El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Primero, investigar y evaluar la situación en la que se encuentra actualmente la filosofía experimental del lenguaje. Para ello, expondré las dos metodologías predominantes en el campo: los cuestionarios y los métodos de corpus, mostrando los problemas comunes y los específicos. Segundo, defender que los métodos de corpus suponen un nuevo horizonte metodológico para la investigación en filosofía experimental del lenguaje por dos razones. Por un lado, porque cuentan con menos problemas que los (...) cuestionarios. Por otro lado, porque tienen ciertas ventajas adicionales: i) consideran una cantidad mayor de evidencia; ii) al emplearlos tenemos la posibilidad de contar con información adicional que puede iluminar otros aspectos de la investigación; iii) cuentan con una mayor replicabilidad. (shrink)

Cappelen (2012) argumenta en contra de la Tesis de la Centralidad, es decir, en contra de la idea de que los filósofos analíticos usan las intuiciones como evidencia para defender sus teorías. Para ello, ataca el denominado “Argumento del vocabulario de intuiciones”, es decir, la idea de que las intuiciones deben jugar un papel determinante en los argumentos de los filósofos analíticos porque estos usan vocabulario de intuiciones de manera profusa. Este artículo examina empíricamente esta afirmación, determinando en qué medida (...) el vocabulario de intuiciones aparece en partes centrales de los argumentos; más concretamente, si el vocabulario de intuiciones suele coincidir con marcadores de razonamiento que indican la presencia de premisas y conclusiones. Para ello, primero compilaré un corpus de artículos sobre desacuerdos de gusto. Segundo, llevaré a cabo dos tipos de análisis: un análisis de listas de frecuencias, y un análisis de la dispersión de ambos tipos de vocabulario a lo largo del corpus. (shrink)

This book presents the current state of experimental philosophy of language, drawing attention to corpus methods. The volume highlights new trends in experimental philosophy of language, thus exploring the future’s discipline. It includes cross-linguistics studies that reveal the differences and similarities in how speakers of different languages use specific terms, and scrutinizes methodological advances used in experimental philosophy of language. The book also includes politically engaged experimental philosophy of language studies focusing on slurs, pejoratives, and hate speech. The topic’s interdisciplinary (...) nature makes the volume of interest to a broad range of scholars across disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, philology, psychology, and computational linguistics. (shrink)

En #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Cass R. Sunstein presenta uno de los fenómenos sociales que más repercusión han tenido en el debate en política durante los últimos años: las cámaras de eco. El presente trabajo tiene por objeto analizar la relación que existe entre este fenómeno y la polarización política, relación que a menudo pasa desapercibida en los debates políticos actuales. Para ello, primero expondré los mecanismos que subyacen a la creación de cámaras de eco (...) descritos por Sunstein en su libro, y examinaré los problemas que estas pueden conllevar. Y segundo, analizaré la relación entre cámaras de eco y polarización. (shrink)

A new wave of thinkers from across different disciplines within the analytical tradition in philosophy has recently focused on critical, societal challenges, such as the silencing and questioning of the credibility of oppressed groups, the political polarization that threatens the good functioning of democratic societies across the globe, or the moral and political significance of gender, race, or sexual orientation. Appealing to both well-established and younger international scholars, this volume delves into some of the most relevant problems and discussions within (...) the area, bringing together for the first time different essays within what we deem to be a “political turn in analytic philosophy.” This political turn consists of putting different conceptual and theoretical tools from epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics at the service of social and political change. The aim is to ensure a better understanding of some of the key features of our social environments in an attempt to achieve a more just and equal society. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es defender el uso tanto de métodos cualitativos como de métodos cuantitativos en investigación en filosofía del lenguaje. Concretamente, defenderé que la mejor opción para llevar a cabo este tipo de investigación es usar métodos propios de la lingüística de corpus, pero aplicando también métodos cualitativos. Para ello, argumentaré a favor de la idea de bucles virtuosos, procesos de retroalimentación entre ambos métodos que pueden producir ciertos hallazgos que serían imposibles de descubrir si solo se (...) usara uno de los dos tipos de método. (shrink)

In this paper, I will defend that there is an asymmetry between straightforwardly factual and non-straightforwardly factual disagreements in terms of persistency and retraction, and that we can use what I will call coordination of contexts to explain these two asymmetries. To make my point I will focus on the kinematics of this type of disagreements. I will argue that one way to give a proper account of the kinematics of disagreements about taste and to discriminate between these two cases (...) of disagreement is to focus on coordination of contexts. (shrink)

