Revisionism in the theory of moral responsibility is the idea that some aspect of responsibility practices, attitudes, or concept is in need of revision. While the increased frequency of revisionist language in the literature on free will and moral responsibility is striking, what discussion there has been of revisionism about responsibility and free will tends to be critical. In this paper, I argue that at least one species of revisionism, moderate revisionism, is considerably more sophisticated and defensible than critics have (...) realized. I go on to argue for the advantages of moderate revisionist theories over standard compatibilist and incompatibilist theories. (shrink)

This article summarizes the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (3) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about (...) moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper is about conceptual engineering. Specifically, it discusses a common objection to CE, which I call the Discontinuity Objection. According to the Discontinuity Objection, CE leads to problematic discontinuities in subject and/or inquiry – making it philosophically uninteresting or irrelevant. I argue that a conceptual engineer can dismiss the Discontinuity Objection by showing that the pre-engineering concept persists through the proposed changes. In other words, the Discontinuity Objection does not apply if the proposal involves identity-preserving changes. Two existing views (...) on identity-preserving changes are considered and rejected. I then argue that an identity-preserving conceptual change is one that allows the concept to continue to perform its function. A concept’s function is its job, its point and purpose, its role in a conceptual repertoire. In a slogan: Preserve a concept’s function, and you preserve the concept itself; preserve the concept, and you preserve the subject. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of this view. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Revisionism Revisited Performance and the Challenge of the Modern More on Forgeries.

Several theorists have observed that attitude reports have what we call “revisionist” uses. For example, even if Pete has never met Ann and has no idea that she exists, Jane can still say to Jim ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis in ten lessons’ if Pete believes all 6-year-olds can learn to play tennis in ten lessons and it is part of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge that Ann is a 6-year-old. Jane’s assertion seems acceptable because the claim (...) she reports Pete as believing is entailed by Pete’s beliefs if they are revised in light of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge. We provide a semantic theory of revisionist reports based on this idea. We observe that the admissible “revisions” are limited in a striking way. Jane cannot say ‘Pete thinks Ann is a 6-year-old and can play tennis in ten lessons’ in the same context that she can say ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis ten lessons’, even though this too follows from Jane and Jim’s background knowledge together with what Pete believes. Our theory predicts the infelicity of these latter reports. It also has the resources to predict the truth of “exported” attitude reports and casts the relationship between these reports and “singular thought” in a new light. We conclude by discussing how revisionist reports make trouble for a simplistic view of the connection between the relations expressed by attitude verbs in natural language and the relations of most interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

Many theories of racism presuppose that ordinary usage of the term “racism” should be preserved. Rarely is this presupposition—the presumption of conservatism—defended. This paper discusses the work of Lawrence Blum, Joshua Glasgow, Jorge Garcia, Tommie Shelby, and others, in order to develop a critique of the presumption of conservatism. Against this presumption, I defend the following desideratum: If ordinary usage of “racism” prompts significant practical difficulties that can be averted by revising ordinary usage, then this counts as a mark against (...) the normative status of ordinary usage and so counts as a reason for revising it. The significance of this argument is that it clears the way for a rigorous defense of revisionism. My paper provides a prima facie case for revisionism, built on two practical criticisms of the ordinary usage of “racism.” First, ordinary usage reflects incompatible norms that promote conceptual confusion and misunderstanding, among other problems. Second, ordinary usage reflects an individualistic conception of racism that serves the interests of whites. By championing ordinary usage in our philosophical theories, we (unwittingly) promote the interests of whites over nonwhites. (shrink)

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness (...) of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Revisionists claim that the retributive intuitions informing our responsibility-attributing practices are unwarranted under determinism, not only because they are false, but because if we are all victims of causal luck, it is unfair to treat one another as if we are deserving of moral and legal sanctions. One revisionist strategy recommends a deflationary concept of moral responsibility, and that we justify punishment in consequentialist rather than retributive terms. Another revisionist strategy recommends that we eliminate all concepts of guilt, blame and (...) punishment, and treat dangerous criminals as we treat people with contagious diseases. I argue against both strong and moderate revisionism that it is not unfair to hold persons desert -entailingly responsible insofar as they take an interest in being treated as appraisable, and that it is unfair to persons not to treat them as desert -entailingly responsible contrary to their interests in being treated as such. The interest-based argument, I conclude, give us a justification for communicating retributive attitudes, but may still require a weak revision of our retributive practices, in the direction of a communicative theory of punishment. (shrink)

The present chapter is concerned with revisionism about free will. It begins by offering a new characterization of revisionist accounts and the way such accounts fit (or do not) in the familiar framework of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It then traces some of the recent history of the development of revisionist accounts, and concludes by remarking on some challenges for them.

