This is a reply to de Sousa's 'Emotional Truth', in which he argues that emotions can be objective, as propositional truths are. I say that it is better to distinguish between truth and accuracy, and agree with de Sousa to the extent of arguing that emotions can be more or less accurate, that is, based on the facts as they are.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 728-746, May 2022.

The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there (...) is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation “a knows that p.” Some, for instance Schaffer (2005) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one ("Contrastivism" in Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge 2010, 513-522), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the differences between them. (shrink)

I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.

Evolutionary debunking arguments claim that evolution has influenced our moral faculties in such a way that, if moral realism is true, then we have no positive moral knowledge. I present several popular objections to the standard version of this argument, then give a new EDA that has clear advantages in responding to these objections. Whereas the Standard EDA argues that evolution has selected for many moral beliefs with certain contents, this New EDA claims that evolution has selected for one belief: (...) belief in the claim that categorical reasons exist. If moral realism is true, then this claim is entailed by all positive moral claims, and belief in it is defeated due to evolutionary influence. This entails that if realism is true, then we have no positive moral knowledge. While there may be objections against this New EDA, it is much stronger than the Standard EDA, and one realists ought to worry about. (shrink)

I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that an agent can have an attitude to p (...) rather than q but not to r rather than q , where r is a logical consequence of p . We relate these ideas to some general issues about thought, such as the question of whether all possibilities that can be distinguished in emotion can be distinguished in belief. (shrink)

Many morally important facts about the way we affect one another, in particular the psychological damage we can inflict, are hard to imagine .

A critical exposition of plans to colonize other planets , especially Mars, and their costs. The final chapter links with issues about the value and future of human life. See the extended summary uploaded to this site.

I relate plural quantification, and predicate logic where predicates do not need a fixed number of argument places, to the part-whole relation. For more on these themes see later work by Boolos, Lewis, and Oliver & Smiley.

Epistemological objections to moral realism allege that realism entails moral skepticism. Many philosophers have assumed that theistic moral realists can easily avoid such objections. In this article, I argue that things are not so easy: theists run the risk of violating an important constraint on replies to epistemological objections, according to which replies to such objections may not rely on substantive moral claims of a certain kind. Yet after presenting this challenge, I then argue that theists can meet it, successfully (...) replying to the objections without relying on the problematic kinds of substantive moral claims. Theists have a distinctive and plausible reply to epistemological objections to moral realism. (shrink)

Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism’s meliorist commitment and will block the road of inquiry. I defend the compatibility of a version of value pluralism (the strong epistemic pluralism of John Rawls) with pragmatism, and offer counterarguments to all of (...) these claims. (shrink)

I argue that folk psychology does not serve the purpose of facilitating prediction of others' behaviour but if facilitating cooperative action. (See my subsequent book *The Importance of Being Understood*.

I consider Glimcher's claim to have given an account of mental functioning that is at once neurological and decision-theoretical. I am skeptical, but remark on some good ideas of Glimcher's.

This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.

I discuss Quine's claim that anyone denying what we now take to be a logical truth would be using logical words in a novel way. I trace this to a confusions between outright denial and failure to assert, and assertion of a negation. (This abstract is written from memory decades after the article.).