The relevance of cognitive penetration has been pointed out concerning three fields within philosophy: philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. This paper argues that this phenomenon is also relevant to the philosophy of language. First, I will defend that there are situations where ethical, social, or cultural rules can affect our taste perceptions. This influence can cause speakers to utter conflicting contents that lead them to disagree and, subsequently, to negotiate the circumstances of application of the taste predicates (...) they have used to describe or express their taste perceptions. Then, to account for the proper dynamics of these cases, I will develop a theoretical framework build upon two elements: the Lewisian idea of the score of a conversation, and Richard’s taxonomy of the different attitudes speakers can have in taste disagreements. In a nutshell, I will argue that speakers can accommodate these conflicting contents as exceptions to the rule that determines the circumstances of application of taste predicates.Keywords: Cognitive penetration, Common ground, Circumstances of application, Accommodation, Exceptions, Score of the conversation, Taste predicates. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to study strategic disagreements, i.e., those situations in which one of the parties uses an expression that allows it to restructure the debate and, in this way, obtain some strategic advantage to advance its political agenda. The paper examines this type of disagreement in a specific context: the parliamentary debates in the Spanish Congress of Deputies during the VIII Legislature. Second, to show that strategic disagreements constitute antagonistic conflict dynamics, i.e., situations in (...) which one or both parties are denied a morally adequate treatment of their points of view. In this way, strategic disagreements prevent the development of the dynamics necessary to manage the conflict in a cooperative way. (shrink)

El trabajo se propone, en primer lugar, analizar el desacuerdo sin falta como elemento central en los juicios de gusto, y examinar tres posiciones: contextualismo deíctico, no deíctico y relativismo. En segundo lugar, mostrar cómo el contextualismo deíctico y el relativismo dan cuenta de dicho fenómeno, pero solo el segundo puede hacerlo y acomodarse a un fenómeno central en esos desacuerdos: la retractación.

RESUMEN El trabajo se propone, en primer lugar, analizar el desacuerdo sin falta como elemento central en los juicios de gusto, y examinar tres posiciones: contextualismo deíctico, no deíctico y relativismo. En segundo lugar, mostrar cómo el contextualismo deíctico y el relativismo dan cuenta de dicho fenómeno, pero solo el segundo puede hacerlo y acomodarse a un fenómeno central en esos desacuerdos: la retractación. ABSTRACT The objective of the article is, first of all, to analyze faultless disagreement as a central (...) element in judgments of taste and to examine three positions: deictic contextualism, non-deictic contextualism, and relativism. Secondly, it shows how deictic contextualism and relativism account for that phenomenon and argues that only the latter can do so and at the same time accommodate a central feature of those disagreements: recantation. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language, as a subdiscipline of experimental philosophy, shares its most important defining characteristic: conducting empirical studies to solve traditional problems in the philosophy of language. Much of the attention in the field has been directed to theories of reference because of the influential 2004 article by Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. After almost 20 years of research, it is time to take stock. This introduction has two goals. First, to represent (...) the discipline’s past and current state, and highlight which have been the topics of study addressed by the discipline in addition to the theories of reference. Second, to draw attention to corpus methods in the experimental philosophy of language, a methodology that, although not the most widespread today, is gaining more and more adherents. (shrink)

The debate about the meaning of color terms in the philosophy of language has been dominated by two main issues. Firstly, there is the discussion about the context-dependency of color terms, specifically, quantity, the degree to which the object is of the color, and one of the dimensions of color quality, hue. Secondly, there is the question of how indexical contextualism can account for these elements of context-dependence. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to examine brightness, one of (...) the dimensions of color quality that has been neglected in the literature. For this purpose, we will examine how the equivalent of “white” in Arabic and Spanish interacts with brightness modifiers. The analysis will allow us to distinguish three different usage patterns, light source, light reflection, and contrast between white and black, pointing to three new ways of contextual incompleteness of color terms. Second, to assess indexical theories of color terms considering these new empirical findings. We will argue that the results of our study offer support for indexical contextualist theories by distinguishing new dimensions of contextual incompleteness of color terms. However, the consequences of applying the standard indexical contextualist explanation–hidden-variable analysis– are too strong. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference and judgments of taste, does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal taste. Secondly, (...) contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es defender la idea de polarización como impermeabilidad, un sentido de polarización que se ha pasado por alto en la literatura sobre polarización política. Según este sentido de polarización, una persona o un grupo se polariza en la medida en que cada vez sea más impermeable a las ideas o razones ajenas. De esta manera, y en contra de la idea en la que se basan los sentidos de polarización disponibles en la literatura hasta (...) el momento, una población o un grupo puede polarizarse si no ha habido ningún movimiento del centro hacia los extremos del espectro ideológico. Asimismo, se defenderá que entender la polarización en este nuevo sentido ofrece ventajas por varias razones: i) la polarización como impermeabilidad es un sentido de polarización más acorde con algunos de los fenómenos que son relevantes para entender las sociedades democráticas actuales: la economía de la atención, la personalización de la información o las cámaras de eco; ii) entender la polarización de manera estándar, es decir, como un desplazamiento del centro hacia los extremos del espectro ideológico, conlleva ciertos problemas.: The aim of this paper is to defend the idea of polarization as impermeability, a sense of polarization that has been overlooked in the debate on political polarization. According to this sense of polarization, a person or group is polarized to the extent that it is impervious to the ideas or reasons of others. In this way, and contrary to the idea on which the senses of polarisation available in literature so far are based, a person or group may be polarised if there has been no movement from the centre to the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Likewise, it will be defended that understanding polarization in this new sense offers advantages for several reasons: i) polarization as impermeability is a sense of polarization more in line with some of the phenomena that are relevant to understanding today’s democratic societies: the economy of attention, the personalization of information or echo chambers; ii) understanding polarization in a standard way, that is, as a shift from the centre towards the ends of the ideological spectrum, entails certain problems. (shrink)

