A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence (...) Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. (shrink)

I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether credence 1 is construed as full belief (the limit case (...) of so-called partial belief) or instead is construed as absolute certainty. I argue that the notion of an “ideal Bayesian reasoner” cannot serve as a normative ideal that actual human agents should seek to emulate as closely as they can, because different such reasoners who all have the same evidence as oneself—no single one them being uniquely psychologically most similar to oneself—will differ from one another in their credences (e.g., because they commence from different prior credences). I argue that epistemic probability, properly understood, is quantitative degree of evidential support relative to one’s evidence, and that principled epistemic probabilities arise only under quite special evidential circumstances—which means that epistemic probability is ill suited to figure centrally within general norms of human epistemic rationality. (shrink)

In his 1958 seminal paper “Saints and Heroes”, J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tripartite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional in the sense of being morally indifferent, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are “beyond the call of duty” (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. But it is a (...) controversial category. Some have argued that the concept of supererogation is paradoxical because on one hand, supererogatory actions are (by definition) supposed to be morally good, indeed morally best, actions. But then if they are morally best, why aren't they morally required, contrary to the assumption that they are morally optional? In short: how can an action that is morally best to perform fail to be what one is morally required to do? The source of this alleged paradox has been dubbed the ‘good-ought tie-up’. In our article, we address this alleged paradox by first making a phenomenological case for the reality of instances of genuine supererogatory actions, and then, by reflecting on the relevant phenomenology, explaining why there is no genuine paradox. Our explanation appeals to the idea that moral reasons can play what we call amerit conferring role. The basic idea is that moral reasons that favor supererogatory actions function to confer merit on the actions they favor—they play a merit conferring role—and can do without also requiring the actions in question. Hence, supererogatory actions can be both good and morally meritorious to perform yet still be morally optional. Recognition of a merit conferring role unties the good-ought tie up, and (as we further argue) there are good reasons, independent of helping to resolve the alleged paradox, for recognizing this sort of role that moral reasons may play. (shrink)

Talks about a man who had it all - looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career - and gave it all up to find for himself the answer to his question, Is there actually anything like freedom, enlightenment or liberation behind all the abstractions the religions have thrown at us? This book aims to introduce you to the unknown truth of life.

This paper addresses an alleged paradox regarding gratitude—that a duty of gratitude is odd or puzzling if not paradoxical. The gist of our position is that in prototypical cases, gratitude expression falls under a distinctive deontic category we call morally expected—which has a corresponding contrary deontic category we call morally offensive. These categories, we maintain, need recognition in normative ethics to make proper sense of the moral status of gratitude expression and other morally charged restrictions on action, and likewise to (...) make proper sense of the moral status of failures to abide by such restrictions. We argue for our view largely on phenomenological grounds. (shrink)

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are being actively implemented in a wide range of fields – psychology, mind/body health care and education at all levels – and there is growing evidence of their effectiveness in aiding present-moment focus, fostering emotional stability, and enhancing general mind/body well-being. However, as often happens with popular innovations, the burgeoning interest in and appeal of mindfulness practice has led to a reductionism and commodification – popularly labelled ‘McMindfulness’ – of the underpinning principles and ethical foundations of such (...) practice which threatens to subvert and militate against the achievement of the original aims of MBIs in general and their educational function in particular. It is argued here that mindfulness practice needs to be organically connected to its spiritual roots if the educational benefits of such practice are to be fully realised. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology is concerned with the elements of one's moral experiences that are generally available to introspection. Some philosophers argue that one's moral experiences, such as experiencing oneself as being morally obligated to perform some action on some occasion, contain elements that (1) are available to introspection and (2) carry ontological objectivist purportargument from phenomenological introspection.neutrality thesisthe phenomenological data regarding one's moral experiences that is available to introspection is neutral with respect to the issue of whether such experiences carry ontological (...) objectivist purport. (shrink)

