What does it mean for a proposition to be "true in a fiction"? According to the account offered by Kendall Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), what is fictionally true, or simply fictional, is what a work of fiction invites or prescribes that we imagine. To say that it is fictional that Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, is to say that we are supposed to imagine that event. Yet Walton gives no account of the (...) kind of imagining relevant to understanding fictionality. In this paper I argue that the relevant kind of imagining is imagining a storyworld. I propose an account of this sort of imagining, as well as the nature of the invitations or prescriptions to imagine generated by fiction. I show that this account can be defended against various criticisms of Walton's original view, including his own argument in 2015 that prescriptions to imagine provide only necessary conditions for fictionality. (shrink)

Analytic aesthetics has had little to say about academic schools of criticism, such as Freudian, Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial perspectives. Historicists typically view their interpretations as anachronistic; non-historicists assess all interpretations according to formalist criteria. Insofar as these strategies treat these interpretations as on a par, however, they are inadequate. For the theories that ground the interpretations differ in the claims they make about the world. I argue that the interpretations of different critical schools can be evaluated according to the (...) truth or epistemic merit of these claims. (shrink)

Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...) the practice of modeling that cannot be captured by other accounts. The approach thus leaves open what we should say about the ontological status of model-systems, and here advocates differ among themselves, defending a variety of realist or anti-realist positions. I argue that this debate over the ontological status of model-systems is misguided. If model-systems are the kinds of objects fictional realists posit, they can play no role in explaining the epistemology of modeling for an advocate of this approach. So they are at best superfluous. Defenders of the approach should focus on developing an account of the epistemological role of imagining model-systems. (shrink)

We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be freed from every blemish (...) using ideas from contemporary metaontology. We can adopt a sense-data framework that vindicates the traditional claims of sense-data theories and leads to plausible theories of perception and color. We can, we should, and in a sense, we must. Yet when we do, we face the traditional problem of external world skepticism, head-on. The real challenge of skepticism is forced upon us; it cannot honestly be avoided using externalist tricks, burden of proof shifting, or other razzle dazzle. But the challenge can be met: we are rational to posit the external world as the best explanation of the many synchronic and diachronic patterns over our sense-data. This paper argues for all of these points and ends with a plea for analytic empiricism – a traditional sense-data version of empiricism that uses all of the tools of analytic philosophy while avoiding the more questionable doctrines of the Vienna Circle (phenomenalism, verificationism). Analytic empiricism is our last best hope for completing the great philosophical project of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic (...) contribution in fiction. In this paper I offer a positive argument for Non-Exceptionalism, relying on the claim that works of both fiction and non-fiction can express the same singular propositions. I go on to defend my account against García-Carpintero’s objections. (shrink)

While aestheticians have devoted substantial attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction, little of this attention has been directed at the acquisition of factual information. The neglect traces, I believe, to the assumption that the task of aesthetics is to explain the special cognitive value of fiction. While the value of many works of nonfiction may be measured, in part, by their ability to transmit information, most works of fiction do not have this aim, and so many conclude (...) that the transmission of information is irrelevant to their value. I am skeptical of these claims. I doubt that there is any value, cognitive or otherwise, special to all and only works of fiction. Thus I see no reason to neglect the capacity to convey factual information—specifically, propositional knowledge about real individuals and events—when assessing the value of particular works. In this paper I consider the value of learning about history from a particular work of fiction, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: A Novel. Drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology, I argue that narrative devices used by Vidal can enhance our ability to learn and retain factual information, despite also increasing the possibility that we will form false beliefs, and that acquiring propositional knowledge from fiction, far from being a process we can take for granted, constitutes a difficult achievement. (shrink)

Once upon a time, logical conventionalism was the most popular philosophical theory of logic. It was heavily favored by empiricists, logical positivists, and naturalists. According to logical conventionalism, linguistic conventions explain logical truth, validity, and modality. And conventions themselves are merely syntactic rules of language use, including inference rules. Logical conventionalism promised to eliminate mystery from the philosophy of logic by showing that both the metaphysics and epistemology of logic fit into a scientific picture of reality. For naturalists of all (...) stripes, this was paradise. Alas, paradise was lost. By the end of the twentieth century, logical conventionalism had been almost universally abandoned. But more recently, it has been revitalized. This chapter provides an overview of logical conventionalism and its history, clears away misunderstandings, and briefly responds to both the canonical objections to conventionalism (from Quine, Dummett, Boghossian, and many others) as well as new objections (from Field and Golan). From paradise lost, to paradise regained: logical conventionalism is back. (shrink)