In his recent work, Duncan Pritchard defends a novel Wittgensteinian response to the problem of radical scepticism. The response makes essential use of a form of non-epistemicism about the nature of hinge commitments. According to non-epistemicism, hinge commitments cannot be known or grounded in rational considerations, such as reasons and evidence. On Pritchard’s version of non-epistemicism, hinge commitments express propositions but cannot be believed. This is the non-belief theory of hinge commitments. One of the main reasons in favour of NBT (...) over rival anti-sceptical Wittgensteinian views is that it has less theoretical costs and revisionary consequences than its rivals. In this paper, I argue that NBT fares at least as bad as its rivals in terms of its theoretical costs and revisionism. In particular, I argue that NBT is inconsistent with certain cases of philosophical disagreement; that it faces worries with mental-state scepticism; and that it faces difficulties in explaining how we can represent ourselves as committed to hinge commitments. (shrink)

Some subjectivist views of practical reasons entail that some people, in some cases, lack sufficient reasons to act as morality requires of them. This is often thought to form the basis of an objection to these subjectivist views: ‘the amoralism objection’. This objection has been developed at length by Julia Markovits in her recent book Moral Reason. But Markovits—alongside many other proponents of this objection—does not explicitly consider that her objection is premised on a claim that her opponents deny on (...) first-order grounds, often as part of a socially and politically motivated revisionism about the assessment of agents and their actions. As such, the amoralism objection as she presents it misses its dialectical mark. This has interesting consequences for subjectivism—and the methodology behind it—more generally. (shrink)

Reductive metaethical views have ethical implications that are frequently inconsistent with our settled ethical intuitions and favored ethical theories. This makes theory choice in metaethics difficult. When we are assessing reductive views, what sort of weight should we accord to their counterintuitive ethical implications? How should we weigh intensional adequacy and explanatory power against apparent extensional inadequacy? I argue that we currently assign too much weight to extensional worries in our metaethical theorizing: We should be willing to tolerate even a (...) great many counterintuitive ethical implications for the sake of a compelling explanation of our ethical practices. Especially when it comes to theorizing about reasons for action, extensional worries should take a back seat to intensional adequacy and explanatory power. My case for this claim beings with a familiar story about the origins of our moral concepts drawn from the work of G. E. M. Anscombe and Alisdair MacIntyre and proceeds via an observation about the nature of practical reasoning. (shrink)

In his book, Building Better Beings, Manuel Vargas argues that we should reject libertarianism, on the grounds that it is naturalistically implausible, and embrace revisionism rather than eliminativism, on the grounds that the former is a shorter departure from ordinary thinking about moral responsibility. I argue that Vargas fails to adequately appreciate the extent to which ordinary judgments about moral responsibility involve ascriptions of basic desert as well as the centrality of basic desert in the ordinary conception of moral responsibility. (...) Insofar as this is correct, we have good reason to think, first, that libertarianism is much more naturalistically plausible than Vargas maintains and, second, that we ought to opt for eliminativism over revisionism in the event that libertarianism turns out to be implausible. (shrink)

This essay is an account of the "revisionism" movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the Cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fact that one of the main issues at stake was not ideological but purely disciplinary, namely a challenge by social historians to (...) the dominance of political history. A similar challenge, this time against the dominance of social history on behalf of cultural history, was issued in the 1990s by "post-revisionists." Although I was a participant in the battles of the 1970s, the essay is less a personal account than a case-based analysis of the way disciplinary orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities are established and challenged, and why this happens when it does. In the case of Soviet history, I argue that new data and external events played a surprisingly small role, and generational change a large one. (shrink)

