We present an inferentialist account of collective rationality and intentionality, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are understood in terms of the normative statuses attributed to, and undertaken by, the participants of a discursive practice—namely, their discursive or practical commitments and entitlements. Although these statuses are instituted by the performances and attitudes of the agents, they are not identified with any physical or psychological entity, process or relation. Therefore, we argue that inferentialism allows us to talk of collective (...) intentionality and agency without needing to posit the existence of any sort of collective psychology or mind. (shrink)

It is often thought that bets on the truth of known propositions become irrational if the losing costs are high enough. This is typically taken to count against the view that knowledge involves assigning credence 1. I argue that the irrationality of such extreme bets can be explained by considering the interactions between the agent and the bookmaker. More specifically, the agent’s epistemic perspective is altered by the fact that the bookmaker proposes that unusual type of bet. Among other things, (...) being willing to offer a bet with unnecessarily harmful losing costs is likely to undermine the baseline level of trustworthiness required for it to be rational to engage in betting exchanges. This sort of explanation does not require granting either that we assign credence lower than 1 to known propositions or that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes. Moreover, I show that, in our ordinary lives, we frequently perform actions that we know would be disastrous if certain conditions did not obtain. This behaviour can be seen as a form of implicit extreme betting and, nevertheless, it is often rational. (shrink)

Success semantics is a theory of content that characterizes the truth-conditions of mental representations in terms of the success-conditions of the actions derived from them. Nanay : 151-165, 2013) and Dokic and Engel have revised this theory in order to defend it from the objections that assailed its previous incarnations. I argue that both proposals have seemingly decisive flaws. More specifically, these revised versions of the theory fail to deal adequately with the open-ended possibility of unforeseen obstacles for the success (...) of our actions. I suggest that the problem of ignored obstacles undermines success semantics quite generally, including alternative formulations such as Blackburn’s. (shrink)

There is an interesting contrast between permissions to act and permissions to believe. Plausibly, if it is permissible to believe something from a perspective with incomplete evidence, it cannot become impermissible to believe it from a second perspective with complete evidence. In contrast, it seems that something permissible to do for an agent in a perspective with limited evidence can become impermissible in a second perspective in which all the relevant evidence is available. What is more, an agent with incomplete (...) evidence may be permitted to do something that she knows would be impermissible if she occupied a perspective of complete evidence. In this paper, I argue that this contrast is explained by a disanalogy between the role played by belief in epistemic deliberation and the role played by action in practical deliberation. Epistemic deliberation may be closed by adopting other attitudes than belief, whereas in general, practical deliberation can only be closed by endorsing some course of action. Thus, when there are pressures to close some practical deliberation, agents have to make a decision about what to do even if they lack relevant information. By contrast, lacking relevant evidence, agents may always refrain from forming a belief and close instead their epistemic deliberation by adopting some other attitude. (shrink)

This paper discusses practical akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that can be derived from Nuno Venturinha’s (2018) remarks on moral matters.

I argue for the possibility of the thesis that metaphors are indispensable for grasping and expressing certain propositions. I defend this possibility against the objection that, if metaphors express propositions, once these propositions are identified they should be specifiable by non‐metaphorical means. I argue that this objection loses its strength if one adopts a Wittgensteinian, particularist view of thought, according to which grasping a propositional thought requires the ongoing exercise of a suitable skill often not characterizable by algorithmic rules. Within (...) this particularist framework, thus, it becomes possible that metaphorical skills have an indispensable role in cognition and communication. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the background evidence of some relevant agent or group of agents. In this paper, I argue that the context-dependence of indicative conditionals goes beyond this. Indicative conditionals are not only sensitive to the evidence of agents, but also to contextual factors that determine what is inferable from such background evidence. More specifically, (...) my proposal is that when the inference associated with a conditional is defeasible, the truth of that conditional is sensitive to practical stakes. (shrink)

Traditional expressivists want to preserve a contrast between the representational use of declarative sentences in descriptive domains and the non-representational use of declarative sentences in other areas of discourse. However, expressivists have good reasons to endorse minimalism about representational notions, and minimalism seems to threaten the existence of such a bifurcation. Thus, there are pressures for expressivists to become global anti-representationalists. In this paper I discuss how to reconstruct in non-representationalist terms the sort of bifurcation traditional expressivists were after. My (...) proposal is that the relevant bifurcation can be articulated by appeal to the contrast between relativistic and non-relativistic assertoric practices. I argue that this contrast, which can be specified without appeal to representational notions, captures the core intuitions behind the expressivist bifurcation. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...) communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