I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to (...) understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence that demonstrates our reliance on it in narrative comprehension. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption. I conclude that we should take fictions, like non-fictions, to be about the real world. (shrink)

Many works of fiction include portraits in their storyworlds. Some of these portraits are themselves fictional, such as the portrait of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. Others are real, such as the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I in A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden. When authors invent portraits, they expect us to visualise them. When they refer to real portraits, they exploit our familiarity with how they actually look. Like representations of other real entities in fiction, references (...) to real portraits function to ground the story in the real world. But portraits are more than material entities; they are also representational in their own right. In contrasting the ways real portraits are used in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, I argue that authors can be criticised when they mischaracterise the representational features of real portraits. (shrink)

In Film, Art and the Third Culture, Murray Smith articulates and defends a naturalized aesthetics of film that exemplifies a “third culture,” integrating the insights and methods of the natural sciences with those of the arts and humanities. By contrast with skeptics who reject the relevance of psychology or neuroscience to the study of film and art, I agree with Smith that we should embrace the third-cultural project. However, I argue that Smith does not go far enough in in developing (...) this project. In defending the contribution of the natural sciences to film aesthetics as traditionally conceived in the arts and humanities, Smith focuses on only one side of the equation, unduly limiting the potential contribution of the arts and humanities to the scientific study of film. Using the example of emotional responses to fiction film, I propose that we adopt a more genuinely integrative approach. (shrink)

Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I (...) claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction. (shrink)

If there are no fictional characters, how do we explain thought and discourse apparently about them? If there are, what are they like? A growing number of philosophers claim that fictional characters are abstract objects akin to novels or plots. They argue that postulating characters provides the most straightforward explanation of our literary practices as well as a uniform account of discourse and thought about fiction. Anti-realists counter that postulation is neither necessary nor straightforward, and that the invocation of pretense (...) provides a better account of the same phenomena. I outline and assess these competing theories. (shrink)

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...) to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. (shrink)

In his arguments that science itself can answer moral questions, Sam Harris often appeals to our intuitions about the badness of suffering. If we share these intuitions, Harris argues, we’ve taken a significant step in conceding to a basically utilitarian worldview. In this chapter, I critically assess Harris’ arguments and find them deeply wanting.

Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...) representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the non-existent. (shrink)

The currently standard approach to fiction is to define it in terms of imagination. I have argued elsewhere that no conception of imagining is sufficient to distinguish a response appropriate to fiction as opposed to non-fiction. In her contribution Kathleen Stock seeks to refute this objection by providing a more sophisticated account of the kind of propositional imagining prescribed by so-called ‘fictive utterances’. I argue that although Stock's proposal improves on other theories, it too fails to provide an adequate criterion (...) of fictionality. I conclude by sketching an alternative account according to which fiction is a genre. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this article, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one's prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that fictions are (...) more likely to be a bad influence than a good one. (shrink)

Engagement with fiction often inspires emotional responses. We may pity Sethe while feeling ambivalent about her actions (in Beloved), fear for Ellen Ripley as she battles monstrous creatures (in Alien), get angry at Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Things Fall Apart), and hope that Kiyoaki and Satoko find love (in Spring Snow). Familiar as they are, these reactions are puzzling. Why do I respond emotionally if I do not believe that these individuals exist or that the events occurred? If I (...) merely imagine that my best friend has betrayed me, I do not become angry with him; if I did, I would be considered irrational. Yet although beliefs seem to be necessary for emotions in other contexts, we respond to fiction without the relevant beliefs. These observations prompt two questions about our emotional responses to fiction (henceforth: fictional emotions). The first is descriptive: Should fictional emotions be classified as the same kind of emotions we experience in other contexts? The second is normative: Are fictional emotions irrational or otherwise inappropriate? I take each of these debates in turn. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” (1970) is one of the most important and influential papers in twentieth-century aesthetics. It is almost universally taken to refute traditional aesthetic formalism/empiricism, according to which all that matters aesthetically is what is manifest to perception. Most commentators assume that the argument of “Categories” applies to works of literature. Walton himself notes a word of caution: “The aesthetic properties of works of literature are not happily called ‘perceptual’ … (The notion of perceiving a work in (...) a category … is not straightforwardly applicable to literary works)” (335 n.5). However, he goes on to say that although he focuses “on visual and musical works … the central points I make concerning them hold, with suitable modifications, for novels, plays, and poems as well” (335 n.5). Here I consider what “suitable modifications” are required to extend the account to literature. (shrink)

