We prove the Decomposability Conjecture for functions of Baire class $2$ from a Polish space to a separable metrizable space. This partially answers an important open problem in descriptive set theory.

Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief? Only if we have reason to trust intuition here. But intuitions are unreliable in a wide range of cases. And it can be argued that the Gettier intuitions have a greater resemblance to unreliable intuitions than to reliable intuitions. Whats distinctive about the faulty intuitions, I argue, is that respecting them would mean abandoning a (...) simple, systematic and largely successful theory in favour of a complicated, disjunctive and idiosyncratic theory. So maybe respecting the Gettier intuitions was the wrong reaction, we should instead have been explaining why we are all so easily misled by these kinds of cases. (shrink)

It is argued that propositions cannot be the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context) simply due to issues stemming from the compositional semantics of modal operators (or modal quantifiers). In particular, the fact that the arguments for double indexing generalize to multiple indexing exposes a fundamental tension in the default philosophical conception of semantic theory. This provides further motivation for making a distinction between two sentential semantic contents—what (Dummett 1973) called “ingredient sense” and “assertoric content”.

Disagreement as we find it in both the history and the contemporary practice of philosophy is an inadequately understood phenomenon. In this paper I outline and motivate the problem of disagreement, arguing that "hard cases" of disagreement confront us with an unresolved, and seemingly unresolvable, challenge to the rationality of philosophical discourse, thereby raising the specter of a worri-some form of metaphilosophical skepticism. A variety of responses and attempted evasions are considered, though none are found to be particularly satisfying: Thus, (...) the specter remains unexorcised. El desacuerdo que encontramos tanto en la historia como en la práctica contemporánea de la filosofía es un fenómeno mal entendido. En este trabajo hago un esbozo y aduzco los motivos del problema del desacuerdo, argumentando que los "casos difíciles" de desacuerdo nos confrontan con un problema sin resolver y al parecer sin posibilidad de resolverse, que pone en duda la racionalidad del discurso filosófico, y con lo cual surge el espectro de una preocupante forma de escepticismo metafilosófico. Examino varias respuestas y tentativas de evasiones, aunque ninguna de ellas es particularmente satisfactoria. Así, el espectro sigue sin ser exorcizado. (shrink)

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

In three experiments, subjects attempted to track multiple items as they moved independently and unpredictably about a display. Performance was not impaired when the items were briefly (but completely) occluded at various times during their motion, suggesting that occlusion is taken into account when computing enduring perceptual objecthood. Unimpaired performance required the presence of accretion and deletion cues along fixed contours at the occluding boundaries. Performance was impaired when items were present on the visual field at the same times and (...) to the same degrees as in the occlusion conditions, but disappeared and reappeared in ways which did not implicate the presence of occluding surfaces (e.g. by imploding and exploding into and out of existence, instead of accreting and deleting along a fixed contour). Unimpaired performance did not require visible occluders (i.e. Michotte’s tunnel effect) or globally consistent occluder positions. We discuss implications of these results for theories of objecthood in visual attention. (shrink)

As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. (...) It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and generally has as good a claim to be a cloud as any other object in that part of the sky. But we cannot say every such object is a cloud, else there would be millions of clouds where it seemed like there was one. And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it. And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans. Although this seems to be a merely technical puzzle, even a triviality, a surprising range of proposed solutions has emerged, many of them mutually inconsistent. It is not even settled whether a solution should come from metaphysics, or from philosophy of language, or from logic. Here we survey the options, and provide several links to the many topics related to the Problem. (shrink)

Kant's lectures on anthropology capture him at the height of his intellectual power. They are immensely important for advancing our understanding of Kant's conception of anthropology, its development, and the notoriously difficult relationship between it and the critical philosophy. This 2003 collection of essays by some of the leading commentators on Kant offers a systematic account of the philosophical importance of this material that should nevertheless prove of interest to historians of ideas and political theorists. There are two broad approaches (...) adopted: a number of the essays consider the systematic relations of the anthropology to critical philosophy, especially speculative knowledge and ethics. Other essays focus on the anthropology as a major source for the clarification of both the content and development of Kant's work. The volume also serves as an interpretative complement to the translation of the lectures in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has recently argued that few mental states are luminous , meaning that to be in that state is to be in a position to know that you are in the state. His argument rests on the plausible principle that beliefs only count as knowledge if they are safely true. That is, any belief that could easily have been false is not a piece of knowledge. I argue that the form of the safety rule Williamson uses is inappropriate, and (...) the correct safety rule might not conflict with luminosity. (shrink)