Mitchell Franklin's contributions to American legal thought were in large part the result of his devotion to the study of the United States' Romanist legal heritage. A leading theme of his work is that the Roman legal tradition presents more promising prospects for progressive legal developments than the Anglo-American common law tradition. Thus, Franklin became an advocate of Roman-style codification of American law which began with the American revolution and has continued. His Romanist position sharply distinguished Franklin from almost all (...) American jurists of this century, even those considered liberal and progressive. Thus, Franklin criticized Holmes for his Anglophilic Humean1 conceptions of law and judicial hegemony. (shrink)

This chapter defends the claim that the space of human actions is really partitionable into five non-overlapping deontic categories: the three commonly recognized ones (the obligatory, the impermissible or wrong, and the optional), plus two additional ones labeled the expected and the contra-expected. These latter categories are typically not recognized in ethical theorizing but nonetheless they are part of everyday moral experience. The defense of these additional deontic categories appeals, via inference to the best explanation, partly to phenomenological considerations and (...) partly to moral-normative considerations. It is further argued that this five-way partition of the deontic realm helps explain why the hybrid categories of the supererogatory and suberogatory are deontically asymmetrical. (shrink)

Interest in the Buddhist concept of mindfulness has burgeoned over the last few decades as a result of its application as a therapeutic strategy in mind-body medicine, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, leadership and management, and a wide range of other theoretical and practical domains. Although many commentators welcome this extension of the range and application of mindfulness—drawing parallels between ancient contemplative traditions and modern secular interpretations—there has been very little analysis of either the philosophical underpinnings of this phenomenon or of its (...) implications for education. This article examines the new interpretations of mindfulness in the following areas—meaning and definition, ethical foundations and spiritual ethos—in an attempt to gain a clearer understanding of what is involved in the process of reconstructing the concept of mindfulness. In conclusion, some implications for learning and education are examined in the light of these recent re-interpretations of mindfulness principles and practices. A central thesis throughout is that—although there are many educational benefits of mindfulness in the areas of moral, affective and spiritual education—such potential gains require the maintenance of organic connections between contemporary practices and their foundations in secular Buddhism. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology is (roughly) the study of those features of occurrent mental states with moral significance which are accessible through direct introspection, whether or not such states possess phenomenal character – a what-it-is-likeness. In this paper, as the title indicates, we introduce and make prefatory remarks about moral phenomenology and its significance for ethics. After providing a brief taxonomy of types of moral experience, we proceed to consider questions about the commonality within and distinctiveness of such experiences, with an eye (...) on some of the main philosophical issues in ethics and how moral phenomenology might be brought to bear on them. In discussing such matters, we consider some of the doubts about moral phenomenology and its value to ethics that are brought up by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Michael Gill in their contributions to this issue. (shrink)

Is conceptual relativity a genuine phenomenon? If so, how is it properly understood? And if it does occur, does it undermine metaphysical realism? These are the questions we propose to address. We will argue that conceptual relativity is indeed a genuine phenomenon, albeit an extremely puzzling one. We will offer an account of it. And we will argue that it is entirely compatible with metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the view that there is a world of objects and properties that (...) is independent of our thought and discourse (including our schemes of concepts) about such a world. Hilary Putnam, a former proponent of metaphysical realism, later gave it up largely because of the alleged phenomenon that he himself has given the label ‘conceptual relativity’. One of the key ideas of conceptual relativity is that certain concepts—including such fundamental concepts as object, entity, and existence—have a multiplicity of different and incompatible uses (Putnam 1987, p. 19; 1988, pp. 110 14). According to Putnam, once we recognize the phenomenon of conceptual relativity we must reject metaphysical realism: The suggestion . . . is that what is (by commonsense standards) the same situation can be described in many different ways, depending on how we use the words. The situation does not itself legislate how words like “object,” “entity,” and “exist” must be used. What is wrong with the notion of objects existing “independently” of conceptual schemes is that there are no standards for the use of even the logical notions apart from conceptual choices.” (Putnam 1988, p. 114) Putnam’s intriguing reasoning in this passage is difficult to evaluate directly, because conceptual [1] relativity is philosophically perplexing and in general is not well understood. In this paper we propose a construal of conceptual relativity that clarifies it considerably and explains how it is possible despite its initial air of paradox. We then draw upon this construal to explain why, contrary to Putnam and others, conceptual relativity does not conflict with metaphysical realism, but in fact comports well with it.. (shrink)

