Selon les épicuriens, toutes les impressions des sens sont vraies et la raison trouve en elles son fondement. Nombreux sont ceux, cependant, qui croient que les impressions des sens ne sont pas toutes vraies. Les épicuriens expliquent cette croyance de la façon suivante : la source de cette erreur est souvent la croyance que les impressions des sens peuvent se contredire. Mais cette dernière croyance résulte souvent de ce que les épicuriens tiennent pour notre tendance naturelle, et fréquemment utile, à (...) généraliser et à former des opinions par extrapolation à partir des impressions de nos sens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:381 IMPRESSIONS, IDEAS, AND FICTIONS I. Introduction Under the heading of "fiction," Selby-Bigge's index to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature lists no fewer than seventeen distinct fictions. There is the fiction of perfect equality, of continued and distinct existence, of substance and matter, of substantial forms, accidents, faculties and occult qualities, the fiction of personal identity, and many others. The notion of a fiction is central in Hume's philosophy. (...) As the title of this paper suggests, I believe that fictions are so important that what is commonly called Hume's theory of impressions and ideas ought to be called the theory of impressions, ideas, and fictions. Although fictions are at the heart of a number of Treatise passages, they have 2 generally received very little sustained treatment. This paper is a start at filling a gap in Hume interpretation. I hope to lay the groundwork for a complete study of Hume's fictions. There are some obvious questions to be addressed in such a study: Is there just one type of fiction or are there many? Is there an essential feature or set of features shared by all fictions? Is the characterization of a view as involving a fiction always a criticism of that view? If fictions are in some sense false or wrong, what do they contrast with? What notions are true or correct? Does Hume's account of fictions mesh with an account of truth? If there is no account of truth, how can there be an account of fictions? These questions, by no means the only ones which can be raised, are related. They can be seen as hovering around the issue of whether Hume's notion 382 of a fiction is an ontological notion. Is calling something a fiction denying the existence of that thing? Does believing in fictions (e.g., believing that there are persons) amount to holding a false belief that something exists when in fact it does not? Should we read Hume as claiming, for example, that there are no substances because he calls substance a fiction? Answering 'yes' to these questions has obvious implications for the questions raised in the last paragraph. I believe that while the deflationist reading is not completely wrong, it is wrong enough to account for much confusion in Hume interpretation. Many readers of the Treatise think, for example, that in calling the self a fiction Hume is denying the existence of persons. This makes it completely mysterious why Hume talks about persons throughout the Treatise in a common-sense way, as if they do exist. Though I cannot investigate all the consequences of my interpretation of Hume's fictions for the numerous issues which involve fictions in the Treatise, it is my hope that clarifying Hume's notion of fiction will help shed light on those other notions, such as personal identity, which Hume calls fictions. I will offer an interpretation which attempts to locate some general features of fictions in the Treatise passages where Hume invokes them. Although there are different fictions, Hume has a core notion of fiction which is fundamentally epistemological rather than ontological. There will be space in this paper to look at only a few fictions, those which occur in or before "Of scepticism with regard to the senses." I believe, however, that the interpretation can be generalized. Finally, I will suggest how my interpretation provides answers to the above questions. 383 II. Fiction and Imagination It is tempting to think of Hume's notion of a fiction as an ontological notion because in contemporary usage, the notion of a fiction is ontologically loaded. Fictions are things we construct in our heads; they are the result of concatenating ideas in the imagination. Golden mountains and the Wicked Witch of the East are fictitious; they don't represent anything which exists. If Hume is using this notion of fiction, then he must be doing deflationary ontology. On this view, to call something a fiction is to demote it to the status of something thought up in one's imagination; it is to accord it the rank of something whose existence is not to be accepted. There is some support... (shrink)

I argue that both language acquisition and cultural and social factors contribute to the formation of schemata that facilitate false belief reasoning. While the proposal for an active role of language acquisition in this sense has been partially advanced by several voices in the mentalizing debate, I argue that other accounts addressing this issue present some shortcomings. Specifically, I analyze the existing proposals distinguishing between “structure-oriented” views :1858–1878, 2007; de Villiers in Why language matters for theory of (...) mind. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 186–219, 2005), that stress the role of language as a set of rules providing syntactic input and providing a representational format, and “cultural/social-oriented views”, that stress the role of social interaction. Starting from the analysis of these views, I defend my own account of the role of language acquisition in aiding false belief reasoning. I argue that language acquisition plays a pivotal role in the formation of schemata used by pre-schoolers to pass the false belief task. I propose a specific learning mechanism for exploiting linguistic information that taps into specific cognitive abilities, thus making a very concrete suggestion about the role of linguistic input in specific cultural contexts for the development of false belief skills. (shrink)

In A Treatise of Human Nature 1.4.2, entitled ‘Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses’, Hume discussed the causes of belief in the existence of external objects. Philosophers, correcting the false...

Our interest is in the possibility of there being a philosophically interesting set of useful false beliefs where the utility in question is specifically epistemic. As we will see, it is hard to delineate plausible candidates in this regard, though several are promising at first blush. We begin with the kind of strictly false claims that are said to be often involved in good scientific practice, such as through the use of idealisations and fictions. The problem is that (...) it is difficult to see that there would be any epistemic utility in believing such claims, as opposed, say, to merely accepting them. Next we turn to the challenge posed by epistemic situationism, which when embedded within a plausible form of virtue epistemology appears to show that sometimes purely situational factors can play a significant explanatory role in one’s cognitive success. But again it is hard to see how the role that these epistemically beneficial situational factors contribute can be cashed out in terms of epistemically useful false beliefs on the part of the subject. Finally, we turn to the Wittgensteinian conception of hinge commitments, commitments that are held to be epistemically useful even if false. While the epistemic utility of these commitments is defended, it is argued that one cannot make sense of these commitments in terms of belief. Support is thus canvassed, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, for the thesis that the prospects for there being philosophically interesting cases of epistemically useful false belief are poor. (shrink)

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we (...) navigate FBs as they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance. (shrink)

