In this book William G. Lycan offers an epistemology of philosophy itself, a partial method for philosophical inquiry. The epistemology features three ultimate sources of justified philosophical belief. First, common sense, in a carefully restricted sense of the term-the sorts of contingentpropositions Moore defended against idealists and skeptics. Second, the deliverances of well confirmed science. Third and more fundamentally, intuitions about cases in a carefully specified sense of that term. The first half of On Evidence in Philosophy expounds a (...) version of Moore's method and applies it to each of several issues. This version is shown to resist all the standard objections to Moore; most of them do not even apply. It is argued, in Chapters 5 and 6, that philosophical method is far lesspowerful than most have taken it to be. In particular, deductive argument can accomplish very little, and hardly ever is an opposing position refuted except by common sense or by science. The final two chapters defend the evidential status of intuitions and the Goodmanian method of reflectiveequilibrium; it is argued that philosophy always and everywhere depends on them. The method is then set within a more general explanatory-coherentist epistemology, which is shown to resist standard forms of skepticism.In sum, William G. Lycan advocates a picture of philosophy as a very wide explanatory reflective equilibrium incorporating common sense, science, and our firmest intuitions on any topic-and nothing more, not ever. (shrink)

This book contends that insufficient attention has been paid to the syntax of conditionals, as investigated by linguists.

Now in its Third Edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author William G. Lycan structures the book into four general parts. Part I, Reference and Referring, includes topics such as Russell's theory of descriptions (and its objections), Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the description theory of proper names, Searle's cluster theory, and the causal-historical theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys (...) the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes a detailed discussion of the problem of indirect force. Part IV, The Expressive and the Figurative, examines various forms of expressive language and what "metaphorical meaning" is and how most listeners readily grasp it. (shrink)

Since Twin Earth was discovered by American philosophical-space explorers in the 1970s, the domain of.

William G. Lycan; XII*—Two—No, Three—Concepts of Possible Worlds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 215–228, https.

William G. Lycan; XII*—Two—No, Three—Concepts of Possible Worlds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 215–228, https.

Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the ..

Second, there is a form of ampliative inference that has come to be called ‘inference to the best explanation,’ or more briefly ‘explanatory inference.’ Roughly: From the fact that a certain hypothesis would explain the data at hand better than any other available hypothesis, we infer with some degree of confidence that that leading hypothesis is correct. There is no question but that this inference is often performed. Arguably, every human being performs it many times in a day, perhaps without (...) letup. (shrink)

It is widely thought that mind–body substance dualism is implausible at best, though mere “property” dualism is defensible and even flourishing. This paper argues that substance dualism is no less plausible than property dualism and even has two advantages over it.

In this book, William Lycan reviews the diverse philosophical views on consciousness--including those of Kripke, Block, Campbell, Sellars, and Casteneda--and ..

_Philosophy of Language_ introduces the student to the main issues and theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language. Topics are structured in three parts in the book. Part I, Reference and Referring Expressions, includes topics such as Russell's Theory of Desciptions, Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the description theory of proper names, Searle's cluster theory, and the causal-historical theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and (...) Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics, includes a detailed discussion of the problem of indirect force and surveys approaches to metaphor. Unique features of the text: * chapter overviews and summaries * clear supportive examples * study questions * annotated further reading * glossary. (shrink)

Grice's cryptic notion of “conventional implicature” has been developed in a number of different ways. This paper deploys the simplest version, Lycan's (1984) notion of “lexical presumption,” and argues that slurs and other pejorative expressions have normal truth-conditional content plus the most obvious extra implicatures. The paper then addresses and rebuts objections to “conventional implicature” accounts that have been made in the literature, particularly those which focus on non-offensive uses of slurs.