Causal compatibilism claims that even though physics is causally closed, and even though mental properties are multiply realizable and are not identical to physical causal properties, mental properties are causal properties nonetheless. This position asserts that there is genuine causation at multiple descriptive/ontological levels; physics-level causal claims are not really incompatible with mentalistic causal claims. I articulate and defend a version of causal compatibilism that incorporates three key contentions. First, causation crucially involves robust patterns of counterfactual dependence among properties.Second, often (...) several distinct such patterns, all subsuming a single phenomenon, exist at different descriptive/ontological levels (e.g., microphysical, neurobiological, macrobiological, and psychological). Third, the concept of causation is governed by an implicit contextual parameter that normally determines a specific descriptive/ontological level as the contextually relevant level, for the context-sensitive semantic evaluation of causal statements. (shrink)

I maintain, in defending “thirdism,” that Sleeping Beauty should do Bayesian updating after assigning the “preliminary probability” 1/4 to the statement S: “Today is Tuesday and the coin flip is heads.” (This preliminary probability obtains relative to a specific proper subset I of her available information.) Pust objects that her preliminary probability for S is really zero, because she could not be in an epistemic situation in which S is true. I reply that the impossibility of being in such an (...) epistemic situation is irrelevant, because relative to I, statement S nonetheless has degree of evidential support 1/4. (shrink)

How should the metaphysical hypothesis of materialism be formulated? What strategies look promising for defending this hypothesis? How good are the prospects for its successful defense, especially in light of the infamous "hard problem" of phenomenal consciousness? I will say something about each of these questions.

The hypothesis of the mental state-causation of behavior asserts that the behaviors we classify as actions are caused by certain mental states. A principal reason often given for trying to secure the truth of the MSC hypothesis is that doing so is allegedly required to vindicate our belief in our own agency. I argue that the project of vindicating agency needs to be seriously reconceived, as does the relation between this project and the MSC hypothesis. Vindication requires addressing what I (...) call the agent-exclusion problem: the prima facie incompatibility between the intentional content of agentive experience and certain metaphysical hypotheses often espoused in philosophy. (shrink)

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals (...) have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity. (shrink)

Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally (...) trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief. (shrink)

NOTE: Series number is not an integer: n/a.

We present a new argument for the claim that in the Sleeping Beauty problem, the probability that the coin comes up heads is 1/3. Our argument depends on a principle for the updating of probabilities that we call ‘generalized conditionalization’, and on a species of generalized conditionalization we call ‘synchronic conditionalization on old information’. We set forth a rationale for the legitimacy of generalized conditionalization, and we explain why our new argument for thirdism is immune to two attacks that Pust (...) (Synthese 160:97–101, 2008) has leveled at other arguments for thirdism. (shrink)

We introduce an innovative technique that quantifies human expertise development in such a way that humans and artificial systems can be directly compared. Using this technique we are able to highlight certain fundamental difficulties associated with the learning of a complex task that humans are still exceptionally better at than their computer counterparts. We demonstrate that expertise goes through significant developmental transitions that have previously been predicted but never explicated. The first signals the onset of a steady increase in global (...) awareness that begins surprisingly late in expertise acquisition. The second transition, reached by only a very few experts in the world, shows a major reorganisation of global contextual knowledge resulting in a relatively minor gain in skill. We are able to show that these empirical findings have consequences for our understanding of the way in which expertise acquisition may be modelled by learning in artificial intelligence systems. This point is emphasised with a novel theoretical result showing explicitly how our findings imply a non-trivial hurdle for learning for suitably complex tasks. (shrink)

