According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...) positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. (shrink)

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

Public reasoning is widely thought to be essential to democracy, but there is much disagreement about whether such deliberation should be constrained by a principle of public reason, which may seem to conflict with important democratic values. This paper denies that there is such a conflict, and argues that the distinctive contribution of public reason is to constitute a relationship of civic friendship in a diverse society. Acceptance of public reason would not work against mutual understanding, learning, or compromise, nor (...) does the principle involve any violation of political equality. The real threat to democracy is not public reason, but the framing of public reason by a presumption against state action. (shrink)

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material.

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

On the neo-Fregean approach to the foundations of mathematics, elementary arithmetic is analytic in the sense that the addition of a principle wliich may be held to IMJ explanatory of the concept of cardinal number to a suitable second-order logical basis suffices for the derivation of its basic laws. This principle, now commonly called Hume's principle, is an example of a Fregean abstraction principle. In this paper, I assume the correctness of the neo-Fregean position on elementary aritlunetic and seek to (...) explain one way in which it may be extended to encompass the theory of real numbers, introducing the reals, by means of suitable further abstraction principles, as ratios of quantities. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

Neoliberalization is a distinctive economic, political, and social project that promotes profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation as the primary axis of societalization. This might suggest that neoliberalism promotes the primacy of the economic but, since its extension and reproduction require continuing state support and, indeed, involve what Weber called political capitalism, one might also argue that it entails a primacy of the political. To address this paradox, my article offers a baseline definition of neoliberalism and identifies four ideal-typical historical forms thereof; relates (...) neoliberalism to the world market, geopolitics and global governance; disambiguates the primacy of the economic; and addresses the role of the political in promoting neoliberalism and handling its contradictions and crisis-tendencies. It illustrates this exercise in critical theory from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and how its management has strengthened the neoliberal project, enabled its main promoters and beneficiaries to escape the need to learn from their mistakes, and even enabled them to further enrich themselves. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that (...) arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases. (shrink)

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as the (...) most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, (...) which are in turn analyzed along reliabilist lines: an agent's reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other's explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

This chapter first talks about LEGO modal epistemology. Modal epistemology has the two parts. Some of it is the study of how one knows that some things are contingent and others necessary. The other part of modal epistemology concerns how much one know about what is contingent and necessary. The chapter then talks about what went wrong with the imagination‐based story. Whatever the story about how one knows what he/she can build, it had better be one that factors in his/her (...) background knowledge, since that is what makes the imagination useful. With working knowledge of those little pieces, one can make judgments about what can and can not be done with them. Crucially, there are various ways to make those judgments. The chapter further focuses on a segment of the LEGO community that might seem a bit fussy: purists. (shrink)

Quasi-realists face the challenge of providing a plausible analysis of acknowledgments of moral fallibility. This paper devel...

This book is an eye-opening account of transnational advocacy, not by environmental and rights groups, but by conservative activists. Mobilizing around diverse issues, these networks challenge progressive foes across borders and within institutions. In these globalized battles, opponents struggle as much to advance their own causes as to destroy their rivals. Deploying exclusionary strategies, negative tactics and dissuasive ideas, they aim both to make and unmake policy. In this work, Clifford Bob chronicles combat over homosexuality and gun control in the (...) UN, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. He investigates the 'Baptist-burqa' network of conservative believers attacking gay rights, and the global gun coalition blasting efforts to control firearms. Bob draws critical conclusions about norms, activists and institutions, and his broad findings extend beyond the culture wars. They will change how campaigners fight, scholars study policy wars, and all of us think about global politics. (shrink)

Uses interviews with persons who have changed from belief to nonbelief or vice versa, and discusses what comfort people receive from religion.

"We often find that the state of not-knowing can be a precursor to moments of rich discovery which possess a dynamic, transformative power that exceeds any prior expectation." From the Introduction In daily life, when we see, hear or touch something that we don't recognise, we are instantly at our most alert. In that condition of 'not-knowing' we are in a state of alive, lithe awareness: asking questions, inviting input, open to learning, looking for significance and meaning... These essays, most (...) by practising psychotherapists, some of them Buddhists, take as their starting point the idea that not-knowing is fundamental to conscious reflection and the desire to know must always arise in the first instance from the self-awareness of not-knowing. Read in any order, on waking, before sleeping or when in doubt... they will be of interest to anyone who has ever sat in either chair in a psychotherapist's or counsellor's room - as well as anyone troubled or intrigued by what it takes to live comfortably and well in a condition of not knowing all (or even any) of the answers. (shrink)

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)

When is it permissible to rely on a proposition in practical reasoning? Standard answers to this question face serious challenges. This paper uses these challenges to motivate a certainty norm of practical reasoning. This norm holds that one is permitted to rely on p in practical reasoning if and only if p is epistemically certain. After developing and defending this norm, I consider its broader implications. Taking a certainty norm seriously calls into question traditional assumptions about the importance of belief (...) and knowledge. In particular, it raises the possibility that many epistemological jobs that are usually assigned to belief and knowledge should be reallocated to two related but importantly different states: psychological and epistemic certainty. (shrink)