In their 1978 paper, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff posed the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” They treated this question as interchangeable with the inquiry, “Does a chimpanzee make inferences about another individual, in any degree or kind?” Here, we offer an alternative way of thinking about this issue, positing that while chimpanzees may not possess a theory of mind in the strict sense, we ought to think of them as enactive perceivers of practical (...) and social affordances. As such, we reframe the question: “Are chimpanzees socially enactive?”. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume and Pascal: Pyrrhonism vs. Nature José R. Maia Neto The view that Pyrrhonism is not practically viable was, according to Richard H. Popkin, held during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesbydifferent philosophers suchas Mersenne,Arnauld, Pascal, Ramsay, and others.1 Among the anti-sceptics, this position was usually taken as an argument against Pyrrhonism. Popkin points out that Hume's main contribution to the "Pyrrhonian controversy" is to show that (i) "the Pyrrhonian (...) doctrine was the logical outcome of philosophical analysis,"2 (ii) that the infeasibility of Pyrrhonism does not weaken its epistemological force but only its psychological plausibility, and (Ui) that this implausibility obtains because nature (the common affairs ofeveryday life and the feeUngs, impressions, and ideas thereby generated) impels the philosopher to believe.3 Popkin alsomakes an allusion to the similaritybetweenHume and Pascal on this issue.4 In this paper I compare the dilemma posed by Pascal as apropaedeutic tofaith withthe "dangerous dilemma" alluded to, but avoided, by Hume in the conclusion of book 1 of the Treatise. The dilemma follows from (i) above. At a certain point in his epistemological enquiry the philosopher is forced tomake a hard choice between the quite disadvantageous alternatives: either to continue his philosophizing, which, leading to Pyrrhonism, may bring despair and cause the annihilation ofhis life, or to abandon philosophy, makinghim aprey ofthe "errors, absurdities, andobscurities"ofanon-critical life.5 In what follows I compare Hume's solution to this dilemma with Pascal's.? In the following passage Hume shows the toughness of the dilemma and offers a first answer to it: What party, then, shall we choose among these difficulties? If we... condemn all refin'd reasoning, we run into the most manifest absurdities. If we reject it in favour of these reasonings, we subvert entirely the human understanding. We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all. For my part, I know not what ought to be done Volume XVII Number 1 41 JOSE R.???? NETO in the present case. I can only observe what is commonly done; which is, that this difficulty is seldom or never thought of; and even where it has once been present to the mind, is quickly forgot, and leaves but a small impression behind it. (T 268) Note that in this first answer Hume manages to avoid the normative response that the dilemma demands. He provides, instead, a descriptive account which is a kind of solution because it purports to show that human psychology makes it unlikely that someone could reach the point at which he or she would have to choose between the two parties. The dilemma does not arise because nature stops the self-subversion ofreason. Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herselfsuffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent ofmind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. (T 269) Hume means by nature in this passage both human nature and the social and natural environments which, in so far as they demand specific reactions, generate appropriate beliefs. Those beliefs imposed by nature are necessaryforour survival. So, the mere interaction ofthe philosopher with the world outside his closet suffices to dispel his sceptical crisis. According to Hume, this determination of nature is absolute and necessary. "I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin'd to live... I may, nay I must yield to the current ofnature" (T 269). This view is reaffirmed in the Enquiry. Nature is always too strong for principle. And though a PYRRHONIAN may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point ofaction and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect, or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches.6 So, it would appear that the dilemma is just a fleeting impression in the imagination of the philosopher during a momentary sceptical crisis. Nature provides that such a crisis is not prolonged... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IT AIN'T NECESSITY, SO... (With Apologies to George Gershwin) I shall argue in this paper that what Hume calls the idea of necessary connection is mislabelled, and that what he ought to call the idea of necessary connection is not so labelled. My argument is not that there are, on Hume's view, real necessary connections between causes and their effects but rather that there is an idea of genuine (...) necessary connection — what I call logical necessity — which we all mistakenly believe extends to causal connections. The genesis of this mistake is given a psychological explanation in the Treatise. Precisely how does Hume account for the origin of what he calls our idea of necessary connection? I have argued elsewhere that, whatever the answer, it has little philosophical importance. My reason was that, given Hume's view that causal connections are not necessary, the question must be viewed as one within psychology. Recent work on Hume, however, has convinced me that my former opinion was much too quick. Imlay, for example, has challenged Hume's distinction between demonstrative and probable inference on the grounds that Hume gives only one account of necessity for both 2 mathematical and lawlike truths. As I now see much more clearly, there are important philosophical distinctions that must be made in any full explication of Hume's view of the origin of our idea of causal necessity. I shall attempt an answer to the lead question of the second paragraph. My strategy is as follows. I shall first present a synopsis of Hume's account of our belief in causal necessity. Next, I shall develop 87. 88. a view of logical necessity. Finally, I shall briefly examine the exact genesis of the confusion between logical and causal necessity. Consider the following three propositions: (1)Hume does not believe that there are necessary causal connections. (2)All statements of laws of nature are on Hume's view descriptions of constant conjunctions, the logical form of which is captured by the Russellian " (x) [fx => gx]." (3)This logical form captures Hume's first definition of "cause." On these three propositions I and many other philosophers agree. I and an ever-shrinking number of philosophers also believe that Hume is right. But everyone, according to Hume, in some sense believes that causal connections are necessary; the Humean philosopher knows they are not but acts otherwise, while the ordinary person simply acts without the knowledge. Since everyone believes what is false, only a psychological explanation can be given for why we believe it anyway. Thus, Hume's second definition of "cause", and the view that the idea of necessity arises from the determination of the mind to pass from the impression of a cause to an idea of 3 its effect. The three most salient passages from the Treatise on the production of the idea of necessary connection follow. As we shall see, these passages cannot be understood without considering a number of others. For after a frequent repetition, I find, that upon the appearance of one of the objecte, the mind is determin 'd by custom to consider its usual attendant, and to consider it in a stronger light upon account of 89. its relation to the first object. 'Tis this impression, then, or determination, which affords me the idea of necessity. (T 156) Tho ' the several resembling instances, which give rise to the idea of power, have no influence on each other, and can never produce any new quality in the object, which can be the model of that idea, yet the observation of this resemblance produces a new impression in the mind, which is its real model. For after we have observ 'd the resemblance in a sufficient number of instances, we immediately feel a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant, and to conceive it in a stronger light upon account of that relation. This determination is the only effect of the resemblance; and therefore must be the same with power or efficacy, whose idea is deriv 'd from the resemblance. The several instances of resembling conjunctions leads us into the notion of power and necessity.... Necessity, then... (shrink)