In American Sign Language (ASL) narratives, signers map conceptualized spaces onto actual spaces around them that can reflect physical, conceptual, and metaphorical relations among entities. Because verb tenses are not attested in ASL, a question arises: How does a signer distinguish utterances about past events from utterances within a present conversational context? In narratives, the story-teller’s past-event utterances move the story along; accompanying these will often be subjective comments on the story, evaluative statements, and the like, that are geared, in (...) the present, to the conversational partner. This usage-based study looks at how the ASL signer integrates past and present spaces in a narrative and specifically, integrates the viewpoints associated with each. Blending past and present spaces, while a conceptual notion, is in ASL played out in utterance structure and also in the fact that signed language articulation takes place in a three-dimensional space upon which both the signer and addressee have embodied, perspectivized views. Past and present conceptual spaces both occupy the physical space of articulation, and so the blends are at once conceptual and perceivable. (shrink)

The philosophical account of vagueness I call "transvaluationism" makes three fundamental claims. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: it essentially involves mutually unsatisfiable requirements that govern vague language, vague thought-content, and putative vague objects and properties. Second, vagueness in language and thought (i.e., semantic vagueness) is a genuine phenomenon despite possessing this form of incoherence—and is viable, legitimate, and indeed indispensable. Third, vagueness as a feature of objects, properties, or relations (i.e., ontological vagueness) is impossible, because of (...) the mutually unsatisfiable conditions that such putative items would have to meet. In this paper I set forth the core claims of transvaluationism in a way that acknowledges and explicitly addresses a challenging critique by Timothy Williamson of my prior attempts to articulate and defend this approach to vagueness. I sketch my favored approach to truth and ontological commitment, and I explain how it accommodates the impossibility of ontological vagueness. I argue that any approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness that both (i) eschews epistemicism and (ii) thoroughly avoids positing any arbitrary sharp boundaries (either first-order or higher-order) will have to be not an alternative to transvaluationism but an implementation of it. I sketch my reasons for repudiating epistemicism. I briefly describe my current thinking about how to accommodate intentional mental properties with vague content within an ontology that eschews ontological vagueness. And I revisit the idea, which played a key role in my earlier articulations of transvaluationism, that moral conflicts provide an illuminating model for understanding vagueness. (shrink)

For the last 20 years or so, philosophers of mind have been using the term ‘qualia’, which is frequently glossed as standing for the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The examples of what-it-is-like that are typically given are feelings of pain or itches, and color and sound sensations. This suggests an identification of the experiential what-it-islike with such states. More recently, philosophers have begun speaking of the “phenomenology“ of experience, which they have also glossed as “what-it-is-like”. Many say, for example, that any (...) acceptable materialism—or any acceptable account of the relation of mind and body—must “respect the phenomenology.”1 Typically, no examples beyond those mentioned in the first paragraph are offered. This suggests that the picture of the phenomenology that ”must be respected” is the what-it-is-like of bodily sensations, of sensations that occur in perception, and perhaps of certain analogous nonperceptual states, such as imaginings and image-like rememberings. According to the suggested picture, all there is to phenomenology is such states; intentional mental states—as such— have no phenomenology; there is nothing that it is like to undergo them. Although beliefs and desires are intentionally directed—i.e., they have aboutness—these mental states allegedly are not inherently phenomenal. On this view, there is nothing that it is like to be.. (shrink)

Fix an integer $r \ge 3$. We consider metric spaces on n points such that the distance between any two points lies in $\left\{ {1, \ldots,r} \right\}$. Our main result describes their approximate structure for large n. As a consequence, we show that the number of these metric spaces is $\left\lceil {{{r + 1} \over 2}} \right\rceil ^{\left + o\left}.$Related results in the continuous setting have recently been proved by Kozma, Meyerovitch, Peled, and Samotij [34]. When r is even, our (...) structural characterization is more precise and implies that almost all such metric spaces have all distances at least $r/2$. As an easy consequence, when r is even, we improve the error term above from $o\left$ to $o\left$, and also show a labeled first-order 0-1 law in the language ${\cal L}_r $, consisting of r binary relations, one for each element of $[r]$. In particular, we show the almost sure theory T is the theory of the Fraïssé limit of the class of all finite simple complete edge-colored graphs with edge colors in $\left\{ {r/2, \ldots,r} \right\}$.Our work can be viewed as an extension of a long line of research in extremal combinatorics to the colored setting, as well as an addition to the collection of known structures that admit logical 0-1 laws. (shrink)

