Phillips argues that blindsight is due to response criterion artefacts under degraded conscious vision. His view provides alternative explanations for some studies, but may not work well when one considers several key findings in conjunction. Empirically, not all criterion effects are decidedly non-perceptual. Awareness is not completely abolished for some stimuli, in some patients. But in other cases, it was clearly impaired relative to the corresponding visual sensitivity. This relative dissociation is what makes blindsight so important and interesting.

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...) I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

Anosognosia for visual deficits—cases where significant visual deficits go unnoticed—challenges the view that our own conscious experiences are what we know best. We review these widespread and striking failures of awareness. Anosognosia can occur with total blindness, visual abnormalities induced by brain lesions, and eye diseases. We show that anosognosia for visual deficits is surprisingly widespread. Building on previous accounts, we introduce a framework showing how apparently disparate forms of anosognosia fit together. The central idea is that, to notice a (...) deficit, individuals need to form expectations about normal vision, compare expectations and visual input, and judge any mismatch at the metacognitive level. A failure in any of these three steps may lead to unawareness of visual deficits. (shrink)

I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defective and (...) permissible from an epistemic point of view? The first solution I consider maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are always impermissible but can be excusable. The second solution maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are bad inquiries that can be conducted by inquirers we can legitimately trust. I argue against the former and in favor of the latter. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that metal’s ‘heaviness’ is conceptually inarticulable. I argue, on the contrary, that ‘heaviness’ is a matter of inaccessibility—the ‘something more’ that makes metal ‘heavy’ is actually something less: less auditory processing fluency. Like profound literature, metal resists, but also invites and rewards, interpretation. I argue that understanding ‘heaviness’ in terms of auditory processing fluency allows us to make sense of a number of otherwise puzzling features of the music, and to articulate a unifying gestalt for (...) the genre. (shrink)

This article takes issue with two prominent views in the current debate around epistemic partiality in friendship. Strong views of epistemic partiality hold that friendship may require biased beliefs in direct conflict with epistemic norms. Weak views hold that friendship may place normative expectations on belief formation but in a manner that does not violate these norms. It is argued that neither view succeeds in explaining the relationship between epistemic norms and friendship norms. Weak views inadvertently endorse a form of (...) motivated reasoning, failing to resolve the normative clash they seek to avoid. Strong views turn out to be incoherent once we consider the question of whether the requirement to form an epistemically partial belief is independent of whether the belief in question would be true. It is then argued that an epistemology of friendship should recognise the special role that understanding plays in friendship. On this view, friendship normatively requires understanding the truth about our friends. This entails that epistemic partiality, far from being a requirement, is in fact at odds with good friendship. (shrink)

Review of Felice C. Frankel's "The visual elements—design: a handbook for communicating science and engineering.".

Emotion terms such as “sad”, “happy” and “joyful” apply to a wide range of entities. We use them to refer to mental states of sentient beings, and also to describe features of non-mental things such as comportment, nature, events, artworks and so on. Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of emotion descriptions. It argues that emotion terms are polysemous and distinguishes seven related senses. In addition, the paper applies the analysis to shed light on (...) a long-standing debate in philosophy of music concerning emotion descriptions of music. (shrink)

In 1924, the Munich-school phenomenologist Moritz Geiger argued that there are dynamic essences. His two examples are the tragic, and being human, his main ideas are that what it takes to be tragic varies over time historically and that what makes an organism human varies across different stages of its ontogenetic development. He hence points to two ways in which essences may be dynamic, that is, subject to change. The current paper takes Geiger’s view seriously and assumes that it poses (...) an explanatory challenge for the, then and now, standard view that essences are ‘Platonic’, i.e. cannot be subject to change. In the first part of the paper, I introduce Geiger’s view and a bit of its historical context. In the second, I first formulate the challenge it poses to the standard ‘platonic’ view of essence, then discuss how this challenge can be met by a contemporary view of essence discussing three potential responses. The first relies on a notion of relativized essence, the second on the distinction between determinables and determinates, the third and last one on multidimensional properties. Finally, I argue that the last of these three proposals may be preferable to the other two. (shrink)