Readers of the poems of Dracontius as edited and expounded by F. Vollmer may well receive the impression that the poet was incapable of the Latin tongue and was given to turns and expressions intelligible only to himself and such painstaking students as his editor. The language of the true Drac., though often stiff and artificial, does not, however, call for superhuman powers of interpretation, and the bewilderment of his readers is occasioned largely by the faulty tradition of the text (...) and the conservatism of an editor who either refuses to recognize the corruptions which confront him, or is content with superficial corrections sufficient to restore some semblance of grammar whether or not accompanied by sense. To the text of Drac. Vollm. certainly made a valuable contribution, but his unshakable faith in the integrity of scribes led to a frequent acceptance of the false as the true; that the transmission of the text may have been left to the heedless or the ignorant is not a possibility which appears to have occurred to him. There can be no doubt that the manuscripts on which the text depends are full of corruptions, and many of these have received either inadequate attention or none at all; where convincing remedies have been proposed by previous scholars, Vollm. has shown all too often a blind indifference. The poems of Drac. deserve, indeed, more sympathetic treatment, for they are by no means without merit. The Christian works at least, written during his imprisonment, contain flashes of real poetry and are characterized by a warmth of feeling inspired by the poet's personal miseries and genuine belief in the goodness of God; that they were read and imitated in the most diverse lands of the Christian world is not surprising. The following notes represent for the most part an attempt to improve on Vollm.'s text of the De laudibus dei and the Satisfactio in certain passages where the manuscript reading appears to me to have been either improperly retained or imperfectly emended. I have already dealt with a number of other unsatisfactory passages in C.Q., vol. xxxiii, pp. 157–62, and vol. xl, pp. 92–100. The text quoted is in each case that of Vollm.'s P.L.M. edition. (shrink)