Why engage in inquiry? According to many philosophers, the goal of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer. While this view holds considerable appeal, this paper argues that it stands in tension with another highly attractive thesis: knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Forced to choose between these two theses, I argue that we should reject the idea that inquiry aims at knowledge. I go on to develop an alternative view, according to which inquiry aims at (...) maximizing the epistemic value of our credences. This alternative view makes room for knowledge that falls shy of certainty, and it coheres nicely with a rich body of work in epistemic decision theory. I proceed to highlight the implications of this replacement for some important topics in epistemology, including the dogmatism paradox, the nature of interrogative attitudes, and the norm of practical reasoning. (shrink)

According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals and strong necessity modals to make progress on a question that has received surprisingly little discussion in the literature, namely: ‘What’s the best version of a deontological approach?’ The two most obvious hypotheses are the Permissive View, (...) according to which justified expresses permission, and the Obligatory View, according to which justified expresses some species of obligation. I raise difficulties for both of these hypotheses. In light of these difficulties, I propose a new position, according to which justified expresses a property I call faultlessness, defined as the dual of weak necessity modals. According to this view, an agent is justified in phi-ing iff it’s not the case that she should [/ought] not phi. I argue that this ‘Faultlessness View’ gives us precisely what’s needed to avoid the problems facing the Permissive and Obligatory Views. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marx...

"The Symons Medal—one of Canada's most prestigious honours—recognizes an individual who has made an exceptional contribution to Canadian life. The 2020 Symons Medal was awarded to Mr. Bob Rae, P.C., C.C., O.Ont, Q.C. Mr. Rae is the 20th Medallist in this series, following a formidable line of recipients. Hon. Rae's lecture is Learning from The Past, Imagining the Future: Reflections from a Political Life. Throughout the address, published in a bilingual book format, he explores such themes as Canada's improbable origins (...) as a nation; post-war emergence onto the global stage; active membership within the United Nations; and the significance of the ever-evolving Canadian constitution—a "living tree document." Welcoming remarks were made by the Honourable Premier Dennis King, while the official response was delivered by the Honourable Roy Romanow, PC, OC, SOM, QC. Hon. Rae is the 2020 recipient in part for his many years of work on humanitarian issues, most recently the Rohingya Refugee crisis, as well as his time focusing on indigenous issues and his decades of public service and teaching. He has always been deeply involved in the political life of Canada—as MP, former premier of Ontario, and interim leader of the federal Liberal Party. The Symons Medal and Lecture Series is named in honour of Professor Thomas H.B. Symons, a long-time supporter of Confederation Centre and a Board Governor. Held each fall, the medal ceremony and its associated lecture offer a national platform for an eminent Canadian to discuss the nation’s current state, shared histories, and future prospects using themes related to their professional pursuits. The award is presented at Confederation Centre of the Arts—Canada’s living monument to Canadian Confederation—in honour of the meetings of the Fathers of Confederation, who first gathered at Province House National Historic Site in the fall of 1864."--. (shrink)

out a visitation and a thorough assessment of his diocese. His predecessor (or rather his friend Benson, the bishop of Gloucester, who during Edward Chandler's decline had managed Durham's affairs) had kept the deanery records in good ...

According to the dogmatist, knowing p makes it rational to disregard future evidence against p. The standard response to the dogmatist holds that knowledge is defeasible: acquiring evidence against something you know undermines your knowledge. However, this response leaves a residual puzzle, according to which knowledge makes it rational to intend to disregard future counterevidence. I argue that we can resolve this residual puzzle by turning to an unlikely source: Kavka’s toxin puzzle. One lesson of the toxin puzzle is that (...) it is irrational to intend to do that which you know will be irrational. This yields a simple reply to the dogmatist: it is irrational to intend to disregard future evidence because you can know in advance that it will be irrational to do so. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...) of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)

One leading account of justification comes from the evidentialist tradition. According to evidentialists, whether a doxastic attitude is justified depends on whether that attitude is supported by the believer’s evidence. This chapter assesses the prospects for evidentialism, focusing on the question of whether evidentialists can provide a satisfactory account of their key notions – evidence possession and evidential support – without helping themselves to the notion of justification.

