McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of tensed (...) statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony--whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor the testimony for credibility. (...) Fricker (1994) argues, first, that some monitoring for trustworthiness is required if the hearer is to avoid being gullible, and second, that reductionism but not anti-reductionism is compatible with ascribing an important role to the process of monitoring in the course of justifiably accepting observed testimony. In this paper we argue that such an argument fails. (shrink)

Given anti-individualism, a subject might have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking that p, have complete and exhaustive explicational knowledge of all of the concepts composing the content that p, and yet still need empirical information (e.g. regarding her embedding conditions and history) prior to being in a position to apply her exhaustive conceptual knowledge in a knowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed by anti-individualists: it squares with everything that compatibilist-minded anti-individualists have (...) said regarding e.g. the compatibility of anti-individualism and basic self-knowledge; and more importantly it contains the crux of a response to McKinsey-style arguments against anti-individualism. (shrink)

This paper develops a normative account of epistemic luck, according to which the luckiness of epistemic luck is analyzed in terms of the expectations a subject is entitled to have when she satisfies the standards of epistemic justification. This account enables us to distinguish three types of epistemic luck—bad, good, and sheer—and to model the roles they play e.g. in Gettierization. One controversial aspect of the proposed account is that it is non‐reductive. While other approaches analyze epistemic luck in non‐epistemic (...) terms—either in modal terms (lack of safety) or in agential terms (lack of creditworthiness)—I argue that the non‐reductive nature of the normative account is actually a selling‐point relative to its competitors. (shrink)

In several works on modality, G. H. von Wright presents tree structures to explain possible worlds. Worlds that might have developed from an earlier world are possible relative to it. Actually possible worlds are possible relative to the world as it actually was at some point. Many logically consistent worlds are not actually possible. Transitions from node to node in a tree structure are probabilistic. Probabilities are often more useful than similarities between worlds in treating counterfactual conditionals.

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

Although the truth value (falsity) of "Henry knows that (dogs live in trees and beavers chew wood)" remains unchanged no matter what sentence is substituted in it for "beavers chew wood", we want not to regard the second as a truth functional component (tfc) of the first. Many definitions of "tfc" (e.g., Quine's) fail to insure satisfaction of the following principle: if p is a component of r which is in turn a component of q, then p is a tfc (...) of q if and only if 1) p is also a tfc of r, and 2) r is also a tfc of q. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 128-130 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy Robert Hanna. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 312. Cloth, $65.00. Robert Hanna's book has an ambitious two-fold agenda. Its historical agenda is to prompt a reassessment of the role Kant played in the foundations (...) of analytic philosophy. The ideological agenda is to reassess the status of the relevant Kantian doctrines--in particular, his views regarding the nature of necessity, the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the nature and scope of the a priori--in the face of what Hanna takes to be the "crisis" (11) facing analytic philosophy today. Hanna views the elements of this two-fold agenda as inextricably [End Page 128] linked: when we see how the analysts failed to appreciate much of the subtlety and power of Kant's arguments, we will be in a position both to appreciate why the early analysts were not able to bring their official projects to completion, and to reassess the plausibility of various Kantian doctrines that have been considered untouchable during the dominance of analytic philosophy.Hanna's Kant, the Kant of the first Critique, is bent on answering two fundamental problems regarding the nature of cognition. Hanna characterizes the first problem as the "modal" problem, that of saying how the same judgment "can... be at once necessarily true, refer to the real or natural world in a substantive way, yet cognizable to creatures minded like us apart from all sense experience" (1). The second problem is the "semantic" problem, that of stating "how meanings are possible" (3). Hanna's book is organized around his characterization of Kant's answers to these questions and his defense of the resulting position in the face of the analytic tradition's reaction.In assessing Kant's role in the analytic tradition, Hanna borrows much from previous historically sensitive philosophers interested in this period. Three such authors figure prominently: Coffa and his seminal book The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap; Friedman (with special attention to his Reconsidering Logical Positivism); and Dummett (whose work on Frege is cited throughout). From Coffa and Friedman, Hanna endorses the thesis that at its core the analytic tradition is a reaction to the Kantian conception of the a priori. Hanna accepts as well that the early analysts were united by the aim of exploiting technical developments in logic and semantics as part of a case against Kant's conception of the a priori. Where Hanna disagrees with, e.g., Coffa is over the status of the analysts' anti-Kantian arguments: where Coffa appears to endorse the cogency of those arguments, Hanna suggests that Kant's position is much more defensible, and the analysts' positions and arguments much more vulnerable, than has previously been thought.It is worth noting some of the many virtues of Foundations. Hanna makes an interesting case for the idea that at a certain level of description there is an important agreement between Kant and Frege regarding the evils of psychologism about logic. This will come as news to those who have treated Kant as among the targets in Frege's critique of psychologism. In addition, Hanna develops Kant's conception of analyticity and presents a robust defense of that conception against some prevalent criticisms; proffers an intriguing comparison between Kant's pure intuition and Wittgenstein's view of the transcendental nature of logic (221-3); and makes a plausible case for the provocative conclusion that the conceptualism of early analytic philosophy is in contrast with Frege's own philosophical attitude (233).At the same time, some complaints are worth registering. To those (like me) who do not encounter Kantian vocabulary on a regular basis, Hanna's reliance on that vocabulary has the effect of rendering many passages heavy-going and difficult to unpack. (While Hanna does attempt to provide explications of the vocabulary, I sometimes found these explications themselves to be difficult to understand.) Secondly, Hanna is sometimes... (shrink)