Teleosemantic theories aspire to develop a naturalistic account of intentional agency and thought by appeal to biological teleology. In particular, most versions of teleosemantics study the emergence of intentionality in terms of biological purposes introduced by Darwinian evolution. The aim of this paper is to argue that the sorts of biological purposes identified by these evolutionary approaches do not allow for a satisfactory account of intentionality. More precisely, I claim that such biological purposes should be attributed to reproductive chains or (...) lineages, rather than to individual traits or organisms, whereas the purposes underlying intentional agency and thought are typically attributed to individuals. In the last part of the paper I suggest that related difficulties are also faced, despite appearances, by accounts of intentionality relying on alternative organizational approaches to biological teleology. (shrink)

Higher‐order evidence can make an agent doubt the reliability of her reasoning. When this happens, it seems rational for the agent to adopt a cautious attitude towards her original conclusion, even in cases where the higher‐order evidence is misleading and the agent's original reasons were actually perfectly good. One may think that recoiling to a cautious attitude in the face of misleading self‐doubt involves a failure to properly respond to one's reasons. My aim is to show that this is not (...) so. My proposal is that (misleading) higher‐order evidence can undermine the agent's possession of her first‐order reasons, constituting what I call a dispossessing defeater. After acquiring the higher‐order evidence, the agent is no longer in a position to rely competently on the relevant first‐order considerations as reasons for her original conclusion, so that such reasons stop being available to her (even if they remain as strong as in the absence of the higher‐order evidence). In this way, an agent with misleading higher‐order evidence can adopt a cautious stance towards her original conclusion, while properly responding to the set of reasons that she possesses–a set that is reduced due to the acquisition of higher‐order dispossessing defeaters. (shrink)

Selected-effects theories provide the most popular account of biological teleology. According to these theories, the purpose of a trait is to do whatever it was selected for. The vast majority of selected-effects theories consider biological teleology to be introduced by natural selection. We want to argue, however, that natural selection is not the only relevant selective process in biology. In particular, our proposal is that biological regulation is a form of biological selection. So, those who accept selected-effects theories should recognize (...) biological regulation as a distinctive source of biological teleology. The purposes derived from biological regulation are of special interest for explaining and predicting the behavior of organisms, given that regulatory mechanisms directly modulate the behavior of the systems they regulate. This explanatory power, added to the fact that regulation is widespread in the biological world, makes the idea that regulation gives rise to its own form of teleology a substantial contribution to the debate on biological teleology. (shrink)

I argue that if there are nondisabled reasons to believe p, then there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something incompatible with p. I first defend a restricted version of the view, which applies only to situations where the relevant agent has complete evidence. Then, I argue for a generalized version of the view, which holds regardless of the agent's evidence. As a related result, I show that, given plausible assumptions, there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something false.

Ascriptions of rationality are related to our practices of praising and criticizing. This seems to provide motivation for normative accounts of rationality, more specifically for the view that rationality is a matter of responding to normative reasons. However, rational agents are sometimes guided by false beliefs. This is problematic for those reasons-based accounts of rationality that are also committed to the widespread thesis that normative reasons are facts. The critical aim of the paper is to present objections to recent proposed (...) solutions to this problem, according to which the responses of deceived agents would be rationalized by facts about how things appear to them. My positive aim is to argue that accounts of reasons in terms of apparent reasons manage to capture the intuitions that seem to favor a normative account of rationality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Anti-normativists have advanced the view that the involvement of content in norms is not an essential feature of content, but a contingent feature or side effect of the normativity governing attitudes. In this paper, we argue that, in its original formulation, this view puts too much weight on the idea that belief is the fundamental, and perhaps the only, source of content-involving normativity. In its more refined formulation, however, the view does not make justice to a neutral and encompassing (...) characterization of what it is for content to be essentially normative. (shrink)

