean geometry. While Friedman's characterization of Kant's views on geometrical reasoning is correct, I argue that Friedman's conclusion that non-Euclidean geometries are logically impossible for Kant is not. I argue that Kant is best understood as a proto-constructivist and that modern constructive axiomatizations (unlike Hilbert-style axiomatizations) of both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry capture Kant's views on the essentially constructive nature of geometrical reasoning well. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate (...) Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

The book presents the first comprehensive survey of limits of the intentional control of action from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together leading scholars from philosophy, psychology, and the law to elucidate this theoretically and practically important topic from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. It provides reflections on conceptual foundations as well as a wealth of empirical data and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers alike. Among the authors: Clancy Blair, Todd S. Braver, Michael (...) W. Cole, Anika Fäsche, Maayan Davidov, Peter Gollwitzer, Kai Robin Grzyb, Tobias Heikamp, Gabriele Oettingen, Rachel McKinnon, Nachschon Meiran, Hans Christian Röhl, Michael Schmitz, John R. Searle, Gottfried Seebaß, Gisela Trommsdorff, Felix Thiede, J. Lukas Thürmer, Frank Wieber. (shrink)

By way of engagement with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, Lonergan, and neo-Thomism more broadly, Michael Baur and Gadamer discuss historicity, the Enlightenment and scientism, the epistemic implications of hylomorphism, and the nature of human finitude and death.

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

This paper is a defense of investigations into the meanings of words by reflecting on their use as a philosophical method for investigating the emotions. The paper defends such conceptual analysis against the critique that it is short of empirical grounding and at best reflects current “common-sense beliefs.” Such critique harks back to Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, his idea that all language is theory dependent and the subsequent critique of “linguistic philosophy” as sanctifying our ordinary use of words, (...) as empirically naïve, unscientific and founded on outmoded theories of meaning. This paper is an attempt to show why such critique is misplaced. Conceptual analysis, properly construed, need not depend on empirical considerations. On the contrary, conceptual analysis of emotions is often a prerequisite to empirical investigations. Furthermore, conceptual analysis need not make ordinary language sacred and need not rely on a theory of meaning or on an analytic/synthetic distinction. (shrink)

The intentionality of virtually all thought that is distinctive of human beings is linguistically based and constitutively normative. As Robert Brandom claims in Making It Explicit, this normativity is best understood as having roots in social practice. But Brandom is wrong to insist that all intentionality is normative (thus denying intentionality to nonhuman, nonlinguistic animals). For even the simple social practices that ground the most primate norms presuppose robust nonnormative intentionality. Furthermore, Brandom’s appeal to perception to supplement his informal semantics (...) with a view to avoiding complete indeterminacy of linguistic meaning is either ineffective or arbitrary and unjustified unless perceptual states are recognized as having nonnormative intentional contents that go way beyond the mere differential responsiveness which he allows them. (shrink)

In this article, we reconsider the syntactical analysis as well as the categorial status of two Medieval French elements, et and ne. In this connection, we illustrate and compare various approaches which principally differ with regard to the assignment of a unique category or of various categories to these elements. In the context of this comparison, we address some of the questions pertaining to their motivations and the evidence which has been offered in their favor, showing that approaches which assign (...) a unique category to et and ne, respectively, prove to be empirically more adequate. (shrink)

According to the propositional view of belief, a belief situation involves a believer’s standing in the relation of belief to a proposition. It is argued that the propositional view has unacceptable implications concerning the identity conditions of belief situations involving beliefs with indexical contents, especially where such beliefs are held over a period of time during which background circumstances change. After a critical discussion of Perry’s alternative to the propositional view, a version of the adverbial theory of belief, which accounts (...) satisfactorily for the identity conditions of belief situations, is advanced. This theory, which avoids the standard objections to adverbialism, is defended against the charge that it cannot provide an account of the semantics of sentences attributing the same belief to two or more believers. In the course of this defense it is argued that the standard propositional account of such sentences is insensitive to everyday language. (shrink)