Sanford Goldberg investigates the role that others play in our attempts to acquire knowledge of the world.

Sanford C. Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part I he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part II he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication, arguing that the (...) epistemic characteristics of communication-based beliefs depend on features of the cognitive and linguistic acts of the subject's social peers. In acknowledging an ineliminable social dimension to mind, language, and the epistemic categories of knowledge, justification, and rationality, his book develops fundamental links between externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, on the one hand, and externalism is epistemology, on the other. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 676-692, June 2022.

Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers render themselves (...) illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another. (shrink)

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. The chapters examine a wide range of topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, (...) including 2D semantics, transparency views of self-knowledge, and theories of linguistic understanding, as well as epistemological debates on contextualism, contrastivism, pragmatic encroachment, anti-luminosity arguments and testimony. The scope of the volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

The scenario of the brain in a vat, first aired thirty-five years ago in Hilary Putnam's classic paper, has been deeply influential in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This collection of new essays examines the scenario and its philosophical ramifications and applications, as well as the challenges which it has faced. The essays review historical applications of the brain-in-a-vat scenario and consider its impact on contemporary debates. They explore a diverse range of philosophical issues, from intentionality, external-world (...) scepticism, and the nature of truth, to the extended mind hypothesis, reference magnetism, and new versions of realism. The volume will be a rich and valuable resource for advanced students in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, as well as anyone interested in the relations between language, thought and the world. (shrink)

Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents eleven specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and ...

Responding to Russell is a constant throughout Wittgenstein's philosophizing. This Element focuses on Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell's theories of judgment in the summer of 1913. Wittgenstein's response to these criticisms is of first-rate importance for his early philosophical development, setting the path to the conceptions of proposition and of logic in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This Element also touches on further aspects of Wittgenstein's responses to Russell: the rejection of Russell's and Frege's logicisms in the Tractatus, the critique of Russell's causal-behavioristic philosophy (...) of mind in Wittgenstein's 'middle' period, the Russellian origins of notions of privacy dialectically treated in Philosophical Investigations, and the discussion of 'surveyability' of mathematical proof in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is, again, a response to Russellian logicism. (shrink)

Kant and Milton: fundamentals and foundations -- Kant's journey in the constellation of German Miltonism: toward the procedure of succession -- Kant's Miltonic transfer to exemplarity: the succession to Milton's "On his blindness" in the groundwork of the Metaphysics of morals -- Kantian tragic form and Kantian "storytelling" -- The Critique of practical reason and Samson agonistes -- Kant's Miltonic procedure of succession in a key moment of the Critique of judgment.