Lycan (1985, 1988) defended a “Principle of Credulity”: “Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true” (1988, p. 165). Though that takes the form of a rule rather than a thesis, it does not seem very different from Huemer’s (2001, 2006, 2007) doctrine of phenomenal conservatism (PC): “If it seems to S that p , then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p ” (2007, (...) p. 30). My Principle was differently motivated and put to uses different from Huemer’s. In this paper I shall explore some of the differences. (shrink)

Has any school or movement in all of Western philosophy made a permanent contribution, permanent in the sense that it will last as long as philosophy does? More narrowly, has there ever been put forward a thesis that has achieved lasting consensus? After carefully defining “philosophical thesis” and “consensus,” so as to forestall uninteresting answers, this paper argues that the ancient Greeks made one or two such contributions, and the Analytic philosophers (ca. 1890–1960) made a few, but there have been (...) no others. Moreover (a) the Analytic contributions were more empirical than philosophical, and (b) they were almost entirely negative. So, the basic short answer to our question is “no.” The paper concludes by asking in what way(s) there has been progress in philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter explains that most of the standard objections to substance dualism (SD) count as effectively against property dualism (PD), and that PD is hardly more plausible, or less implausible, than SD. Dualism competes, not with neuroscience (a science), but with materialism, an opposing philosophical theory. The chapter shows that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in (...) particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism. (shrink)

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

The ethics of humor has suffered from failure to distinguish objects of evaluation. This paper’s main thesis is that once we do distinguish the evaluation of ordinary humorous acts—everyday joking and laughing—from that of humorous amusement or mirth considered as a mental state, we find that, with one important qualification, the former is not particularly distinctive; standard moral theories apply straightforwardly. What presents special issues for moral philosophy is, rather, the mental state, and its assessment from the viewpoint of virtue (...) and character. The paper explores several ways in which mirth per se can be morally bad. (shrink)

What does vision represent? What does hearing represent? Smell? Touch? Competing answers to each of these questions have been defended. The present paper argues that the issue of what taste represents is categorically more complicated. In particular, it raises two very difficult dilemmas.

As a clinical geneticist I have been amazed at the speed of discovery over the past 20 years. The specific genetic causes of thousands of rare genetic conditions have been defined due to improvements in genomic sequencing, computing power and international collaborations to phenotype individuals with similar clinical features. This knowledge has resulted in an increased ability to make accurate molecular diagnoses which informs optimal treatment and clinical care, can remove the need for unnecessary investigations and informs reproductive decision-making. However (...) for any given individual, this genetic testing can often take weeks or months before the initial genetic diagnosis is made within a family. Occasionally genetic information is required more quickly to define a clinical action. For years point of care testing has been a mainstay of clinical care, for example, in confirming pregnancy or monitoring blood glucose. I had been keen to explore scenarios where a genetic POCT could be employed in clinical practice. To me, an obvious example appeared to be neonatal testing to avoid gentamicin-induced hearing loss. Here was a situation where we had known about the genetic …. (shrink)

MEANING POSTULATES REINSTATED If I am right in agreeing with Cresswell that the "logicarrlexicaT distinction is one of degree rather than one of kind, that in turn impugns the distinction between the official truth-rules that define logical ...

On Evidence in Philosophy sketches an epistemology of philosophy itself, a method for philosophical inquiry. Part 1 defends a version of Moore's method of “common sense,” in which humble, boring everyday facts like “I have hands” and “I had breakfast earlier today” trump the a priori philosophical premises of arguments for various eliminative idealisms and skepticisms. Part 2 exhibits the deeper poverty of philosophical method, arguing that philosophy cannot prove or even refute any interesting thesis. But Part 3 defends intuitions (...) as giving us good prima facie reason to accept the judgments they support, and then develops the method of wide reflective equilibrium in the context of a broader explanatory-coherentist epistemology. (shrink)

Donald Davidson notoriously rejected ‘metaphorical meaning’ and denied the existence of linguistic mechanisms by which metaphorical significance is conveyed. He contended that the meanings metaphorical sentences have are just their literal meanings, though metaphorical utterances may brute-causally have important cognitive effects. Contrastingly, John Searle offers a Gricean account of metaphor as an elaborated kind of implicature, and defends metaphorical meaning as speaker-meaning. Each of those positions is subject to very telling objections from the other's point of view. This paper proposes (...) a synthesis that combines the respective virtues of Davidson's and Searle's accounts and avoids all the objections to each. (shrink)