I argue against the Ramsey test connecting indicative conditionals with conditional probability, by means of examples in which conditional probability is high but the conditional is intuitively implausible. At the end of the paper, I connect these issues to patterns of belief revision.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 257-259 [Access article in PDF] Atrocity, Banality, Self-Deception Adam Morton Keywords evil, self-deception, banality, atrocity, motivation When talking about evil we must make a fundamental choice about how we are to use the term. We may use it as half of the contrast "good versus evil," in which case it covers everything that is not good. That includes moral incompetence, lack of (...) imagination, willingness to follow orders, overreactions, and a host of other reasons why people who do not have personalities that we would call evil do things that are wrong, often very wrong. Call this the weak reading of evil: evil as wrongdoing. Or we may use it with the meaning suggested by "evil person," "really evil act," "the evil lurking in all of us," and other such idioms. If we do this, we focus on a particular class of actions, and the motives and people that produce them, that arouse a particular moral revulsion in us. Call this the strong reading of evil: evil as atrocity (for more on this contrast see Morton [2004] and Card [2002]).Kubarych, following Peck, thinks of evil in the strong way. Most of the time at any rate: Some of the philosophers, such as Kant, that he draws on are thinking of evil in the weak way, and some of his quotations are from the German, where good/bad/evil distinctions are not drawn in the same way as in English. He explores a general explanation of evil that seems to be targeted at the psychology of extremely abhorrent actions. But, I argue, his account is in danger of collapse in either of two directions. Depending on how we interpret Kubarych's account, it could turn out that it describes all wrongdoing as evil, or, making some different choices, it could turn out that there are no really evil people.The strong reading of evil is definitely the most interesting and potentially fruitful. After all, we have no shortage of satisfying explanations of why people lie to get out of unwelcome appointments, steal to support their children or their drug habits, or defraud investors to become rich. But we do feel deeply puzzled by those who commit torture, serial murder, or genocide. We ask of these people not so much "Why did he do it?" as "How could he do it?" We feel the need of a philosophical or psychological theory that can give us even a slight handle of these people and their deeds. There are two risks associated with the project of explaining atrocity, though. The first is the risk of accepting unsatisfactory accounts, just because they purport to explain what we desperately want to understand. The second is the risk of supposing that there is a single explanation when the causes of the phenomenon are in fact too varied. On other topics these two risks have often combined to make people believe what seem to us now to be evident falsehoods. Humans have often for example wanted to know the causes of disease, and as a result have accepted blanket explanations, in terms of [End Page 257] evil spirits or lack of faith, that seem ludicrous to us now that we have a better grasp of the variety of factors that can cause our bodies to misfunction. So before asking naively "Why and how can people do these awful things?" we should ask "Is there a deeper causal unity here, beyond the fact that we react to these acts with horror?"My suspicion is that there is not much unity, that it is asking too much to want a common profile to the psychology of serial killers, or of proponents of genocide, let alone a profile that applies across these and other categories. What we can do, I believe, is describe our concept of evil in such a way that we can leave some parameters to be filled in by a large variety of objective psychological factors. Even this runs the risk that the really relevant factors cannot be forced into the role that the philosophical account requires. In... (shrink)

This is exciting stuff. Philosophers have long explored the structure of human concepts from the inside, by manipulating their skills as users of those concepts. And since Quine most reasonable philosophers have accepted that the structure is a contingent matter – we or not too different creatures could have thought differently – which in principle can be..

I discuss Goodman's claim that when 'all As are Bs' is a law then the counterfactual 'if a were an A, it would be a B' is tue. I give counterexamples, and link the failure of the connection to the contrast between higher level and lower level laws.

Scale matters in morality, so that different factors occupy us at high and low scales. Different people are needed to be good neighbours in everyday life and moral heroes in crises. There is no reason to believe that the same traits are required for both. So there is no such thing as the all-round good person.

According to Marr's theory of vision, computational processes of early vision rely for their success on certain "natural constraints" in the physical environment. I examine the implications of this feature of Marr's theory for the question whether psychological states supervene on neural states. It is reasonable to hold that Marr's theory is nonindividualistic in that, given the role of natural constraints, distinct computational theories of the same neural processes may be justified in different environments. But to avoid trivializing computational explanations, (...) theories must respect methodological solipsism in the sense that within a theory there cannot be differences in content without a corresponding difference in neural states. (shrink)

In his recent book Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence, Jonas Olson attempts to revive the argument from queerness originally made famous by J.L. Mackie. In this paper, we do three things. First, we eliminate four untenable formulations of the argument. Second, we argue that the most plausible formulation is one that depends crucially upon considerations of parsimony. Finally, we evaluate this formulation of the argument. We conclude that it is unproblematic for proponents of moral non-naturalism—the target of the argument from (...) queerness. (shrink)

I compare our idioms for quantifying into belief contexts to our idioms for quantifying into intention contexts. The latter is complicated by the fact that there is always a discrepancy between the action as intended and the action as performed. The article contains - this is written long after it appeared - an early version of a tracking or sensitivity analysis of the relation between a thought and its object.

Is there such a thing as bounded rationality? I first try to make sense of the question, and then to suggest which of the disambiguated versions might have answers. We need an account of bounded rationality that takes account of detailed contingent facts about the ways in which human beings fail to perform as we might ideally want to. But we should not think in terms of rules or norms which define good responses to an individual's limitations, but rather in (...) terms of desiderata, situations that limited agents can hope to achieve, and corresponding virtues of achieving them. We should not take formal theories defining optimal behavior in watered-down bounded form, even though they can impose enormous computational or cognitive demands. (shrink)

I give cases where the contrast between "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have" and "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet and someone else did"is found in future tense sentences. This is often denied.