I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, (...) undermining our justification for criticising documentaries like Bowling for Columbine or The Hunting Ground for playing fast and loose with the facts. I argue that this objection is misguided, misidentifying the justification for criticising non-fiction films that mislead or deceive. I develop an alternative account that explains why we also criticise many fictions for inaccuracy. (shrink)

Two assumptions are common in discussions of the paradox of tragedy: (1) that tragic pleasure requires that the work be fictional or, if non-fiction, then non-transparently represented; and (2) that tragic pleasure may be provoked by a wide variety of art forms. In opposition to (1) I argue that certain documentaries could produce tragic pleasure. This is not to say that any sad or painful documentary could do so. In considering which documentaries might be plausible candidates, I further argue, against (...) (2), that the scope of tragic pleasure is limited to works that possess certain thematic and narrative features. (shrink)

It is widely taken for granted that fictions, including both literature and film,influence our attitudes toward real people, events, and situations. Philosopherswho defend claims about the cognitive value of fiction view this influence in apositive light, while others worry about the potential moral danger of fiction.Marketers hope that visual and aural references to their products in movies willhave an effect on people’s buying patterns. Psychologists study the persuasiveimpact of media. Educational books and films are created in the hopes of guidingchildren’s (...) and adult’s preferences toward socially acceptable norms.The influencesdiscussed by marketers, psychologists, educators, and philosophers tend to be bothcognitive and affective. It seems that we can be “emotionally persuaded”: ourpreferences can be changed, our feelings about particular people or events can beinfluenced, and so forth. (shrink)

The most well-known and controversial solution to the paradox of fiction is Kendall Walton’s, according to whom pity of (say) Anna Karenina is not genuine pity. Walton’s opponents argue that we can resolve the paradox of fiction while preserving the intuition that our response to Anna is ordinary, run-of-the-mill pity; and they claim that retaining this intuition explains more than Walton’s approach. In my view, the arguments of Walton’s opponents depend on idiosyncratic features of examples involving purely fictional characters like (...) Anna Karenina. What is really at issue is the fact that we respond emotionally to fiction in ways that are not explained by our beliefs, but instead by what we imagine. That this is the crux of the paradox of fiction becomes clear only when we consider fictions about real persons and events. And I contend that once we turn our attention to these cases, Walton’s theory proves significantly more explanatory than the opposition. (shrink)

Quantifier variance is a well-known view in contemporary metaontology, but it remains very widely misunderstood by critics. Here we briefly and clearly explain the metasemantics of quantifier variance and distinguish between modest and strong forms of variance (Section I), explain some key applications (Section II), clear up some misunderstandings and address objections (Section III), and point the way toward future directions of quantifier-variance-related research (Section IV).

A popular way for irrealists to explain co-identification—thinking and talking ‘about the same thing’ when there is no such thing—is by appeal to causal, historical or informational chains, networks or practices. Recently, however, this approach has come under attack by philosophers who contend that it cannot provide necessary and/or sufficient conditions for co-identification. In this paper I defend the approach against these objections. My claim is not that the appeal to such practices can provide necessary and sufficient conditions for co-identification, (...) but rather that it is a mistake to seek these in the first place. -/- . (shrink)

Plato claimed that morality exits to control conflict. Business people increasingly are called upon to resolve moral conflicts between various stakeholders who maintain opposing ethical positions or principles. Attempts to resolve these moral conflicts within business discussions may be exacerbated if disputants have different communicative styles. To better understand the communication process involved in attempts to resolve a moral dilemma, we investigate the "discourse ethics" procedure of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas claims that an individual's level of moral reasoning parallels the type (...) of communication which that individual typically uses in attempts to resolve conflict. Our research focuses upon the relationship between the communicative style used by participants attempting to resolve a particular moral dilemma involving workplace safety and the level of moral reasoning possessed by those participants. The results of our study suggest that, contrary to Habermas' views, participants with "higher" levels of moral reasoning do not use "discursive" communicative tactics more frequently than participants that possessed "lower" moral reasoning. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