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investi- gated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature clusters can (...) be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor loca- tions appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part struc- ture, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This major new series in the philosophy of science aims to provide a new generation of textbooks for the subject. The series will not only offer fresh treatments of core topics in the theory and methodology of scientific knowledge, but also introductions to newer areas of the discipline. Furthermore, the series will cover topics in current science that raise significant foundational issues both for scientific theory and for philosophy more generally. Biology raises distinct questions of its own not only for (...) philosophy of science, but for metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. This comprehensive new textbook for a rapidly growing field of study provides students new to the subject with an up-to-date presentation of the key philosophical issues. Care is taken throughout to keep the technicalities accessible to the non-biologist but without sacrificing the philosophical subtleties. The first part of the book covers the philosophical challenges posed by evolution and evolutionary biology, beginning with Darwin's central argument in the Origin of the Species. Individual chapters cover natural selection, the selfish gene, alternative units of selection, developmental systems theory, adaptionism and issues in macroevolution. The second part of the book examines philosophical questions arising in connection with biological traits, function, nature and nurture, and biological kinds. The third part of the book examines metaphysical questions, biology's relation with the traditional concerns of philosophy of science, and how evolution has been introduced into epistemological debates. The final part considers the relevance of biology to questions about ethics, religion and human nature. (shrink)

The tendency among working journalists to view ethics negatively, and ethical decision making as an attempt to inhibit their work by post facto sniping, is in part attributable to the way ethics is still taught in some undergraduate journalism programs - as a compendium of what journalists should not do. By adopting an approach that helps students and working journalists recognize ethics as affirmative, systematic, integrative, and definitive, ethics teachers can help foster a conception of ethics as positive, helpful, and (...) fundamental to the duty to inform. (shrink)

Vagueness as Indeterminacy. I defend the traditional view that a vague term is one with an indeterminate denotation from a bevy of recent challenges.

Lettered selves and beyond -- The alphabetic body -- Gesture and non-alphabetic writing -- Technologized mathematics -- Parallel selves -- Ghost effects.

Uncertainty plays an important role in The General Theory, particularly in the theory of interest rates. Keynes did not provide a theory of uncertainty, but he did make some enlightening remarks about the direction he thought such a theory should take. I argue that some modern innovations in the theory of probability allow us to build a theory which captures these Keynesian insights. If this is the right theory, however, uncertainty cannot carry its weight in Keynes’s arguments. This does not (...) mean that the conclusions of these arguments are necessarily mistaken; in their best formulation they may succeed with merely an appeal to risk. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom argues that if we accept some plausible assumptions about how the future will unfold, we should believe we are probably not humans. The argument appeals crucially to an indifference principle whose precise content is a little unclear. I set out four possible interpretations of the principle, none of which can be used to support Bostrom’s argument. On the first two interpretations the principle is false, on the third it does not entail the conclusion, and on the fourth it (...) only entails the conclusion given an auxiliary hypothesis that we have no reason to believe. (shrink)

Orthodox Bayesian decision theory requires an agent’s beliefs representable by a real-valued function, ideally a probability function. Many theorists have argued this is too restrictive; it can be perfectly reasonable to have indeterminate degrees of belief. So doxastic states are ideally representable by a set of probability functions. One consequence of this is that the expected value of a gamble will be imprecise. This paper looks at the attempts to extend Bayesian decision theory to deal with such cases, and concludes (...) that all proposals advanced thus far have been incoherent. A more modest, but coherent, alternative is proposed. Keywords: Imprecise probabilities, Arrow’s theorem. (shrink)