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

This paper considers characteristic views advanced in the past fifteen years that may be considered relatively sympathetic to student practices of cheating on graded assignments or exams. We detect and analyze typical fallacies that are recurrent in articles that promote a revisionist view of cheating as morally permissible. We offer a general, deontological argument that cheating is immoral. The efforts to justify student cheating take several forms. For example, it has been argued that cheating may be tolerated if the student (...) did not intend to cheat, perhaps because of a failure to understand the normal rules or expected procedures. We also argue that student collaboration in graded work constitutes cheating even if the instructor condones such collaboration. In a similar vein, we address the view that student copying is cheating even if the instructor alters the rules to allow such copying. This moral view can be applied to any cheating behavior, we argue. As a specific example, we demonstrate how it can be applied to the pedagogical recommendation that instructors should encourage their students to cheat in order to cultivate student skills in the area of cyber security. We also address the view that student cheating can be justified by situations in which the student believes that he/she is being subjected to an unfair or unethical overall learning environment. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that revisionary theories about the nature and extent of Hume's scepticism are mistaken. We claim that the source of Hume's pervasive scepticism is his empiricism. As earlier readings of Hume's Treatise claim, Hume was a sceptic – and a radical one. Our position faces one enormous problem. How is it possible to square Hume's claims about normative reasoning with his radical scepticism? Despite the fact that Hume thinks that causal reasoning is irrational, he explicitly claims (...) that one can and should make normative claims about beliefs being ‘reasonable’. We show that even though Hume thinks that our causal beliefs are rationally unjustified, there is nonetheless a ‘relative’ sense of justification available to Hume and that he relies on this ‘relative’ sense in those places where he makes normative claims about what we ought to believe. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture during his over-sixty-year-long scholarly activity. Bauman wrote his first books on the theory of culture (Culture and Society; Sketches in the Theory of Culture) when he was a Professor at Warsaw University. The ideas put forward at that time were later developed in his writings. This applies in particular to the critical nature of his thought, the combination of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the inclusion of the context of the (...) social structure as well as his references to the structural dimension and to agency. Later years – starting with the publication of the book, Culture as Praxis – saw Bauman’s growing emphasis on the transcendence of the existing reality and the creative role of an individual in the transformation of cultural reality. This article shows how other theorists of culture inspired Bauman and how he critically referred to them. The article offers a holistic look at Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre. It also creates an opportunity for English-speaking readers to become familiar with Bauman’s writings in his mother tongue. (shrink)

Written in the wake of a critical incident which the author considers worrying and yet characteristic of the times we live in, this article contends that the conflation heretofore evident between critical historical thinking (revisionism) and negationism is ultimately harmful to the historical discipline since it can serve the interests of the deniers and indirectly grant an argument to radical postmodernists who demote history to a loosely constructed form of personal fiction. On the other hand, it also eschews the belief (...) in historical scholarship as an immiscible category demarcated by impenetrable boundaries, which is habitually associated with empirical positivism. Furthermore, it argues strongly for the introduction of a diachronic perspective in the study of revisionism not only to show the steady process of professionalization of the discipline but to disclose an often neglected or denied aspect: its contribution to the evolution of philosophical thought. (shrink)

In his book, Building Better Beings, Manuel Vargas argues that we should reject libertarianism, on the grounds that it is naturalistically implausible, and embrace revisionism rather than eliminativism, on the grounds that the former is a shorter departure from ordinary thinking about moral responsibility. I argue that Vargas fails to adequately appreciate the extent to which ordinary judgments about moral responsibility involve ascriptions of basic desert as well as the centrality of basic desert in the ordinary conception of moral responsibility. (...) Insofar as this is correct, we have good reason to think, first, that libertarianism is much more naturalistically plausible than Vargas maintains and, second, that we ought to opt for eliminativism over revisionism in the event that libertarianism turns out to be implausible. (shrink)