The factual existence of deep disagreements has an unclear status in the lite-rature. On the one hand, some authors claim that deep disagreements exist in practice, arguing that the parties involved will use non-rational persuasion tactics to resolve the disagreement. On the other hand, some argue that deep disagreements are only theoretically possible because practical constraints will push the parties to find rational ways to resolve the disagreement. This article empirically investigates the factual existence of deep disagreements by analyzing parliamentary (...) debates on abortion. The analysis results do not allow us to determine whether the debates examined are cases of deep disagreement but rather question whether the distinction between rational argumentation and non-rational persuasion tactics is explanatorily relevant for investigating deep disagreements. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es defender el uso tanto de métodos cualitativos como de métodos cuantitativos en investigación en filosofía del lenguaje. Concretamente, defenderé que la mejor opción para llevar a cabo este tipo de investigación es usar métodos propios de la lingüística de corpus, pero aplicando también métodos cualitativos. Para ello, argumentaré a favor de la idea de bucles virtuosos, procesos de retroalimentación entre ambos métodos que pueden producir ciertos hallazgos que serían imposibles de descubrir si solo (...) se usara uno de los dos tipos de método. Abstract: This paper aims to defend the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods in research in language philosophy. Specifically, I would argue that the best option for conducting this type of research is to use methods of corpus linguistics, but also applying qualitative methods. For this, I will argue in favor of the idea of virtuous loops, feedback processes between both methods that can produce findings that would be impossible to discover if only one of the two methods were used. (shrink)

Several recent studies (see Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2015; Marques, 2018; Kneer, 2021a) address linguistic retraction from an experimental perspective. In these studies, speakers’ intuitions regarding the mandatory nature of retraction are tested. Pace MacFarlane, competent speakers (of English) do not consider retraction to be obligatory. This paper examines two methodological features of the above-mentioned studies: they do not take into consideration the difference between public and private contexts; neither do they incorporate the distinction between evaluative and descriptive statements. (...) In this paper, we report the results of two studies conducted to empirically test the hypothesis that retraction is, above all, a public phenomenon. Our findings show that context exerts a significant effect on speakers’ attitudes toward retraction. (shrink)

What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

Il semble évident que la philosophie de l’art développée par Danto s’oppose en tout point à l’esthétique pragmatiste. Non pas que Danto ait été un commentateur critique de Peirce ou de Dewey, auxquels il se réfère finalement fort peu. Mais le renouveau pragmatiste de l’esthétique, quand il remet au premier plan la notion d’expérience esthétique ou quand il cherche à restaurer la continuité entre l’art et la vie, s’est quant à lui en bonne partie explicitement construit contre l’œuvre de Danto. (...) Sans nier ces différences essentielles, Richard Shusterman revient toutefois ici sur sa dette, à la fois personnelle et théorique, à l’égard de Danto. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

1.1 Manifolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Tangent Vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.3 Vector Fields, Integral Curves, and Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1.4 Tensors and Tensor Fields on Manifolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 1.5 The Action of Smooth Maps on Tensor Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.6 Lie Derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 1.7 Derivative Operators and Geodesics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 1.8 Curvature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 1.9 Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 1.10 Hypersurfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 1.11 Volume Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96.. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and (...) impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due (...) to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Dark matter is a fundamental component of the standard cosmological model, but in spite of four decades of increasingly sensitive searches, no-one has yet detected a single dark-matter particle in the laboratory. An alternative cosmological paradigm exists: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Observations explained in the standard model by postulating dark matter are explained in MOND by proposing a modification of Newton's laws of motion. Both MOND and the standard model have had successes and failures – but only MOND has repeatedly (...) predicted observational facts in advance of their discovery. In this volume, David Merritt outlines why such predictions are considered by many philosophers of science to be the 'gold standard' when it comes to judging a theory's validity. In a world where the standard model receives most attention, the author applies criteria from the philosophy of science to assess, in a systematic way, the viability of this alternative cosmological paradigm. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind (...) of answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)