There is growing concern that decision-making informed by machine learning (ML) algorithms may unfairly discriminate based on personal demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Scholars have responded by introducing numerous mathematical definitions of fairness to test the algorithm, many of which are in conflict with one another. However, these reductionist representations of fairness often bear little resemblance to real-life fairness considerations, which in practice are highly contextual. Moreover, fairness metrics tend to be implemented in narrow and targeted toolkits that (...) are difficult to integrate into an algorithm’s broader ethical assessment. In this paper, we derive lessons from ethical philosophy and welfare economics as they relate to the contextual factors relevant for fairness. In particular we highlight the debate around acceptability of particular inequalities and the inextricable links between fairness, welfare and autonomy. We propose Key Ethics Indicators (KEIs) as a way towards providing a more holistic understanding of whether or not an algorithm is aligned to the decision-maker’s ethical values. (shrink)

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to (...) be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege. (shrink)

The validity of psychological measurement is crucially connected to a peculiar form of epistemic circularity. This circularity can be a threat when there are no independent ways to assess whether a certain procedure is actually measuring the intended target of measurement. This paper focuses on how Gustav Theodor Fechner addressed the measurement circularity that emerged in his psychophysical research. First, I show that Fechner's approach to the problem of circular measurement involved a core idealizing assumption of a shared human physiology. (...) Second, I assess Fechner's approach to this issue against the backdrop of his own epistemology of measurement and the measurement context of his time. Third, I claim that, from a coherentist and historicallysituated perspective, Fechner's quantification can be regarded as a first successful step of a longer-term quantification process. To conclude, I draw from these insights some general epistemological reflections that are relevant to current quantitative psychology. (shrink)

According to the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, consciousness results from the global broadcast of information throughout the brain. The global neuronal workspace is mainly constituted by a fronto-parietal network. The anterior insular cortex is part of this global neuronal workspace, but the function of this region has not yet been defined within the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. In this review, I hypothesize that the anterior insular cortex implements a cross-modal priority map, the function of which is (...) to determine priorities for the processing of information and subsequent entrance in the global neuronal workspace. (shrink)

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I (...) defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise. (shrink)

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduced by reshaping the architecture of online environments. Proponents of educational approaches suggest that fake news consumers should be empowered to improve their epistemic agency. In this paper, we address a question that is relevant to this debate: namely, whether fake news consumers commit mistakes for which they can be criticized and (...) that they could easily avoid by reforming their doxastic conduct. Proponents of structural approaches, like R. Rini and B. Millar, have defended in different ways a negative answer to this question. In this paper, we criticize their views and suggest that individual users could improve on their epistemic practice by widening their information diet. (shrink)

Notes prises par Jacques Lagrange lors du cours d'anthropologie donné par Michel Foucault en 1954-1955 à l'École Normale Supérieure.

This chapter presents the perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness (PRM). PRM is a higher-order theory of consciousness. It holds that consciousness involves monitoring the reliability of one’s own sensory signals. I explain how a perceptual reality monitoring mechanism computes the higher order representations that are crucial for consciousness. While PRM accounts for the difference between conscious and unconscious states, it does not explain, on its own, why experiences feel the way they do—the phenomenal character of experience. PRM is compatible (...) with multiple theories of phenomenal character. Here, I show how to combine it with ‘Mental Quality Space’ theory. I finish by presenting empirical evidence for PRM, as well as some of its predictions. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full (...) belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. (shrink)

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic (...) literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM OF THE BEING OF THE EGO AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ONTOLOGY "Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, der Philosophic ...

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017), namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will introduce (...) and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions. (shrink)

Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...) commits the criterion content fallacy: the fallacy of interpreting evidence that observers were conscious of something as evidence that they were conscious of the task-relevant features of the stimuli. In the second part, I contend that the criterion content fallacy is prevalent in consciousness research. For this reason, I hold that if unconscious perception exists, scientists studying consciousness could routinely underestimate it. I conclude with methodological recommendations for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming from (...) Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

The paradox of pain refers to the idea that the folk concept of pain is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily states. By taking a close look at our pain terms, this paper argues that there is no paradox of pain. The air of paradox dissolves once we recognize that pain terms are polysemous and that there are two separate but related concepts of pain rather than one.

Empirical evidence suggests that perceptual‐motor simulations are often constitutively involved in language comprehension. Call this “the simulation view of language comprehension”. This article applies the simulation view to illuminate the much‐discussed phenomenon of copredication, where a noun permits multiple predications which seem to select different senses of the noun simultaneously. On the proposed account, the (in)felicitousness of a copredicational sentence is closely associated with the perceptual simulations that the language user deploys in comprehending the sentence.