Much of the recent literature on the normativity of belief has focused on undermining or defending narrow scope readings of doxastic norms. Wide scope readings are largely assumed to have been decisively refuted. This paper will oppose this trend by defending a wide scope reading of the norm of belief. We shall argue for the modest claim that if it is plausible to regard belief as constitutively normative (in the minimal sense that false belief (...) is eo ipso defective), then a modified version of the wide scope reading of the norm of belief should be preferred to the narrow scope reading. (This is subject to certain attractive conditions relating to the holism involved in the fixation and confirmation of belief.). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME, MOTIVATION AND MORALITY Hume remarks, in the Abstract, that his account of the passions in Book II of the Treatise has 'laid the foundation' (A 7 Ì1 for his theory of morals. Pall Ardal has shown how Hume's theory of certain indirect passions (pride, humility, love, hatred) underpins his theory of the evaluation of character. I propose to explore the links between Hume's account of motivation and his (...) treatment of an agent 'ß moral assessment of prospective action. Where Ardal stresses the moral spectator, my focus is on the agent. Hume himself attends primarily to the moral spectator, but the agent's perspective is central in two of his chief arguments concerning morals, that for the thesis that moral distinctions are derived from a moral sense, and that for the artificiality of justice. I shall take it that the argument of Treatise II, iii, 3 ("Of the influencing motives of the will") provides the framework for analysis: acting for moral reasons is like acting for any other reason; citing his moral principles to explain a man's actions is like citing his desire to preserve his health as an explanation of his taking exercise; deliberating about moral matters is like pondering the purchase of a pair of shoes. Of course there are differences; I shall look to them shortly. It is essential, however, to begin with the similarities. To a first approximation, the central doctrine is that the reasons that explain actions are rational causes of those actions. Reasons for actions are constituted by suitably related desires and beliefs; volitions are somehow implicated in intentional actions. Reasons are causes: the desires and beliefs that constitute reasons cause volitions, and thus actions. They are rational causes: there are links of special kinds between the contents of the desires and beliefs that constitute an agent's reasons for what he does, and the content of the volitions implicated in the actions done. Hume is at pains to deny that "reason [here: belief] alone can... be a motive to any action of the will" (T 413). But he insists there are "two principal parts [of human nature], which are requisite in all its actions, the affections and understanding' (T 493). I suggest that by "affections" he here means specifically (if broadly) desires, and so both the "direct passions" of desire and aversion and such "indirect passions" as benevolence, anger, pity, compassion and malice. Hume's official doctrines both of desires and of volitions are unsatisfactory as they stand; he treats each as simple impressions. To be sure, these simple impressions are said always to be accompanied by thoughts of (in Hume's phrase) their objects. Even such complex states, however, can play no satisfactory role in psychological theory. The insights that Hume's official doctrines mishandle can, I suggest, be incorporated into more defensible, and more-or-less Humean, analyses of the internal structure of desire and volition. Having made efforts along these lines elsewhere, however, I shall here concentrate on other features of desire and volition that are germane to Hume's moral psychology. Desires and volitions are alike in two linked respects, among others: neither takes a truth value (and so each differs from belief); each is a conative, not a cognitive, psychological state (and so, again, each differs from belief). Because desires and volitions are not capable of "an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact" it is "impossible... they can be pronounced either true or false" (T 458). Their general functional role is that of "propense and averse motions of the mind" (T 574). To be sure, there are differences. The principal difference is that of specific functional location: desires are constituents in reasons for acting: volitions are constituents of (or otherwise implicated in) actions done for such reasons. This functional difference is tied to differences of content. To grasp the many relations among belief, desire and volition, when the first two serve as 4 reason for (and so cause of) the third, it is useful to plot their causal relations onto the elements in an Aristotelian practical syllogism. Desires function as causally salient major premises... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socrates Dissatisfied: An Analysis of Plato’s Crito by Roslyn WeissMark L. McPherranRoslyn Weiss. Socrates Dissatisfied: An Analysis of Plato’s Crito. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 187. Cloth, $39.95.The speech by ‘the Laws’ of the Crito has commonly been understood as a case of Socratic ventriloquism, voicing a doctrine of authoritarian civic obligation that Socrates himself endorses. This, of course, generates the standard problem of (...) reconciling this docile son of Athens with the radically autonomous Socrates of the Apology, a man obedient only to the dictates of his own reason. Roslyn Weiss’s book sets out to challenge this mainstream reading.On Weiss’s account, the speech of the Laws is a piece of crafty Socratic rhetoric antithetical to Socrates’ own convictions. Its purpose, then, is to convince not the reader but the lawless and unphilosophical Crito that Socrates ought to remain in Athens, using terms that Crito can comprehend (terms that will benefit his soul by making him more law-abiding). Despite this false ‘oratory’ (50b6–8), however, Socrates’ own first allegiance is to “justice and philosophy” (3) whose principles dictate that he suffer the court’s judgment, “abiding by the things agreed to” at his trial (Cr. 50a2–3).Although others have argued for this thesis, this is the first book-length argument of its kind and it supersedes all previous attempts in its persuasiveness and its thorough and detailed treatment: sensitive not only to the dialogue’s Greek and argumentative structure, but also to its literary/characterological nuances, it establishes an important scholarly outpost on the interpretation of the Crito and a worthy challenge to Richard Kraut’s reading. It is, finally, written in a remarkably engaging, clean and effective style, addressing the secondary scholarship adequately, and providing a useful bibliography and general index (though, regrettably, no Index Locorum).The book essentially follows the text of the Crito in a series of nine chapters. After a short Introduction, Chapter 2 begins by portraying Socrates as an autonomous moral agent utterly devoted to justice; Chapter 3 distinguishes Crito from Socrates; Chapter 4 contends that 46b–50a outlines Socrates’ complete argument against escape (one compatible with the principles of the Apology); Chapter 5 unpacks Socrates’ hint at 50a–d that the Laws will be offering only rhetorical arguments; Chapter 6 outlines these arguments and their logical flaws; Chapter 7 addresses Socrates’ characterization of their effect as ‘Corybantic’ (54d); Chapter 8 explains how the Laws are able to “boost Crito to a higher rung on the moral ladder,” (6); and finally, Chapter 9 reaffirms the radical moral independence of Socrates.Provocative and impressive, the book is bound to provoke criticism and reservations in its readers. Here I can only record a sample of my own. First, it seems to me that Weiss’s desire to portray Socrates as a slave of reason and not the state leads her astray when she tries to account for Socrates’ apparent reliance on the extrarational (15–23). Weiss, for example, tries to map out a new third alternative to the opposition between Vlastos’ view that the daimonion is no more than a kind of subjective, contentless hunch and the Brickhouse, Smith and McPherran view that the daimonion can oppose and ‘trump’ the results of rational deliberation. As she sees it, for Socrates the daimonion is not a voice independent of, and in potential conflict with, his own thinking; rather, it is the voice of his own unconscious beliefs, restraining him for his own reasons from [End Page 620] doing what he is tempted to do in moments of weakness. There is much to be said against this account, but it will suffice to point out that whatever the true nature of the daimonion might have been, Socrates is not likely to have been sympathetic to Weiss’s analysis of it. All our evidence, after all, indicates that Socrates takes the cause of the daimonion to be a god or daimoôn in the traditional sense of those terms (see, e.g., Ap. 27b–28a). Weiss’s proposal also runs up against texts such as Lysis 218C4–8 and 215C4–5, where Socrates recounts an... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume and Pascal: Pyrrhonism vs. Nature José R. Maia Neto The view that Pyrrhonism is not practically viable was, according to Richard H. Popkin, held during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesbydifferent philosophers suchas Mersenne,Arnauld, Pascal, Ramsay, and others.1 Among the anti-sceptics, this position was usually taken as an argument against Pyrrhonism. Popkin points out that Hume's main contribution to the "Pyrrhonian controversy" is to show that (i) "the Pyrrhonian (...) doctrine was the logical outcome of philosophical analysis,"2 (ii) that the infeasibility of Pyrrhonism does not weaken its epistemological force but only its psychological plausibility, and (Ui) that this implausibility obtains because nature (the common affairs ofeveryday life and the feeUngs, impressions, and ideas thereby generated) impels the philosopher to believe.3 Popkin alsomakes an allusion to the similaritybetweenHume and Pascal on this issue.4 In this paper I compare the dilemma posed by Pascal as apropaedeutic tofaith withthe "dangerous dilemma" alluded to, but avoided, by Hume in the conclusion of book 1 of the Treatise. The dilemma follows from (i) above. At a certain point in his epistemological enquiry the philosopher is forced tomake a hard choice between the quite disadvantageous alternatives: either to continue his philosophizing, which, leading to Pyrrhonism, may bring despair and cause the annihilation ofhis life, or to abandon philosophy, makinghim aprey ofthe "errors, absurdities, andobscurities"ofanon-critical life.5 In what follows I compare Hume's solution to this dilemma with Pascal's.? In the following passage Hume shows the toughness of the dilemma and offers a first answer to it: What party, then, shall we choose among these difficulties? If we... condemn all refin'd reasoning, we run into the most manifest absurdities. If we reject it in favour of these reasonings, we subvert entirely the human understanding. We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all. For my part, I know not what ought to be done Volume XVII Number 1 41 JOSE R.???? NETO in the present case. I can only observe what is commonly done; which is, that this difficulty is seldom or never thought of; and even where it has once been present to the mind, is quickly forgot, and leaves but a small impression behind it. (T 268) Note that in this first answer Hume manages to avoid the normative response that the dilemma demands. He provides, instead, a descriptive account which is a kind of solution because it purports to show that human psychology makes it unlikely that someone could reach the point at which he or she would have to choose between the two parties. The dilemma does not arise because nature stops the self-subversion ofreason. Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herselfsuffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent ofmind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. (T 269) Hume means by nature in this passage both human nature and the social and natural environments which, in so far as they demand specific reactions, generate appropriate beliefs. Those beliefs imposed by nature are necessaryforour survival. So, the mere interaction ofthe philosopher with the world outside his closet suffices to dispel his sceptical crisis. According to Hume, this determination of nature is absolute and necessary. "I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin'd to live... I may, nay I must yield to the current ofnature" (T 269). This view is reaffirmed in the Enquiry. Nature is always too strong for principle. And though a PYRRHONIAN may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point ofaction and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect, or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches.6 So, it would appear that the dilemma is just a fleeting impression in the imagination of the philosopher during a momentary sceptical crisis. Nature provides that such a crisis is not prolonged... (shrink)

Distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and true belief that is knowledge implies scepticism as regards facts. That is because it falsely reduces knowledge to mere true belief To remove the scepticism, it might be held that sense and referent are the same in both. But this over-correction makes the opposite mistake of reducing mere true belief to knowledge. It also implies either assimilating false belief to true (...) belief or saying, counterintuitively, that the sense of a belief varies with the truth-value of the belief The way out is to take the middle path of distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and identifying sense and referent in true belief that is knowledge. (shrink)

Thomas Reid was a persistent and acute critic of the philosophy of David Hume. It is Reid’s contention that Hume’s theory cannot account for the facts of human conception and belief. Hume’s theory is deficient in that impressions and ideas are inadequate to account for the intentionality of human thought, the fact that human thoughts have objects, ones that may not exist. Impressions and ideas are also inadequate to account for the facts of belief, especially the fact of (...) negative belief. Reid recognizes the genius of the attempt to account for human conception and belief in terms of impressions and ideas. He calls Hume the most acute metaphysician of the age and remarked, in correspondence, that if Mr. Hume were to stop writing, he and his cohorts in Aberdeen would have nothing to discuss. Reid remarks as well, however, that it is genius and not the lack of it that leads to false philosophy. Reid is not a mere modus tollens critic of Hume. Unlike G. E. Moore, Reid does not rest content with arguing that Hume’s theory cannot account for the facts but contends that we need not despair of a better. Reid’s philosophy is an attempt to offer a better theory. I shall describe Reid’s destructive and constructive efforts to refute the philosophy of Hume. (shrink)

Here’s a problem that any reliability theory must face, whether it’s one that holds that beliefs are justified just when they’re products of belief-forming mechanisms with the potential of having good records of yielding true beliefs, or one that holds that a belief meets the standards for knowledge if and only if its causal basis rules out any relevant chance of mistake. The problem is made evident when cast in probabilistic terms. Let r be S’s reason for tokening (...) the true belief that p under conditions c. Then, according to reliabilism, Sis justified in believing that p under c iff r makes it sufficiently probable that p, whileS knows that p iff the conditional probability that p on r and c is unity. But how do we specify the belief context c to be counted as epistemically relevant? As urged recently by John Pollock, on the face of it there seems to be no principled reason for excluding mention of the truth value of the proposition believed. As he says, ‘The only obvious way to construct an objective non-epistemic kind of definite probability is to make it conditional on everything that is true [at the belief’s tokening]’ ; and, as he notes, ‘one feature of the present circumstances is a characterization of the belief as a belief in [p ], and another feature is the truth value of [p]’. But if we allow both the belief token and its truth value membership in the relevant belief context, we then have the hopeless task of explaining how the probability of the token’s being true can be anything but one or zero, one if what is believed is true, and zero if it’s false. This in tum would commit reliabilism to the foolish doctrines that a belief’s truth is sufficient for knowledge, while no false belief is ever even justified. No wonder, then, that Pollock says ‘there is no way to construct an intelligible notion of reliability which does the job required by the reliabilist’. And he is surely right in this: Neither knowledge nor justification can be explained as the chance of a belief’s being true if the relevant belief context is required to mention both the belief tokened and its truth value. We would be engaged in a comparably pointless task were we to try to explain the likelihood of a wager’s being a good bet on a horse race when we had to include among the givens both which horse was picked and its finish, or were we to try to make sense of the assertion that a theory’s predictions have a good chance of being true when both what the theory predicts and its outcome had to be included among the givens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (...) (logically) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, (...) vis-à-vis the imaginary world, the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content. (shrink)

Distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and true belief that is knowledge implies scepticism as regards facts. That is because it falsely reduces knowledge to mere true belief To remove the scepticism, it might be held that sense and referent are the same in both. But this over-correction makes the opposite mistake of reducing mere true belief to knowledge. It also implies either assimilating false belief to true (...) belief or saying, counterintuitively, that the sense of a belief varies with the truth-value of the belief The way out is to take the middle path of distinguishing sense and referent in true belief that is not knowledge and identifying sense and referent in true belief that is knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (...) (logically) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

Thomas Reid was a persistent and acute critic of the philosophy of David Hume. It is Reid’s contention that Hume’s theory cannot account for the facts of human conception and belief. Hume’s theory is deficient in that impressions and ideas are inadequate to account for the intentionality of human thought, the fact that human thoughts have objects, ones that may not exist. Impressions and ideas are also inadequate to account for the facts of belief, especially the fact of (...) negative belief. Reid recognizes the genius of the attempt to account for human conception and belief in terms of impressions and ideas. He calls Hume the most acute metaphysician of the age and remarked, in correspondence, that if Mr. Hume were to stop writing, he and his cohorts in Aberdeen would have nothing to discuss. Reid remarks as well, however, that it is genius and not the lack of it that leads to false philosophy. Reid is not a mere modus tollens critic of Hume. Unlike G. E. Moore, Reid does not rest content with arguing that Hume’s theory cannot account for the facts but contends that we need not despair of a better. Reid’s philosophy is an attempt to offer a better theory. I shall describe Reid’s destructive and constructive efforts to refute the philosophy of Hume. (shrink)