I’ve been told that in the good old days of the 1970s, when Quine’s desert landscapes were regarded as ideal real estate and David Lewis and John Rawls had not yet left a legion of influential students rewriting the terrain of metaphysics and ethics respectively, compatibilism was still compatibilism about free will. And, of course, incompatibilism was still incompatibilism about free will. That is, compatibilism was the view that free will was compatible with determinism. Incompatibilism was the view that free (...) will was incompatible with determinism.1 What philosophers argued about was whether free will was compatible with determinism. Mostly, this was an argument about how to understand claims that one could do otherwise. You needn’t have bothered to talk about moral responsibility, because it was just obvious that you couldn’t have moral responsibility without free will. The literature was a temple of clarity. Then, somehow, things began to go horribly wrong. To be sure, there had been some activity in the 1960s that would have struck some observers as ominous. Still, it was not until the 1980s that those initial warning signs gave way to real trouble. The meanings of terms twisted. (shrink)

This essay considers a historical novel of recent times in revisionist terms, Kevin McCarthy’s debut novel of 2010, Peeler. In doing so, I also address the limitations that the novel exposes within Irish revisionism. I propose that McCarthy’s novel should be regarded more properly as a post-revisionist work of literature. A piece of detective fiction that is set during the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, Peeler challenges the romantic nationalist understanding of the War as one of heroic (...) struggle by focusing its attention on a Catholic member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. In considering the circumstances in which Sergeant Seán O’Keefe finds himself as a policeman serving a community within which support for the IRA campaign against British rule is strong, the novel sheds sympathetic light on the experience of Catholic men who were members of the Royal Irish Constabulary until the force was eventually disbanded in 1922. At the same time, it demonstrates that the ambivalence in Sergeant O’Keefe’s attitudes ultimately proves unsustainable, thereby challenging the value that Irish revisionism has laid upon the ambivalent nature of political and cultural circumstances in Ireland with regard to Irish-British relations. In the process, I draw attention to important connections that McCarthy’s Peeler carries to Elizabeth Bowen’s celebrated novel of life in Anglo-Irish society in County Cork during the period of the Irish War of Independence: The Last September of 1929. (shrink)

According to the standard (recent) history of connectionism (see for example the accounts offered by Hecht-Nielsen (1990: pp. 14-19) and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988), or Papert's (1988: pp. 3-4) somewhat whimsical description), in the early days of Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CCTM) based AI research, there was also another allegedly distinct approach, one based upon network models. The work on network models seems to fall broadly within the scope of the term 'connectionist' (see Aizawa 1992), although the term had (...) yet to be coined at the time. These two approaches were "two daughter sciences" according to Papert (1988: p. 3). The fundamental difference between these two 'daughters', lay (according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988: p. 16)) in what they took to be the paradigm of intelligence. Whereas the early connectionists took learning to be fundamental, the traditional school concentrated upon problem solving. (shrink)

John Rawls's famous difference principle is capable of at least four distinct statements, each of which occurs in A Theory of Justice. According to what I shall term the Crude Principle it is a necessary and sufficient condition for the justice of an institutional scheme which expands social and economic inequality that, subject to the satisfaction of more weighty principles, it increases the level of advantage of the least advantaged. Expressing this principle Rawls writes that,Assuming the framework of institutions required (...) by equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate. (shrink)

The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior texts as openings for its own totalizing and unique interpretations. Strong poets present themselves as looking for truth in the world, searching in reality and in tradition, but such a stance, as Nietzsche said, remains under the mastery of desire, of instinctual drives. So, in effect, the strong poet wants pleasure and not (...) truth; he wants what Nietzsche named as "the belief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief." No strong poet can admit that Nietzsche was accurate in this insight, and no critic need fear that any strong poet will accept and so be hurt by demystification. The concern of this book, as of my earlier studies in poetic misprision, is only with strong poets, which in this series of chapters is exemplified by the major sequence of High Romantic British and American poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens, but also throughout by two of the strongest poets in the European Romantic tradition: Nietzsche and Freud. By "poet" I therefore do not mean only verse-writer, as the instance of Emerson also should make clear. Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. This article is the first chapter of his new book, Poetry and Repression, to be published by the Yale University Press. The book completes a tetralogy, of which the earlier volumes are The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Kabbalah and Criticism. See also: "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1. (shrink)