This paper develops a new challenge for moral noncognitivism. In brief, the challenge is this: Beliefs — both moral and non-moral — are epistemically evaluable, whereas desires are not. It is tempting to explain this difference in terms of differences in the functional roles of beliefs and desires. However, this explanation stands in tension with noncognitivism, which maintains that moral beliefs have a desire-like functional role. After critically reviewing some initial responses to the challenge, I suggest a solution, which involves (...) rethinking the functional relationship between desire and belief. (shrink)

There isn’t one conversation about animal ethics. Instead, there are several important ones that are scattered across many disciplines. This volume both surveys the field of animal ethics and draws professional philosophers, graduate students, and undergraduates more deeply into the discussions that are happening outside of philosophy departments. To that end, the volume contains more nonphilosophers than philosophers, explicitly inviting scholars from other fields—such as animal science, ecology, economics, psychology, law, environmental science, and applied biology, among others—to bring their own (...) disciplinary resources to bear on matters that affect animals. -/- The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics is composed of 44 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and organized into the following six sections: -/- I. Thinking About Animals -/- II. Animal Agriculture and Hunting -/- III. Animal Research and Genetic Engineering -/- IV. Companion Animals -/- V. Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics -/- VI. Animal Activism -/- The chapters are brief, and they have been written in a way that is accessible to serious undergraduate students, regardless of their field of study. The volume covers everything from animal cognition to the state of current fisheries, from genetic modification to intersection animal activism. It is a resource designed for anyone interested in the moral issues that emerge from human interactions with animals. (shrink)

According to noncognitivism, normative beliefs are just desire-like attitudes. While noncognitivists have devoted great effort to explaining the nature of normative belief, they have said little about all of the other attitudes we take towards normative matters. Many of us desire to do the right thing. We sometimes wonder whether our conduct is morally permissible; we hope that it is, and occasionally fear that it is not. This gives rise to what Schroeder calls the 'Many Attitudes Problem': the problem of (...) developing a plausible noncognitivist account of the full range of attitudes that we take towards normative matters. This paper explores the problem and proposes a solution. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a relational approach to the question of animal agency. We distinguish between agency and action and, using three examples of non-human animal behaviour, explore how human-other animal interactions might be understood in terms of action, agency and resistance. In order to do this we draw on the distinction between primary and corporate agency found in the work of Margaret Archer, arguing that, while non-human animals are able to act and to exercise primary agency, they are (...) unable to exercise corporate agency. Animals are therefore agents; they act and their actions have consequences, they also resist conditions which they do not like and, in some circumstances, are able to change the conditions of their agency. We discuss the place of animals in the social world and the political implications of this way of viewing animal agency. (shrink)

Getting What You Want? offers a critique of liberal morality and an analysis of its understanding of the individual as a 'wanting thing'.

Assume that M is a transitive model of $ZFC+CH$ containing a simplified $(\omega _1,2)$ -morass, $P\in M$ is the poset adding $\aleph _3$ generic reals and G is P-generic over M. In M we construct a function between sets of terms in the forcing language, that interpreted in $M[G]$ is an $\mathbb R$ -linear order-preserving monomorphism from the finite elements of an ultrapower of the reals, over a non-principal ultrafilter on $\omega $, into the Esterle algebra of formal power series. (...) Therefore it is consistent that $2^{\aleph _0}>\aleph _2$ and, for any infinite compact Hausdorff space X, there exists a discontinuous homomorphism of $C(X)$, the algebra of continuous real-valued functions on X. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens if we construe evidentialism as a thesis about the metaphysical grounds of justification. According to grounding evidentialism, facts about what a subject is justified in believing are grounded in facts about that subject’s evidence. At first blush, grounding evidentialism appears to enjoy advantages over a more traditional construal of evidentialism as a piece of conceptual analysis. However, appearances are deceiving. I argue that grounding evidentialists are unable to provide a satisfactory story about what grounds the (...) evidential facts, and that this provides good reason to reject grounding evidentialism. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 23-49, December 2021.

A theory of categorization is presented in which knowledge of causal relationships between category features is represented in terms of asymmetric and probabilistic causal mechanisms. According to causal‐model theory, objects are classified as category members to the extent they are likely to have been generated or produced by those mechanisms. The empirical results confirmed that participants rated exemplars good category members to the extent their features manifested the expectations that causal knowledge induces, such as correlations between feature pairs that are (...) directly connected by causal relationships. These expectations also included sensitivity to higher‐order feature interactions that emerge from the asymmetries inherent in causal relationships. Quantitative fits of causal‐model theory were superior to those obtained with extensions to traditional similarity‐based models that represent causal knowledge either as higher‐order relational features or “prior exemplars” stored in memory. (shrink)

Learn to achieve the best possible images with minimal lighting equipment Author Bob Davis is a photographer whose high-profile clients include Oprah Winfrey and Eva Longoria, and whose work has appeared in Time, O Magazine, and People. Along with his invaluable professional advice, this beautiful full-color book includes a DVD featuring portions of his workshop curriculum. He covers the elements of lighting and shares his two-strobe technique that will enable you to create studio-quality lighting anywhere with only minimal equipment. High-profile (...) photographer Bob Davis is especially known for his lighting techniques; this book shares his advice on lighting for professional photographers and serious amateurs Covers all the key elements of photographic lighting, with informative illustrations and lighting grids Details the author's pioneering two-strobe technique that reduces the amount of equipment a photographer must carry to a shoot and dramatically lowers equipment costs Features professional tips and stunning full-color images 60-Minute DVD includes video from the author's three-day lighting and photography workshop Lights, Camera, Capture: Creative Lighting Techniques for Digital Photographersoffers your professional advice worth many times the cost of the book. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file. (shrink)