My aim is to discuss the impact of higher-order evidence on aesthetic appreciation. I suggest that this impact is different with respect to aesthetic beliefs and to aesthetic affective attitudes (such as enjoyment). More specifically, I defend the view that higher-order evidence questioning the reliability of one’s aesthetic beliefs can make it reasonable for one to revise those beliefs. Conversely, in line with a plausible account of emotions, aesthetic affective attitudes are not directly sensitive to this type of higher-order evidence; (...) they are sensitive only to those features of objects that make such attitudes (un)fitting. Thus, I argue, there are cases of non-defective recalcitrant aesthetic attitudes where the subject has both a non-defective, fitting aesthetic affective attitude and a reasonable belief questioning the fittingness of this attitude. I further discuss whether, in this type of case, the subject has decisive reasons to try to change her recalcitrant attitudes—say by trying to modify her aesthetic affective dispositions. My answer is negative. Even granting that subjects always have aesthetic reasons to try to avoid aesthetically unfitting attitudes, these can be outweighed by further reasons not to do so—perhaps including aesthetic reasons related to the construction of valuable aesthetic identities or to the value of aesthetic engagement. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that defeasible inferences are occasion-sensitive: the inferential connections of a given claim depend on features of the circumstances surrounding the occasion of inference. More specifically, it is an occasion-sensitive matter which possible defeaters have to be considered explicitly by the premises of an inference and which possible defeaters may remain unconsidered, without making the inference enthymematic. As a result, a largely unexplored form of occasion-sensitivity arises in inferentialist theories of content that appeal to defeasible inferences.

Daniel Whiting has argued, in this journal, that Mark Schroeder’s analysis of knowledge in terms of subjectively and objectively sufficient reasons for belief makes wrong predictions in fake barn cases. Schroeder has replied that this problem may be avoided if one adopts a suitable account of perceptual reasons. I argue that Schroeder’s reply fails to deal with the general worry underlying Whiting’s purported counterexample, because one can construct analogous potential counterexamples that do not involve perceptual reasons at all. Nevertheless, I (...) claim that it is possible to overcome Whiting’s objection, by showing that it rests on an inadequate characterization of how defeat works in the examples in question. (shrink)

We discuss the role of practical costs in the epistemic justification of a novice choosing expert advice, taking as a case study the choice of an expert statistician by a lay politician. First, we refine Goldman’s criteria for the assessment of this choice, showing how the costs of not being impartial impinge on the epistemic justification of the different actors involved in the choice. Then, drawing on two case studies, we discuss in which institutional setting the costs of partiality can (...) play an epistemic role. This way we intend to show how the sociological explanation of the choice of experts can incorporate its epistemic justification. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...) of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation. (shrink)

Success semantics is a theory of content that characterizes the truth-conditions of mental representations in terms of the success-conditions of the actions derived from them. Nanay : 151-165, 2013) and Dokic and Engel have revised this theory in order to defend it from the objections that assailed its previous incarnations. I argue that both proposals have seemingly decisive flaws. More specifically, these revised versions of the theory fail to deal adequately with the open-ended possibility of unforeseen obstacles for the success (...) of our actions. I suggest that the problem of ignored obstacles undermines success semantics quite generally, including alternative formulations such as Blackburn’s. (shrink)

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing (...) interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, disagreements in aesthetic debates, and the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to error theory and realist ontological commitments. (shrink)

Editors' introduction to 'James Woodward: Causal and explanatory asymmetries'.

Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to a practice-based characterization of scientific inference. We want to explore whether Brandom’s pragmatist–inferentialist framework can suitably accommodate several types of ampliative inference common in scientific reasoning and explanation (probabilistic reasoning, abduction and idealisation). First, we argue that Brandom’s view of induction in terms of merely permissive inferences is inadequate; in order to overcome the shortcoming of Brandom’s proposal, we put forward an alternative conception of inductive, probabilistic reasoning by appeal to the (...) notion of degrees of commitment. Moreover, we examine the sorts of inferential commitments operative in other types of ampliative inferences, such as abduction or reasoning involving idealizations and assumptions. We suggest that agents engaging in these forms of reasoning often undertake restricted inferential commitments, whose scope and reach are more limited that in the case of the commitments associated with full beliefs. (shrink)

The expressivist account of knowledge attributions, while claiming that these attributions are nonfactual, also typically holds that they retain a factual component. This factual component involves the attribution of a belief. The aim of this work is to show that considerations analogous to those motivating an expressivist account of knowledge attributions can be applied to belief attributions. As a consequence, we claim that expressivists should not treat the so-called factual component as such. The phenomenon we focus on to claim that (...) belief attributions are non-factual is that of normative doxastic disagreement. We show through several examples that this kind of disagreement is analogous to that of the epistemic kind. The result will be a doxastic expressivism. Finally, we answer some objections that our doxastic expressivism could seem to face. (shrink)

Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to a practice-based characterization of scientific inference. We want to explore whether Brandom’s pragmatist–inferentialist framework can suitably accommodate several types of ampliative inference common in scientific reasoning and explanation (probabilistic reasoning, abduction and idealisation). First, we argue that Brandom’s view of induction in terms of merely permissive inferences is inadequate; in order to overcome the shortcoming of Brandom’s proposal, we put forward an alternative conception of inductive, probabilistic reasoning by appeal to the (...) notion of degrees of commitment. Moreover, we examine the sorts of inferential commitments operative in other types of ampliative inferences, such as abduction or reasoning involving idealizations and assumptions. We suggest that agents engaging in these forms of reasoning often undertake restricted inferential commitments, whose scope and reach are more limited that in the case of the commitments associated with full beliefs. (shrink)

This paper discusses practical akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that can be derived from Nuno Venturinha’s remarks on moral matters.

