In at least a few of his formulations of the pragmatic maxim around 1905—those in which he sought to inoculate his brand of pragmatism against misappropriation by other pragmatists and also to supply a demonstration of its truth—Charles Peirce instructs us to look not only at the consequences of affirming some claim or concept, but also at the consequences of denying it. Referring to himself in the third person as "the author," Peirce writes: Endeavoring, as a man of that type (...) naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing on the conduct of life; so that, since... (shrink)

The question of animal belief (or animal intentionality) often degenerates into a frustrating and unproductive exchange. Foes of animal intentionality point out that non-linguistic animals couldn’t possibly possess the kinds of mental states we linguistic beings enjoy. They claim that linguistic ability enables us to become sensitive to intensional contexts or to the states of mind of others in a way that is unavailable to the non-linguistic, and that would be necessary for proper attributions of intentionality. To attribute mental states (...) to non-linguistic brutes, no matter how natural it comes to us, would be grossly anthropomorphic. In the face of these challenges some friends of animal intentionality have attempted to show that at least a few animals (chimpanzees, vervet monkeys, honeybees) are capable of engaging in quasi-linguistic, communicative practices that ought to be accorded at least a minimal degree of intentionality. Others have questioned the foes’ necessity claims; linguistic ability, claim these animal friends, isn’t required for sensitivity to intensional contexts, surprise, or belief about belief after all, or if it is, then these features aren’t really requisite for mental capacity. Indeed, if we focus exclusively upon linguistic ability, then we are apt to miss the primitive kinds of mental capacities from which our own full-blooded intentional capacities likely evolved. Animals certainly seem to interact intelligently with their surroundings, so much so that we ought to follow our natural (brute?) anthropomorphic inclinations to credit them with minds. Failing to recognize their genuine intentional capacities would be "brutishly" anthropocentric. (shrink)

I shall characterize normative functionalism and contrast it with its causal counterpart. After tracing both stripes of functionalism to the work of the classical American pragmatists, I then argue that they are not exclusive alternatives. Instead, both might be required for an appropriately illuminating account of human rational activity.

In several recent pieces, Daniel Dennett has advanced a line of reasoning purporting to show that we should reject the idea that there is a tenable distinction to be drawn between the manner in which we represent the way things are and the manner in which "blessedly simple" intentional systems like thermostats and frogs represent the way things are. Through a series of thought experiments, Dennett aims to show that philosophers of mind should abandon their preoccupation with "real meaning as (...) opposed to ersatz meaning, 'intrinsic' or 'original ' intentionality as opposed to derived intentionality. " In this paper, I lay out the case that Dennett builds against original intentionality, with the aim of showing that, once it has been properly clarified, the notion of original intentionality isn't nearly the myth that Dennett makes it out to be. (shrink)

Donald Davidson's argument that non-linguistic creatures lack beliefs rests on two premises: (1) to be a believer, one must have the concept of belief, and (2) to have the concept of belief, one must interpret the utterances of others. However, Davidson's defense of these premises is overly compressed and unconvincing. In a recent issue of Philosophy, Roger Fellows provides new arguments for these premises. In this paper, I explain why I'm not persuaded by Fellows' attempt to bolster Davidson's line of (...) reasoning and cast doubt on Davidson's and Fellows' overall strategy of attaching special significance to the concept of belief. (shrink)

In early 2021, a Canadian investigation revealed the discovery of over a thousand grave sites of indigenous children on the grounds of Indian residential schools across Canada. These discoveries prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce a similar investigation into the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of federally sponsored Indian boarding schools in the United States. In addition to documenting the legacy of abuse, neglect and dominance of indigenous peoples, we believe that such reflection upon the impact (...) of Indian boarding schools should also include the justifications that were used to promote the government policy of compelling indigenous children to leave family, tribe, customs and even language behind to be acculturated in remote boarding schools far from home or reservation. For while in hindsight these policies can be both deplored and regretted, they were not crafted in a philosophical vacuum. Specifically, it might come as a surprise to scholars today that Hegelian thought actually featured in the support and promotion of such policies. We propose to tell at least part of this story, by focusing on the leading American Hegelian of the time, William Torrey Harris, who—as director of the famed Concord School of Philosophy and also longtime US Commissioner of Education—was highly influential in both philosophical and educational circles. In that latter capacity, Harris penned a defence of the boarding school system, which drew upon broadly Hegelian ideas and language. So while we have elsewhere defended and lauded Harris and the St Louis Hegelians for their contributions to American philosophy and democratic educational thought, here is one respect in which this influence has not stood up well to the test of time. (shrink)

This paper will present two contributions to teaching introductory logic. The first contribution is an alternative tree proof method that differs from the traditional one-sided tree method. The second contribution combines this tree system with an index system to produce a user-friendly tree method for sentential modal logic.