Teaching false theories goes against the general pedagogical and philosophical belief that we must only teach and learn what is true. In general, the goal of pedagogy is taken to be epistemic: to gain knowledge and avoid ignorance. In this article, I argue that for realists and antirealists alike, epistemological and pedagogical goals have to come apart. I argue that the falsity of a theory does not automatically make it unfit for being taught. There are several good reasons (...) for teaching false theories in school science. These are false theories can bring about genuine understanding of the world; teaching some false theories from the history of science that line up with children’s ideas can provide students “intellectual empathy” and also aid in better grasp of concepts; teaching false theories from the history of science can sharpen students’ understanding of the nature of science; scientists routinely use false theories and models in their practice and it is good sense for science education to mirror scientific practice; and learning about patently non-scientific and antiscientific ideas will prepare students to face and respond to them. In making arguments for the foregoing five points, I draw upon the work of a variety of philosophers and historians of science, cognitive scientists, science education scholars, and scientists. My goal here is not only to justify theories considered false already being taught, but also to actively endorse the teaching of some theories considered false that are by and large not currently taught. (shrink)

(I) It is commonly held that a person cannot wittingly hold false or inconsistent beliefs. Edgley has argued that this follows from the normative implications involved in the concept of belief and the concept of a proposition, as expressed in the analytic principle 'if p, then it is right to think that p\ (II) But the principle, when taken in its analytic sense, does not have the required implications; and taken in the sense in which it (...) would have those implications it is neither analytic nor true. (III) A person can not only hold a false belief wittingly, he can assert that he does. Examples are given to exhibit the legitimacy of the claim that such irrationality does not necessarily dissolve when recognized for what it is. (IV) The phenomenon of self-confessed irrationality involves the fusion of two general features of mental life. It comprises a mental state over whose existence one has no control, but which one can in some way detach oneself from and be critical of. (shrink)

In 'Plato on Sense and Reference' (Mind,1985, pp. 526-37), I argued that Plato 'understood and rejected' a general strategy for explaining false belief, and that Frege's explanation of false belief was an instance of that general strategy. Michael Beaney ('Mistakes and Mismatches: A Reply to Rudebusch', Mind, 1987, pp. 95-8) replied that there is a feature of Frege's explanation that enables it to escape the argument. In this rejoinder I argue that Beaney's escape is not (...) Fregean and that it fails. (shrink)

The idea that we can properly be held responsible for what we believe underlies large stretches of our social and institutional life; without that idea in place, social and institutional life would be unthinkable, and more importantly, it would stumble and fall. At the same time, philosophers have argued that this idea is strange, puzzling, beyond belief, false, meaningless or at any rate defective. The first section develops the alleged problem. The burden of this paper, however, is not (...) to discuss the merits of this idea but rather to measure the damage in case the idea turns out to be defective indeed. This is done by substantiating the claim that this idea indeed underlies large and important stretches of our social and institutional life. Section 2 substantiates that claim by presenting the results of a web search on the use of what I call "deontological epistemic expressions", i.e. expressions in which deontological and epistemological notions (both broadly construed) are combined; examples are "obligation to believe", "not permitted to forget", "right to know". The ubiquitous use of these expressions, I argue, is linguistic evidence for the claim that the contested idea indeed pervades our social life. Linguistic evidence, however, can be frail and misleading. From the fact that we say that the shade is moving we cannot conclude that shades really exist; likewise it may not be permitted to conclude from the ubiquitous use of deontological epistemic expressions that there really are doxastic obligations (and hence doxastic responsibilities). The third section, therefore, moves beyond the linguistic evidence and discusses two social institutions, viz. education and law as we find them in modern Western societies, and argues that they cannot be made sense of unless the contested idea is in place. Educational and legal systems of course vary greatly throughout the Western world. Such differences as exist, however, are irrelevant for the claim I will be making in this paper. The final section states the conclusion. (shrink)

Aristotle determines eristic argument as argument which either operates upon the basis of acceptable premisses (endoxa) and merely give the impression of being deductive, or argument which truly is deductive but operates upon the basis of premisses which seem to be acceptable, but are not (or, again, argument which uses both of these mechanisms). I attempt to understand what Aristotle has in mind when he says that someone is deceived into accepting premisses which seem to be acceptable but which are (...) really not, and how this disqualifies such arguments from being dialectical. In the first section of the paper I interpret Aristotle’s notion of endoxa in terms of a relational concept of acceptability. Real Índoxa are propositions which are accepted by a qualified group or individual. False endoxa may also be accepted by someone or some group, and may even be true, but they are used to serve the purposes of eristical argumentation, which departs from certain standards of dialectical argumentation articulated in the notion of endoxa as a norm for premiss-acceptance. In particular, eristic arguments may even be valid in the sense of a syllogismos while still failing to be proper dialectical arguments. In the second part of the paper I consider how this can be, in examining certain types of fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the relationship between fallacious argumentation and false endoxa. (shrink)

Aristotle determines eristic argument as argument which either operates upon the basis of acceptable premisses and merely give the impression of being deductive, or argument which truly is deductive but operates upon the basis of premisses which seem to be acceptable, but are not. I attempt to understand what Aristotle has in mind when he says that someone is deceived into accepting premisses which seem to be acceptable but which are really not, and how this disqualifies such arguments from being (...) dialectical. In the first section of the paper I interpret Aristotle’s notion of ἔνδοξα in terms of a relational concept of acceptability. Real ἔνδοα are propositions which are accepted by a qualified group or individual. False ἔνδοα may also be accepted by someone or some group, and may even be true, but they are used to serve the purposes of eristical argumentation, which departs from certain standards of dialectical argumentation articulated in the notion of ἔνδοξα as a norm for premiss-acceptance. In particular, eristic arguments may even be valid in the sense of a συλλογισμός while still failing to be proper dialectical arguments. In the second part of the paper I consider how this can be, in examining certain types of fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the relationship between fallacious argumentation and false ἔνδοξα. (shrink)