What role should religion play in public discourse? Not long ago Richard Rorty argued, in more than one place, that religion is a "conversation stopper" which polite people refer to only in private conversations. Religious believers complain, however, that this practice renders it impossible for them to participate in public discourse. They ask whether a democratic community is worthy of the name if it effectively forbids (by custom or legislation) a significant segment of its citizens from acknowledging and drawing upon (...) their own traditions to help justify their moral and political claims? This paper draws upon the work of Jeffrey Stout, Robert Brandom, and importantly a Confucian understanding of ritual to argue that Rorty goes too far in arguing that religious assumptions have no place in public discourse. (shrink)

Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...) that does not simply remain quiet about the explanatory demands of metaethics, but rather is able to diagnose where they go wrong. By combining a neopragmatic analysis of the discourse with an easy approach to ontology, , we can develop a form of Quietist Moral Realism that is far stronger than critics of quietism have appreciated. (shrink)

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...) in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs. (shrink)

The theoretical underpinnings and practical worth of content-based, intentional, or "folk" psychology have been challenged by three distinct groups of philosophical critics in the past 15 years or so. The first group, comprised by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and other advocates of "wide" or "externalist" theories of meaning, claims that traditional psychologists have been mistaken in assuming that our beliefs, desires, and other content-laden states supervene on or inhere in our individual minds or brains. The other two groups are both (...) "eliminative materialists," who charge that the intentional approach is inadequate and that it can or will be replaced by a completely non-interpretive discipline: either neuropsychology, in the view of Patricia and Paul Churchland, or a strictly syntactic computational psychology, according to Stephen Stich. ;This dissertation defends "notional world" or narrow intentional psychology against these charges, primarily on the strength of its practical merits, in contrast to the limitations and adverse effects of the proposed alternatives. Psychology is at least partly an applied science with a mandate to help understand and treat concrete psychological problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, I argue, so any theorist who proposes to reconfigure or phase out existing approaches must be prepared to take over these duties with at least equal facility. However, whereas various "narrow" schools of psychotherapy such as Cognitive Therapy are fairly successful in this regard and show every indication of continuing to be needed for the foreseeable future, the Syntactic Theory seems to show very poor promise of being able to help relieve the distress of people with psychological disturbances, while a purely neurobiological approach is inappropriate in many cases, and tends to cause a variety of untoward and dangerous side-effects. As for the "wide" theorists with their emphasis upon the social and environmental contributions to meaning: they must acknowledge that a good deal of content is in the head; and, more importantly, by focusing on the role of the "experts" in a society's language-game, they miss the whole point of a psychological attribution, which is to understand an individual's reasons--however idiosyncratic--for acting as he or she does. (shrink)

Rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons. Given the independence of appearance and reality, why think that apparent normative reasons necessarily provide real normative reasons? And if they do not, why think that mistakes of rationality are necessarily real mistakes? This paper gives a novel answer to these questions. I argue first that in the moral domain, there are objective duties of respect that we violate whenever we do what appears to violate our first-order duties. The existence of (...) these duties of respect, I argue, ensures that apparent moral reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. I then extend these arguments to the domain of overall reason. Just as there are objective duties of respect for moral reasons that explain moral blameworthiness, so there are objective duties of respect for reasons that explain blameworthiness in the court of overall reason. The existence of these duties ensures that apparent reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. (shrink)