All contributions included in the present issue were originally prepared for an “Author Meets Critics” session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi characterizes grief as a “questioning attitude”; it calls attention to and prompts questions about the significance of the departed specifically to the griever. Accordingly, Cholbi assigns grief a largely self-directed cognitive purpose: grief’s goodness is that it leads—when things go well—to greater self-knowledge. In this paper, I question this claim. Calling upon an ordinary episode of grief, I argue that there are at least a few cases of grief in which greater self-knowledge is (...) neither likely nor reasonably expected. (shrink)

This paper explores the viability of rejecting a largely unchallenged third premise of the conceivability argument against materialism. Fittingly labeled 'type-Z' , this reply essentially grants to the zombie lover, not just the possibility of zombies, but also their actuality. We turn out to be the very creatures Chalmers has taken such great pains to conceive and more conventional materialists have tried to wipe off the face of the planet. So consciousness is a wholly material affair. What is conceivable but (...) non-actual are not zombies, but rather 'angelic' beings possessing an acquaintance with supermaterial phenomenal states. After showing how Chalmers' recent discussion of the phenomenal concepts strategy should incline those pursuing such a strategy toward a type-Z response, this paper relates type- Z materialism to similar replies that Chalmers has found 'hard to classify' and closes with a brief remark about how a type-Z materialist might reply to the knowledge argument. (shrink)

Brandom contends that the classical American pragmatists subscribe to a semantic program that is insufficiently one-sided in that it focuses exclusively on the down-stream consequences of concept application, while neglecting its upstream conditions. Focusing on passages from Peirce’s later work, I show that, while Peirce does unpack meaning in terms of the consequences of concept application, his inclusion of the consequences of denying claims involving a concept allow him to capture the inferential space that Brandom contends the classical pragmatists miss. (...) Thus at least Peirce is one classical pragmatist who would not seem to suffer from that particular semantic blindspot. (shrink)

No philosopher has worked harder than Dan Dennett to set the possibility of machine mentality on firm philosophical footing. Dennett’s defense of this possibility has both a positive and a negative thrust. On the positive side, he has developed an account of mental activity that is tailor-made for the attribution of intentional states to purely mechanical contrivances, while on the negative side, he pillories as mystery mongering and skyhook grasping any attempts to erect barriers to the conception of machine mentality (...) by excavating gulfs to keep us “bona fide” thinkers apart from the rest of creation. While I think he’s “won” the rhetorical tilts with his philosophical adversaries, I worry that Dennett’s negative side sometimes gets the better of him, and that this obscures advances that can be made on the positive side of his program. In this paper, I show that Dennett is much too dismissive of original intentionality in particular, and that this notion can be put to good theoretical use after all. Though deployed to distinguish different grades of mentality, it can (and should) be incorporated into a philosophical account of the mind that is recognizably Dennettian in spirit. (shrink)

In _Knowing Emotions_, Rick Anthony Furtak seeks an account that does justice to both the cognitive and corporeal dimensions of our emotional lives. Concerning the latter dimension, he holds that emotions serve to represent axiological features of the world. Against such a representationalist picture, I shall suggest an alternative way to understand how our emotions gear in with the rest of our cognitive states.

We argue for a reconsideration of the claim that Spinoza’s perfectionist conception of education was ushering in a form of radical humanism distinctly favorable to democratic ideals. With the rise of democratic societies and the corresponding need to constitute educational institutions within those societies, a more thoroughgoing commitment to democratic social ideals arose, first and foremost in American educational thought. This commitment can be seen especially in Dewey’s philosophy of education. Specifically, Dewey and Spinoza had strikingly distinct conceptions of the (...) overall aims of schooling. While Spinoza takes the aim of education to be the perfection of a student’s original nature, Dewey takes education to involve the collective acquisition of an additional nature, reflecting the norms and expectations of one’s specific community. In this paper, we juxtapose these two distinct conceptions of education alongside one another, with an eye towards illuminating the limitations of a perfectionist theory of education for the individual, as we find it in Spinoza, within a democratic society. (shrink)

There is a saying in the energy industry that hydrogen is the fuel of the future … and so it will always remain. The jab might equally be leveled at Peirce’s graphical systems of logic. Though Peir...