Over the last three decades, non-adaptationism has developed as an alternative model to more traditional, adaptationist approaches within Evolutionary Epistemology. Despite its great explanatory strength, non-adaptationist EE finds a potential Achilles heel in its adherence to conceptual relativism, namely the idea that empirical content can be relative to many different and radically incommensurable conceptual schemes. In his seminal essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, Donald Davidson did in fact prove the unintelligibility of an analogous form of conceptual (...) relativism. Although Davidson’s original intent was to debunk a conceptual relativist position which he discerned in the works of authors such as Kuhn, Quine, and Whorf, given the apparent similarity between the conceptual relativism supported by non-adaptationist EE and the one criticised by Davidson, one might well wonder if Davidson’s objections would have the same debunking effect if applied to non-adaptationist EE. In this paper I propose to answer this question by directing Davidson’s critiques of conceptual relativism to non-adaptationist EE and by testing to what extent the latter is de facto undermined by Davidson’s attacks. I demonstrate that Davidson’s arguments do not detract from the reliability of non-adaptationist perspectives and, to some extent, they appear to substantiate the non-adaptationist evolutionary epistemological cause anew. (shrink)

This paper argues that the innovation of an ordering source parameter in the standard Lewis-Kratzer semantics for modals was a mistake, at least for English auxiliaries like ‘ought’, and that a simpler dyadic semantics (as proposed in my earlier work) provides a superior account of normative uses of modals. I programmatically investigate problems arising from (i) instrumental conditionals, (ii) gradability and “weak necessity”, (iii) information-sensitivity, and (iv) conflicts, and show how the simpler semantics provides intuitive solutions given three basic moves: (...) (1) an end-relational analysis of normative modality, (2) a “most” analysis of “weak necessity”, and (3) well-motivated appeals to pragmatics. I conclude with metasemantic observations about the desiderata for a semantics for ‘ought’. (shrink)

In (2011) McLeod suggested that the first century Chinese philosopher Wang Chong 王充 may have been a pluralist about truth. In this reply I contest McLeod's interpretation of Wang Chong, and suggest "quasi-pluralism" (albeit more as an alternative to pluralism than as an interpretation of Wang Chong), which combines primitivism about the concept of truth with pluralism about justification.

(First paragraph.) Different views on the relation between phenomenal reality, the world as we consciously experience it, and noumenal reality, the world as it is independent from an experiencing subject, have different implications for a collection of interrelated issues of meaning and reality including aspects of metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology. Exploring some of these implications, this paper compares and brings together analytic, continental, and Buddhist approaches, focusing on relevant aspects of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, Jacques (...) Derrida, Dharmakīrti, and Dōgen. Prima facie, these philosophers have little in common, and indeed the differences are vast. Even in case of the two Western thinkers there is a fundamental difference between Davidson’s anti-dualist identification of phenomenal, experienced reality with the noumenal, real, external world on the one hand, and the bracketing or elimination of noumenal reality at the base of Derrida’s thought on the other, which lead to radically different ideas with regards to (the possibility and nature of) objectivity and our linguistic access to the real/external/noumenal world. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha and Davidson’s and Derrida’s theories of triangulation and différance respectively, and these similarities can be exploited to bridge some of the differences and attempt a constructive engagement. (shrink)