What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is really only one concrete particular, viz., the entire cosmos (...) (see Horgan and Potr (2000, 2002), Potr (2003)). But there are various potential versions of the generic position we are here calling austere metaphysical realism; and it is the generic view that constitutes the ontological part of the overall approach to realism and truth that we will describe here. What is true? More than you might think, given our austere metaphysical realism. We maintain that truth is semantically correct affirmability, under contextually operative semantic standards. We also maintain that most of the time, the contextually operative semantic standards work in such a way that semantic correctness (i.e., truth) is a matter of indirect correspondence rather than direct correspondence between thought or language on the one hand, and the world on the other.1 When correspondence is indirect rather than direct, a given statement (or thought) can be true even if the correct ontology does not include items answering to all the referential commitments (as we will here call them) of the statement. 2 This means that even if a putative object is repudiated by a correct ontological theory, ordinary statements that are putatively about that object may still be true. For instance, the statement “The University of St. Andrews is in Scotland” can be semantically correct (i.e., true) even if the right ontology does not include any entity answering to the referring term ‘The University of St. Andrews’, or any entity... (shrink)

I advocate a two part view concerning vagueness. On one hand I claim that vagueness is logically incoherent; but on the other hand I claim that vagueness is also a benign, beneficial, and indeed essential feature of human language and thought. I will call this view transvaluationism, a name which seems to me appropriate for several reasons. First, the term suggests that we should move beyond the idea that the successive statements in a sorites sequence can be assigned differing truth (...) values in some logically coherent way that fully respects the nature of vagueness -a way that [1] fully eschews any arbitrarily precise semantic transitions. We should transcend this impossible goal by accepting that vagueness harbors logical incoherence. Second, just as Nietzsche held that one can overcome nihilism by embracing what he called the transvaluation of all values, my position affirms vagueness, rather than despairing in the face of the logical absurdity residing at its very core. This affirmation amounts to a transvaluation of truth values, as far as sorites sequences are concerned. Third, the term ’transvaluationism’ has a nice ring to it, especially since one of the principal philosophical approaches to vagueness is called supervaluationism. I will call the first claim of transvaluationism, that vagueness is logically incoherent, the incoherence thesis . I will call the second claim, that vagueness is benign, beneficial, and essential, the legitimacy thesis . The legitimacy thesis, taken by itself, seems overwhelmingly plausible; anyone who denies it assumes a heavy burden of proof. But prima facie, it seems dubious that the legitimacy thesis can be maintained in conjunction with the incoherence thesis. For, there is reason to doubt whether there is any cogent way to embrace the incoherence thesis without thereby becoming mired in what Williamson (1994) calls global nihilism about vagueness -the view that vague terms are empty (i.e., they do not, and cannot, apply to anything). Global nihilism, Williamson argues, has such destructively negative consequences that it does not deserve to be taken seriously -for instance, the consequence that vastly many of our common sense beliefs are false, and the consequence that these beliefs are not even useful (since the constituent terms in ’Common sense beliefs are useful’ are vague and hence this statement turns out, given the [2] incoherence thesis, to be false itself). In short, the idea that one can adopt the incoherence thesis and then somehow transcend nihilism might initially seem hopelessly optimistic; transvaluationism would then be an unattainable, chimerical, goal rather than an intelligible and conceptually stable position concerning vagueness. Given certain widely held philosophical views about how language and thought must map onto the world in order for statements and the beliefs they express to be true -views that fall appropriately under the label ’referential semantics’ -transvaluationism probably is a chimerical goal. (shrink)