There are three well-developed sorts of answer to the question ‘What kind of meaning is possessed by religious beliefs?’ The first sort regards religious beliefs as truth claims of the kind encountered in the natural and social sciences and in everyday life. Religious beliefs are claims about how things stand in some part of the world. They are to be counted as true or false depending on whether those claims correspond with how things in fact stand. On this reading, (...) religious beliefs are at least in principle verifiable or falsifiable through experiences of appropriate types. There are of course different notions of ‘experiences of the appropriate type’. A Russian cosmonaut returned from space saying that there was no God. He regarded religious beliefs as falsified by the observations he made when he went into the sky and looked around. Others think of religious beliefs as testable, not through ordinary sense experience, but through rather similar kinds of experiences after death. In either of these versions, the sort of meaning possessed by religious beliefs and the sort of truth or falsehood of which they are susceptible are not radically different from the sorts of meaning and truth typical of claims about empirical facts. (shrink)

A belief ascription such as “Oedipus believes that his mother is the queen of Thebes” can be understood in two ways, one in which it seems true, and another in which it seems false. It can seem true because the woman who was, in fact, Oedipus’ mother was believed by him to be the queen of Thebes. It can seem false because Oedipus himself would have sincerely denied that Jocasta could be correctly characterized as “Oedipus’s mother.” (...) class='Hi'>Belief ascriptions thus seem to admit of two interpretations, and this has suggested to many that belief predicates such as “________ believes that his mother is the queen of Thebes” are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading.1 However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. The following will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms of disavowals from a more basic sort of ascription is preferable to positing a simple ambiguity in which each of the two sorts of ascription are conceptually primitive. (shrink)

We have reasons to want an epistemology of simple belief in addition to the Bayesian notion of belief which admits of degree. Accounts of simple belief which attempt to reduce it to the notion of credence all face difficulties. We argue that each conception captures an important aspect of our pre-theoretic thinking about epistemology; the differences between the two accounts of belief stem from two different conceptions of unlikelihood. On the one hand there is unlikelihood in (...) the sense of improbability, on the other hand there is unlikelihood in the sense of far-fetchedness. A non-reductive account of simple belief is outlined. Belief aims not just at truth, but at attaining the status of knowledge, and knowledge should satisfy the weak modal principle: If S knows that p then S is certain that there is no possibility very close to actuality at which p is false. The account faces a difficulty in dealing with statistical inductive cases. We sketch a speculative strategy for dealing with such cases, based on the pragmatic considerations that lead to an agent’s partition of the space of possibilities and a nonprobabilistic notion of the “estimated distance” of elements of such a partition from actuality. (shrink)

According to the sensitivity account of knowledge, S knows that p only if S’s belief in p is sensitive in the sense that S would not believe that p if p were false. The sensitivity condition is usually relativized to belief-formation methods to avoid putative counterexamples. A remaining issue for the account is where methods should be mentioned in the sensitivity subjunctives. In this paper, I argue that if methods are mentioned in the antecedent, then the (...) account is too strong to accommodate inductive knowledge; if methods are mentioned in the consequent, then the account is too weak to eliminate some luckily true beliefs from the realm of knowledge. Therefore, the strategy to relativize the sensitivity condition is undermined by inductive knowledge and some luckily true beliefs. (shrink)

Despite the strength of arguments for veganism in the animal rights literature, alongside environmental and other anthropocentric concerns posed by industrialised animal agriculture, veganism remains only a minority standpoint. In this paper, I explore the moral motivational problem of veganism from the perspectives of moral psychology and political false consciousness. I argue that a novel interpretation of the post-Marxist notion of political false consciousness may help to make sense of the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism. Specifically, (...) the notion of false consciousness fills some explanatory gaps left by the moral psychological notion of akrasia, often understood to refer to a weakness of will. Central to my approach is the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic and the assumption that moral motivation is inseparable from moral thinking. In this light, the primary obstacle to the adoption of veganism arises not so much from a failure to put genuine beliefs into action, but rather in a shared, distorted way of thinking about animals. Thus, common unreflective objections to veganism may be said to be manifestations of false consciousness. (shrink)

This essay first introduces the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and clarifies important differences between them. It then examines whether moral judgment based on the moral sense or moral sentiments varies according to one's metaphysical beliefs. For this, the essay mainly applies those theories to such issues as stem cell research, abortion, and active euthanasia. In all three theories, false religious beliefs can distort moral judgment. In Hutcheson's theory, answers to stem (...) cell research, abortion, and active euthanasia do not change according to the spectator's metaphysical beliefs. Yet answers to those issues can change according to the agent's metaphysical beliefs. Hume's theory cannot provide answers to stem cell research and abortion where the embryo or fetus is the receiver (the one affected by the agent's action) and to active euthanasia where the patient is unconscious. It may provide answers to abortion where the pregnant woman is the receiver and to active euthanasia where the patient is conscious. Yet the answers can vary depending on the woman's or the patient's metaphysical beliefs. Smith's theory can provide answers to stem cell research, abortion, and active euthanasia. But the answers can vary depending on the agent's metaphysical beliefs. These show that the moral sense or moral sentiments in those theories alone cannot identify appropriate morals. (shrink)

Holding content explicitly requires a form of self knowledge. But what does the relevant self knowledge look like? Using theory of mind as an example, this paper argues that the correct answer to this question will have to take into account the crucial role of language based deliberation, but warns against the standard assumption that explicitness is necessary for ascribing awareness. It argues in line with Bayne that intentional action is at least an equally valid criterion for awareness. This leads (...) to a distinction between different levels of implicitness. Postulating these different levels, it is argued, allows us to make better sense of the empirical literature on early false belief task abilities. (shrink)

How does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary? The phenomenon of self-deception threatens a widely shared view of beliefs according to which they do not regularly correspond to emotions and evaluative attitudes. Accordingly, the most popular answer to this question is that the belief formed in self-deception is caused by an intention to form that belief. On (...) this view, the state of self-deception is taken to be a calculated outcome involving a person's intentional manipulation of her own thoughts. I argue that this answer is false and forms an impediment towards making sense of self-deception. I show that, contrary to philosophical prejudice, emotions and desires exert vast and systematic effects on the formation of beliefs. In this, and other, sections of the article, the results of experimental work are brought forward. Self-deception is portrayed here as resembling numerous instances of belief formation which are regularly affected by motivational factors. I argue that self-deceptive beliefs are direct expressions of the subject's wishes, fears and hopes. Qua beliefs which mostly correspond to such factors (rather than to evidence), self-deceptive states are a kind of fantasy. (shrink)