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. (...) Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

I revise J L Mackie's first account of casual direction by replacing his notion of "fixity" by a newly defined notion of "sufficing" that is designed to accommodate indeterminism. Keeping Mackie's distinction between casual order and casual direction, I then consider another revision that replaces "fixity" with "one-way conditionship". In response to the charge that all such accounts of casual priority beg the question by making an unjustified appeal to temporal priority, i maintain that one-way conditionship explains rather that assumes (...) objective temporal dependence as well as objective casual dependence. (shrink)

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This Article is part of a larger series of studies that have examined this question by asking what citizens believe the law should demand, using surveys of persons called to jury service (...) in Tucson, Arizona. Respondents are asked to imagine they are the judge charged with deciding a series of cases in which the facts are systematically varied so as to reveal the implicit principles that survey respondents employ in deciding them. Previously reported results in this project have examined studies of the amount of child support that people believe appropriate, and how they believe child custody disputes should be resolved. This study examines lay views about alimony. It finds considerable divergence between American law in practice and the views of American citizens as to what the law should be. Survey respondents were willing to award alimony considerably more often than the law now does. More clearly, in deciding whether to allow an alimony award, they care most of all about the claimant’s responsibility as primary caretaker of the couple’s minor children, to some extent about the partners’ marital status and their relational duration, and very little at all about the claimant’s history of having cared for the couple’s now-grown children. Moreover, the way these factors affect our respondents’ judgments about alimony are not very dependent on who they are. Our respondents did vary among themselves, of course, in the frequency with which they allowed alimony, but they varied relatively little in how factors such as marriage, relational duration, the presence of minor children or the history of care for now-grown children affected their judgments. The citizen consensus reflected by these patterns differs, however, from the prevailing legal rules, the views of many scholars, and the recommendations of the American Law Institute. This striking discrepancy is interesting although not always surprising. Our respondents’ willingness to award alimony to non-marital partners, for example, is consistent with the law of some other Western countries, even if not with American law, suggesting perhaps that it is American law, not our respondents, that is peculiar. Perhaps it is also understandable that our respondents seem more concerned with the welfare of the couple’s current minor children than with addressing perceived inequities in the current economic circumstances of the adult partners. In any event, the views of our respondents pose a challenge to policymakers. Given the dearth of theoretical justification for current American practice, its rejection by American citizens seems all the more telling. (shrink)

Hume, in "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", holds (1) that all causal reasoning is based on experience and (2) that causal reasoning is based on nothing but experience. (1) does not imply (2), and Hume's good reasons for (1) are not good reasons for (2). This essay accepts (1) and argues against (2). A priori reasoning plays a role in causal inference. Familiar examples from Hume and from classroom examples of sudden disappearances and radical changes do not show otherwise. A (...) priori causal reasoning is closely related to understanding causal mechanisms. One uncovers the intelligibility of a causal process by understanding its mechanism. (shrink)

In "Causes and "If P, Even If X, still Q," Philosophy 57 (July 1982), Ted Honderich cites my "The Direction of Causation and the Direction of Conditionship," journal of Philosophy 73 (April 22, 1976) as an example of an account of causal priority that lacks the proper character. After emending Honderich's description of the proper character, I argue that my attempt to account for one-way causation in terms of one-way causal conditionship does not totally lack it. Rather than emphasize the (...) singularity of an effect, as Honderich does, I emphasize the multiplicity of independent factors in a causal circumstance. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners addressing the global food crisis have rarely incorporated perspectives from the world's religious traditions. This lacuna appears in multiple dimensions: until recently, environmentalists have tended to ignore food and agriculture; food justice advocates have focused on food quantities, rather than its method of production; and few scholars of religion have considered agriculture. Faith-based perspectives typically emphasize the dignity and sanctity of creation and offer holistic frameworks that integrate equity, economic, and environmental concerns, often called the three legs (...) of sustainability. Faith-based perspectives can provide new paradigms through which to assess food, consumption, and production and the attendant social relations; assess our scientific, economic, and social approaches; and acknowledge the moral and religious dimensions of the world food crisis. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, first, that the most influential (and perhaps only acceptable) account of the epistemology of self-knowledge, developed and defended at great length in Wright (1989b) and (1989c) (among other places), leaves unanswered a question about the psychology of self-knowledge; second, that without an answer to this question about the psychology of self-knowledge, the epistemic account cannot be considered acceptable; and third, that neither Wright's own answer, nor an interpretation-based answer (based on a proposal from Jacobsen (1997)), (...) will suffice as an acceptable answer to the psychological question. My general ambition is thus to establish that more work is needed if we are to have a full account of self-knowledge in both its epistemological and psychological aspects. I conclude by suggesting how my thesis bears on those who aim to provide an empirical account of the cognition involved in self-knowledge. (shrink)