Pragmatist views inspired by Peirce characterize the content of claims in terms of their practical consequences. The content of a claim is, on these views, determined by what actions are rationally recommended or supported by that claim. In this paper I examine the defeasibility of these relations of rational support. I will argue that such defeasibility introduces a particularist, occasion-sensitive dimension in pragmatist theories of content. More precisely, my conclusion will be that, in the sort of framework naturally derived from (...) Peirce’s pragmatist maxim, grasping conceptual contents is not merely a question of mastering general rules or principles codifying the practical import of claims, but decisively involves being sensitive to surrounding features of the particular situation at hand. (shrink)

I argue that if there are nondisabled reasons to believe p, then there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something incompatible with p. I first defend a restricted version of the view, which applies only to situations where the relevant agent has complete evidence. Then, I argue for a generalized version of the view, which holds regardless of the agent's evidence. As a related result, I show that, given plausible assumptions, there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something false.

Los expedientes de la Capilla Real de Sevilla acaban de ser depositados en el Archivo de la Institución Colombina de la Catedral para su inventario y para que puedan estar al servicio de los investigadores, junto con otros fondos bibliográficos y documentales de la Catedral. Tras una primera aproximación a este rico y desconocido archivo, el trabajo que se presenta en este trabajo es el inventario de una de sus series documentales más más interesantes para la investigación actual, por su (...) contenido genealógico. También tenemos prevista la elaboración y publicación del inventario completo de este archivo. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo diagnosticar el estado de la competencia comunicativa en estudiantes de primer año de pedagogía, considerando las competencias léxica, de comprensión lectora y de producción escrita. Para ello, en el marco de un estudio de caso, se diseñaron y adaptaron tres instrumentos, uno para cada competencia: test de disponibilidad léxica, test de comprensión lectora y rúbrica para evaluar una tarea de escritura argumentativa. Dentro de los principales hallazgos, destaca que el rendimiento más alto corresponde al desempeño (...) en lectura, por sobre escritura, quedando el desempeño léxico en tercer lugar. Se concluye que los resultados obtenidos permiten clasificar los desempeños en niveles iniciales y que, si bien no es posible hablar de la existencia de una correlación, los vínculos más estrechos se presentan entre lectura-escritura, léxico-escritura y léxico-lectura, respectivamente. (shrink)

Este estudio busca indagar en la relación entre las concepciones sobre la escritura que tienen estudiantes de doctorado y su relación con la calidad textual y argumentativa que poseen textos redactados por ellos. Se revisaron 31 textos producidos por los doctorandos y se evaluó la calidad textual y la calidad argumentativa; luego, se aplicó un cuestionario de procesos de escritura, lo que permitió conocer las concepciones de los estudiantes sobre las dos variables mencionadas. Se encontró que las dimensiones ‘bloqueo’ y (...) ‘procrastinación’ inciden en la calidad de la escritura, mientras que ‘transformación del conocimiento’ se relaciona con la calidad argumentativa. (shrink)

En este trabajo se indaga en el comportamiento de la atenuación en los verbos que expresan duda, presentes en el corpus AMERESCO de conversaciones coloquiales de Santiago de Chile. Se describen las funciones de la atenuación de estos verbos de acuerdo con (1) el tipo de acto de habla, (2) la actividad de imagen y (3) algunas características sintáctico-discursivas. Los principales hallazgos demuestran que la atenuación se manifiesta a través de verbos doxásticos (_creer_, _parecer_, _cachar_, etc.), verbos modales (_poder_, _deber_) (...) y el verbo “saber” con polaridad negativa (“_no sé_”). Esta surge cuando se presenta lo dicho como una duda, bien para suavizar una opinión contraria o crítica, en cuyo caso su significado es de opinión, bien para informar sobre un estado de cosas, cuando su significado es epistémico. En el reconocimiento de su carácter atenuante, resultan clave el tipo de acto de habla en el que ocurren, el rol proyectado por el hablante en la conversación, la gestión de las imágenes y sus características sintáctico-discursivas, elementos que determinan si estas construcciones verbales expresan mayor o menor atenuación. (shrink)