The concepts of knowledge and accomplishment are duals. There are many parallels between them. In this paper I discuss the "AA" thesis, which is dual to the well known KK thesis. The KK thesis claims that if someone knows something, then she knows that she knows it. This is generally thought to be false, and there are powerful reasons for rejecting it. The AA thesis claims that if someone accomplishes something, then she accomplishes that she accomplishes it. I argue that (...) this, too, is false, and that the reasons it is false parallel reasons for the falsity of the KK thesis. (shrink)

Mathematical models provide explanations of limited power of specific aspects of phenomena. One way of articulating their limits here, without denying their essential powers, is in terms of contrastive explanation.

This is a very selective survey of developments in epistemology, concentrating on work from the past twenty years that is of interest to philosophers of science. The selection is organized around interesting connections between distinct themes. I first connect issues about skepticism to issues about the reliability of belief-acquiring processes. Next I connect discussions of the defeasibility of reasons for belief to accounts of the theory-independence of evidence. Then I connect doubts about Bayesian epistemology to issues about the content of (...) perception. The last detailed connection is between considerations of the finiteness of cognition and epistemic virtues. To connect the connections I end by briefly discussing the pressure that consideration of social roles in the transmission of belief puts on the purposes of epistemology. (shrink)

review of Laden's *Reasoning: a social picture* praising the aim and expressing puzzlement at the details,.

I describe a way of handling comparative adjectives "a is P-er than b", in terms of degrees "a has P to degree d". I defend this approach against attacks due to C J F Williams in an article in the same issue of *Analysis*, by tracing his objections to the assumption that degrees must be linearly ordered. Since this abstract is written years later, I can mention that some of the ideas were taken further in my Hypercomparatives. Synthese 111, 1997, (...) 97-114 . (shrink)

Card argues that we should not give injustice priority over evil. I agree. But I think Card sets us up for some difficult balancings, for example of small evils against middle sized injustices. I suggest some ways of staying off the tightrope.

I discuss ways in which the linguistic form of mathimatics helps us think mathematically.

McMahon's connections between collective reasoning and collective action are real and important. I suspect that they do not go deep enough, and that far more that we usually classify as individual is in fact collective.

I discuss the possibility that there is no intrinsic unity to the capacities which are bundled under the label "folk psychology". Cooperative skills, attributional skills, and predictive skills may be scattered as parts of other non--psychological capacities. I discuss how some forms of social life bring these different skills together. I end with some remarks on how abilities that are not unified in their essential mechanisms may still form a rough practical unity. (Remark: the paper is conjectural. It describes a (...) possibility to take seriously rather than a conclusion of which I am convinced.). (shrink)

[Ronald de Sousa] Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like (...) states, by contrast, are digital representations. I argue that the gravest problem-objectivity-is not insurmountable. /// [Adam Morton ] It is accuracy rather than truth itself that is valuable. Emotional truth is a dubious though attractive notion, but emotional accuracy is much easier to make sense of. My approach to accuracy goes via an account of what makes a story accurate. Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate whether or not they are true. The capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person's situation, is an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires. (shrink)

Experiments are actions, performed in order to gain information. Like other acts, there are virtues of performing them well. I discuss one virtue of experimentation, that of knowing how to trade its information-gaining potential against other goods.

I discuss Bermudez' minimalist approach to self-consciousness approvingly, connecting it with other positions in philosophy and trying to separate it from ideas about non-conceptual content.

(for Adam Morton's half) I argue that if we take the values of persons to be ordered in a way that allows incomparability, then the problems Broome raises have easy solutions. In particular we can maintain that creating people is morally neutral while killing them has a negative value.

I describe conventions not of correct reasoning but of giving and taking advice about reasoning. This article is asn anticipation of part of the first chapter of my forthcoming *Bounded Thinking*, OUP 2012.

A criticism of Dorothy Edgington's attempt to make Gibbard's problem for indicative conditionals apply to counterfactuals.

Wilson argued that since for continuants such as people a predicate and a time determine a place, natural language *can* specify just, e,.g. "a is dyspeptic at t" leaving the location of a's dyspepsia unstated. From this he concludes that language *must* leave the location unstated. I query the transition from *may* to *must*.

I give grounds for taking seriously the possibility that some of the emotions we ascribe do not exist. I build on the premise that the experience of imagining an emotion resembles that of having one. First a person imagines having an emotion. This is much like an emotion, so the person takes herself to be having the emotion that she imagines, and acts or expects a disposition to act accordingly. The view sketched here contrasts possibly impossible emotions such as disembodied (...) passion, blind rage, and Quixotic courage with real ones such as affection, anger, and bravery. Both these real emotions and the states of imagining impossible ones are things that really happen to us. (shrink)

some lighthearted definitions of philosophical terms.