Hume begins ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses,’ Section 2 of the Treatise, Book I, Part iv with the claim that it is otiose to ask whether or not there are bodies since belief in their existence is unavoidable. The appropriate question is rather ‘What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?’ (§2, 187-8; his emphasis). For Hume, belief is lively conception. Hence, he is also undertaking to answer the logically prior question: What causes (...) induce us to form the concept of body? Hume wants to explain the ordinary notion of, and belief in, external objects as part of his science of human nature. (shrink)

Are these different requirements, in the sense that someone could satisfy one without satisfying the other? No one could meet the Truth Requirement without meeting the Variation Requirement, because understanding that a belief is false involves realising one should not believe it and appreciating the possibility of having other beliefs in its place. But could someone meet the Variation Requirement without meeting the Truth Requirement? In other words, is it possible to be aware of beliefs which are (...) inconsistent without being aware that at least one of these beliefs is false? (shrink)

A major worry in self-deception research has been the implication that people can hold a belief that something is true and false at the same time: a logical as well as a psychological impossibility. However, if beliefs are held with imperfect confidence, voluntary self-deception in the sense of seeking evidence to reject an unpleasant belief becomes entirely plausible and demonstrably real.

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

I argue that it is not ideally rational to believe that some of one's current beliefs are false, despite the impressive inductive evidence concerning others and our former selves. One's own current beliefs represent a commitment which would be undermined by taking some of them to be false. The nature of this commitment is examined in the light of Nagel's distinction between subjective and objective points of view. Finally, I suggest how we might acknowledge our fallibility consistently with (...) this special attitude to our own beliefs. (shrink)

This commentary on Adam Pautz's excellent book, Perception, explores the consequences of “spatial illusionism,” the view that the spatial properties presented in experience aren't instantiated in the extra-mental world. First, I consider whether spatial illusionism entails that our ordinary beliefs about the physical world are mostly false. I then argue that spatial illusionism threatens to undermine two arguments Pautz's defends in Perception: his argument that sense data theory is incompatible with physicalism, and his central argument against the internal (...) physical state view of perception. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is (...) the plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

The over-arching claim that I intend to defend in this paper is that while widespread ‘local’ error is conceivable, we cannot, in the end, make sense of the radical sceptical idea that all our perceptual beliefs might be false – that no one has, as it were, ever been in touch with an ‘external world’ at all. To this end, I will show that an asymmetry exists between ‘local’ and ‘global’ sceptical scenarios, such that the possibility of ‘local’ (...) error does not imply that ‘global’ error must also be possible. Instead, we will see that what gives rise to the radical sceptical problem is an unquestioned acceptance of the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ (NET) – the notion that I and my ‘envatted’ counterpart share the same perceptual experiences, even though my benighted twin has never had any contact with an ‘external’ reality. Although most contemporary epistemologists take NET for granted, I will show that it cannot, ultimately, be rendered intelligible, and, consequently, that neither can the ‘global’ sceptical scenario that depends on it. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I offer an interpretation and defense of the following argument for the claim that we--together with all rational deliberators--are free: rational deliberators necessarily possess a sense of freedom in virtue of their nature as rational deliberators, and if rational deliberators, in virtue of their nature as rational deliberators, necessarily possess a sense of freedom, then they are free. Therefore, rational deliberators are free. ;I offer two related arguments for , each of which is inspired by (...) the Kantian view that reason cannot be the source of an illusory idea. Each argument appeals to a different aspect of reason. The first turns on the idea that reason is a guide to truth, and so could not be such as to lead inevitably to a false sense of ourselves. The second turns on the idea that reason could not lead to an epistemic state which is unresponsive to reasons, and that if there were rational deliberators who were unfree, the sense of freedom would be unresponsive to reasons. ;I then canvass a variety of interpretations of , and argue that several of them rest on a mistaken conception of rational deliberation. I ultimately adopt and defend a reading of according to which all rational deliberators are epistemically committed to the proposition that their actions are up to them in such a way that they are accountable for them. This reading of rests on an understanding of rational deliberation as an activity, the point of which is to act for good reasons. Identifying the correct understanding of rational deliberation allows us to see that the very activity of rational deliberation is rationalized by a sense of freedom, and hence that is true. ;I consider a number of objections to the argument, including the claim that entails that a skeptic who believes that she is not free has contradictory beliefs, and, hence, is irrational. In reply, I argue that the attribution of a certain sort of irrationality in this case is intelligible and provides the best account of the skeptic's situation. (shrink)

Plato's "theaetetus" (187-200) raises puzzles about false belief. Frege's explanation of how an identity statement can be informative is often seen as a solution to socrates' puzzles. The strategy of frege's solution is to explain a "mistake" as a "mismatch". But it turns out that socrates' argument, In fact, Is aware of and rejects this strategy.

Does science provide knowledge of reality? In this paper, I offer a positive response to this question. I reject the anti-realist claim that we are unable to acquire knowledge of reality in favour of the realist view that science yields knowledge of the external world. But what world is that? Some argue that science leads to the overthrow of our commonsense view of the world. Common sense is “stone-age metaphysics” to be rejected as the false theory of our (...) primitive ancestors. Against such eliminativists about common sense, I argue that science both preserves and explains commonsense experience of the world. Though science may lead to the overthrow of deeply held beliefs, common sense reflects a more basic and durable level of experience. Commonsense beliefs are well-confirmed beliefs which are vindicated by their role in successful practical action each and every day. Common sense provides a firm basis on which to establish the realist approach to science. (shrink)

Recent evidence that young children seem to both understand false belief in one sense, but not in another, has led to two-systems theorizing about mindreading. By analyzing the most detailed two-systems approach in studying social cognition—the theory of mindreading defended by Ian Apperly and Stephen Butterfill—I argue that that even when dutifully constructed, two-systems approaches in social cognition struggle to adequately define the mindreading systems in terms of signature processing limits, an issue that becomes most apparent when (...) investigating mindreading in infancy. I end the article by developing several challenges that face any two-systems account of mindreading. (shrink)