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...) related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

According to a recent account of epistemic authority proposed by Linda Zagzebski (2012), it is rational for laypersons to believe on authority when they conscientiously judge that the authority is more likely to form true beliefs and avoid false ones than they are in some domain. Christoph Jäger (2016) has recently raised several objections to her view. By contrast, I argue that both theories fail to adequately capture what epistemic authority is, and I offer an alternative account grounded in the (...) abilities that different kinds of authorities are required to possess. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

Poetry evokes mental imagery in its readers. But how is mental imagery precisely related to poetry? This article provides a systematic treatment. It clarifies two roles of mental imagery in relation to poetry—as an effect generated by poetry and as an efficient means for understanding and appreciating poetry. The article also relates mental imagery to the discussion on the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. It argues against the orthodox view that the imagistic effects of poetry cannot be captured by prosaic paraphrase, but (...) points to features of poetry that can shape aspects of mental imagery that are liable to be lost in paraphrase. (shrink)

This article introduces an account of moral education grounded in Zagzebski’s recent Exemplarist Moral Theory and discusses two problems that have to be solved for the account to become a realistic alternative to other educational models on the market, namely the limited-applicability problem and the problem of indoctrination. The first problem raises worries about the viability of the account in ordinary circumstances. The second charges the proposed educational model with indoctrinating students. The main goal of this article is to show (...) how an exemplar-based account of moral education can handle both problems without compromising its structure and upshot. (shrink)

Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...) without running into a circular argument. Second, opponents to consciousness in fish cannot be provided with reasons to believe in the multiple realizability of pain. I conclude that the debate on the existence of pain in fish is impossible to settle by relying on the multiple realization argument. (shrink)

Recent research in psycholinguistics suggests that language processing frequently involves mental imagery. This paper focuses on visual imagery and discusses two issues regarding the processing of polysemous words (i.e. words with multiple related meanings or senses) – co-predication and sense-relatedness. It aims to show how mental imagery can illuminate these two issues.

To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, researchers need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not. This article is an introduction to a family of procedures called ‘confidence-based procedures’, which consist in interpreting metacognitive indicators as indicators of consciousness. I assess the validity and accuracy of these procedures, and answer a series of common objections to their use in consciousness research. I conclude that confidence-based procedures are valid for assessing consciousness, and, in most cases, accurate (...) enough for our practical and scientific purposes. (shrink)

This paper confronts Zagzebski’s exemplarism with the intertwined debates over the conditions of exemplarity and the unity-disunity of the virtues, to show the advantages of a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education (PEBAME). PEBAME is based on a prima facie disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which amounts to admitting both exemplarity in all respects and single-virtue exemplarity. First, we account for the advantages of PEBAME, and we show how two figures in recent Italian history (Giorgio Perlasca and Gino Bartali) satisfy (...) Blum’s definitions of ‘moral hero’ and ‘moral saint’ (1988). Then, we offer a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of heroes and saints with respect to character education, according to four criteria derived from PEBAME: admirability, virtuousness, transparency, and imitability. Finally, we conclude that both unitarist and disunitarist exemplars are fundamental to character education; this is because of the hero's superiority to the saint with respect to imitability, a fundamental feature of the exemplar for character education. (shrink)

Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on (...) two main planks: first, there is a distinction between a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of belief-forming methods. Secondly, different kinds of decision-theoretic reasoning, i.e. expected-accuracy reasoning and accuracy-domination reasoning, must be paired with a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of methods, respectively. I argue that while the first pair is wholly irrelevant to the question of the truth-connection, the second affords the means to a permissivist explanation of the truth-connected value of rationality. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...) not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who states or affirms that something is the case, they state or affirm that a certain course of political action is (...) the one that should be followed or enacted. Consequently, the performance of acts of political advocacy such as voting should be understood as bounded by epistemic norms mirroring those binding the act of assertion and yield epistemic responsibilities mirroring the ones required to satisfy these norms. (shrink)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative locutions, such as (...) ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn. (shrink)

While possessing moral understanding is agreed to be a core epistemic and moral value, it remains a matter of dispute whether it can be acquired via testimony and whether it involves an ability to engage in moral reasoning. This paper addresses both issues with the aim of contributing to the current debates on moral understanding in moral epistemology and virtue ethics. It is argued that moral epistemologists should stop appealing to the argument from the transmissibility of moral understanding to make (...) a case for their favorite view of moral understanding. It is also argued that proponents of exemplarist moral theories cannot remain neutral on whether the ability to engage in moral reasoning is a necessary component of moral understanding. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher‐order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double‐checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one's belief in the face of higher‐order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to the main competitor view which (...) appeals to the notion of defeat. (shrink)