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)

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 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)

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...

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)

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.

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)