Despite its many advantages as a metaethical theory, moral expressivism faces difficulties as a semantic theory of the meaning of moral claims, an issue underscored by the notorious Frege-Geach problem. I consider a distinct metaethical view, inferentialism, which like expressivism rejects a representational account of meaning, but unlike expressivism explains meaning in terms of inferential role instead of expressive function. Drawing on Michael Williams’ recent work on inferential theories of meaning, I argue that an appropriate understanding of the pragmatic role (...) of moral discourse—the facilitation of coordinated social behavior—suggests the kind of inferences we should expect terms with this function to license. I offer a sketch of the inferential roles the moral ‘ought’ plays, and argue that if we accept that the relevant inferential roles are meaning-constitutive, we will be in a position to solve the Frege-Geach problem. Such an inferentialist solution has advantages over those forwarded by expressivists such as Blackburn and Gibbard. First, it offers a more straightforward explanation of the meaning of moral terms. It also gives simple answers to at least two semantic worries that have vexed contemporary expressivists—the “problem of permissions” and the commitment to “mentalism”, both of which I argue are problems that don’t get traction with an inferentialist approach. I conclude by considering ways in which this approach can be expanded into a more robust semantic account. (shrink)

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we (...) express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed. (shrink)

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead (...) in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it. (shrink)

In three experiments we studied lay observers’ attributions of responsibility for an antisocial act (homicide). We systematically varied both the degree to which the action was coerced by external circumstances and the degree to which the actor endorsed and accepted ownership of the act, a psychological state that philosophers have termed ‘identification’. Our findings with respect to identification were highly consistent. The more an actor was identified with an action, the more likely observers were to assign responsibility to the actor, (...) even when the action was performed under constraints so powerful that no other behavioral option was available. Our findings indicate that social cognition involving assignment of responsibility for an action is a more complex process than previous research has indicated. It would appear that laypersons’ judgments of moral responsibility may, in some circumstances, accord with philosophical views in which freedom and determinism are regarded to be compatible. (shrink)

Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attractive about epistemic consequentialism while yielding predictions that are harder for the latter to (...) secure in a principled way. §2 presents Epistemic Kantianism. §3 argues that it is uniquely poised to satisfy the desiderata set out in §1 on an ideal theory of epistemic justification. §4 gives three further arguments, suggesting that it (i) best explains the objective normative significance of the subject's perspective in epistemology, (ii) follows from the kind of axiology needed to solve the swamping problem together with modest assumptions about the relation between the evaluative and the deontic, and (iii) illuminates certain asymmetries in epistemic value and obligation. §5 takes stock and reassesses the score in the debate. (shrink)

There is a prima facie conflict between the values of love and autonomy. How can we bind ourselves to a person and still enjoy the fruits of self-determination? This chapter argues that the solution to this conflict lies in recognizing that love is the basis of autonomy: one must love a person in order to truly appreciate their autonomy. To make this case, this chapter defends a minimalist account of love, according to which love is an agreeable sensation that is (...) experienced when considering the existence of another person. On this view, the lover does not desire anything from the beloved but works to attend to their presence. Love, then, puts us in a position to appreciate the beloved in their particular way of being. By accepting the presence of the beloved we gain a sense of their autonomy. The roots of this account of love are found in the writings of Damaris Cudworth Masham. This chapter draws on the work of Kieran Setiya, David Velleman, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan to elaborate on and defend Masham’s views. (shrink)

A short paper discussing and critiquing common claims that "truth is relative.".

When medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada in June 2016, the question of allowing decisionally capable persons to make advance requests in anticipation of later incapacity was reserved for further consideration during the mandatory parliamentary review originally scheduled to begin in June 2020 (but since delayed by COVID-19). In its current form the legislation does not permit such requests, since it stipulates that at the time at which the procedure is to be administered the patient must give (...) “express consent” to receiving it. Since express consent presupposes decisional capacity, this requirement rules out administering MAiD to a patient who has lost capacity. Amendments to the legislation passed by Parliament in March 2021 open the door slightly by allowing advance requests by patients after they have been approved for MAiD, if they fear losing capacity before the procedure can be administered. But this provision would apply only to patients whose natural death was deemed to be “reasonably foreseeable”, and would continue to exclude (a) requests made after diagnosis of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” but in advance of approval for MAiD, and (b) requests made before such a diagnosis. My aim in this paper is twofold: to explore the ethical and legal issues concerning advance requests for MAiD, and to argue for expanding provision for such requests to include both of these further scenarios. (shrink)

Hate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the right course of action for (...) university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down. (shrink)

If you utter sentence (1) ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like (1), but which was true when uttered a few years ago and is (...) no longer true now. On this basis, we shall conclude that the past has changed. (shrink)