Safety-based theories of knowledge face a difficulty surrounding necessary truths: no subject could have easily falsely believed such a proposition. Failing to predict that ill-grounded beliefs in such propositions do not constitute knowledge, standard safety theories are therefore less informative than desired. Some have suggested that the subjects at issue could easily have believed some related false proposition; but they have given no indication as to what makes a proposition related. I suggest a solution to this problem: a belief is (...) safe iff its subject could not easily have believed a false answer to the same question. (shrink)

Levinas distances himself from Kierkegaardian analyses by suggesting that It is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other. This seems an obvious misreading of Kierkegaard. Resistance, for Kierkegaard, never legitimately arises from the I, but from a God-relationship that breaks through the sphere of immanence and disturbs the system. But, for Levinas it is problematic to suggest a God-relationship distinct from interhuman relationships. Transcendent interhuman relations, Levinas contends, give theological concepts [their] sole signification. Yet, (...) similarities in their accounts of ethical subjectivity and conscience may tempt one to suggest, as a recent commentator does, that appropriation of the Kierkegaardian framework by Levinas is problematic insofar as it is misapplied to interhuman relationships... .; I resist this understanding of the problem. Levinas is not only concerned with denying the interlocutor (i.e., God) in Kierkegaard's description of the transcendent awareness that grounds conscience. Levinas also questions the nature of interlocution implied by Kierkegaard. Levinas' criticisms of Kierkegaard set an important agenda for the study of Kierkegaard by demanding that one address the difficulties that the problematics of hearing raise for Kierkegaard's account of conscientious subjectivity. His challenge could profoundly affect and, in my opinion, enrich the Kierkegaardian account. (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 12251274) is widely viewed as one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time.

Phenomenology is one of the most pervasive and influential schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the idea of the imagination in Husserl and Heidegger. The author also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the location of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of phenomenology both as an historical event and as a legacy for present and (...) future philosophy. (shrink)

The mysterious phrase, ‘the eternal validity of the self,’ is clearly quite important in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. A reader of those works will see that becoming aware of your eternal validity is a prerequisite for becoming both Judge William’s ‘ethical man’ and Johannes de Silentio’s ‘knight of faith,’ but the same reader is likely to be unsure just what it means to become aware of yourself in your eternal validity. In this paper, I discuss and critique various accounts of the (...) concept of the eternal validity of the self. Then, I offer an account of that notion which proceeds from careful attention to Judge William’s use of the phrase in Either/or. Finally, I connect my account with some of Kierkegaard’s writings beyond Either/or. (shrink)

The arguments for Bayesianism in the literature fall into three broad categories. There are Dutch Book arguments, both of the traditional pragmatic variety and the modern ‘depragmatised’ form. And there are arguments from the so-called ‘representation theorems’. The arguments have many similarities, for example they have a common conclusion, and they all derive epistemic constraints from considerations about coherent preferences, but they have enough differences to produce hostilities between their proponents. In a recent paper, Maher (1997) has argued that the (...) pragmatised Dutch Book arguments are unsound and the depragmatised Dutch Book arguments question begging. He urges we instead use the representation theorem argument as in his (1993). In this paper I argue that Maher’s own argument is question-begging, though in a more subtle and interesting way than his Dutch Book wielding opponents. (shrink)

There is growing consensus that reward plays an important role in the control of attention. Until recently, reward was thought to influence attention indirectly by modulating task-specific motivation and its effects on voluntary control over selection. Such an account was consistent with the goal-directed (endogenous) versus stimulus-driven (exogenous) framework that had long dominated the field of attention research. Now, a different perspective is emerging. Demonstrations that previously reward-associated stimuli can automatically capture attention even when physically inconspicuous and task-irrelevant challenge previously (...) held assumptions about attentional control. The idea that attentional selection can be value driven, reflecting a distinct and previously unrecognized control mechanism, has gained traction. Since these early demonstrations, the influence of reward learning on attention has rapidly become an area of intense investigation, sparking many new insights. The result is an emerging picture of how the reward system of the brain automatically biases information processing. Here, I review the progress that has been made in this area, synthesizing a wealth of recent evidence to provide an integrated, up-to-date account of value-driven attention and some of its broader implications. (shrink)