Against contextualism, Duncan Pritchard has argued that conversational pragmatics give rise to an argument in favour of invariantist neoMooreanism. More specifically, he argues that when we conjoin a Moorean view with a warranted assertability manoeuvre, we can satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions (which are decidedly invariantist), whereas contextualists cannot. In the following paper, I challenge Pritchard’s argument and contend that he is too quick to declare victory for invariantism, for not only does the WAM he employs appear to be ad hoc (...) vis-à-vis DeRose’s plausible criteria, but it also seems to have very implausible pragmatic implications when subjected to close scrutiny. (shrink)

Contribution to a symposium on Alan Chalmer's The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms (Springer, Dordrecht, 2009).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally (...) emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

As far as logic is concerned, the conclusion of Michael Dummett's manifestability argument is that intuitionistic logic, as first developed by Heyting, satisfies the semantic requirements of antirealism. The argument may be roughly sketched as follows: since we cannot manifest a grasp of possibly justification-transcendent truth conditions, we must countenance conditions which are such that, at least in principle and by the very nature of the case, we are able to recognize that they are satisfied whenever they are. Intuitionistic logic (...) satisfies the semantic requirement that we should either eschew the notion of truth altogether and replace it by provability in principle, or constrain it by provability in principle (Dummett [1973] 1978). (Handout: 1-5). Some philosophers have argued that the traditional antirealist desideratum of decidability in principle is too weak, so that semantic antirealism properly construed must be committed to effective decidability. As such, it either leads to strict finitism (Wright [1982] 1993) [Handout: 6] or to a much stronger kind of logical revisionism than the one considered by intuitionists (whether or not they accept the manifestability argument): substructural logics, and in particular linear logics, rather than intuitionistic logic, satisfy the semantic requirements of strict antirealism (Dubucs and Marion 2004) [Handout: 8-9]. I shall develop two different kinds of replies. The first is concerned with the notion of meaning per se and looks to strict finitism directly, although not on the ground that it would provide a correct way of dealing with Soritic-type paradoxes (the original and primary focus of discussion in Wright [1982] 1993). The second is concerned with the justification of structural and logical rules in a natural deduction system à la Gentzen. It will deal in particular with the criticism of the structural rules of Weakening and Contraction [Handout: 10 and 11]. The first kind of reply, which Dummett has partially taken into consideration, is that if we jettison the effectively vs. in principle distinction, as applied to manifestability-type arguments, we end up with an unsatisfactory explanation of how the meaning of statements covering the practically unsurveyable or pro tempora undecided cases is fixed. The idea is that if we have a method which may be used over some small range, we have determined a way of applying the method everywhere in principle and that this is enough as far as fixing meaning is concerned. Decidability in principle is just what we need with respect to manifestation of grasp of meaning. In this perspective, antirealism shouldn't be strict and manifestability-type arguments need not be applied as far as the strict finitist would want to [Handout: 7]. It follows that there is no reason to think that practical feasibility should be built in assertibility conditions and proofs be construed dynamically as acts in the strict antirealist's acception of that term [Handout: 8]. I shall then look at one radical antirealist principle disqualifying structural rules, namely Token Preservation, arguing against Bonnay and Cozic's criticisms of Dubucs and Marion (Bonnay and Cozic 3 2007) that some conceptual support may be provided for Token Preservation, which doesn't rely on a causal misreading of the turnstile [Handout: 13, 14]. I shall then assess the merits and limits of radical antirealism and the logic of feasible proofs with respect to the original Dummettian argument in favour of semantic antirealism (provided it has indeed revisionist implications for logic), whether the radical antirealist merely stipulates what human feasibility amounts to, or dispenses with structural rules in order to argue in favour of a curb on the epistemic idealizations they unwarrantedly embed. It will be noted here that there is a great difference, conceptually speaking, between the rejection of classical logic via the curbing of the epistemic idealizations embedded in structural rules, and the rejection of classical logic via the criticism of the introduction and elimination rules which fix the meaning of the classical constants. The kind of logical revisionism envisaged by intuitionists from Heyting on is in many respects stronger than the one envisaged by advocates of linear logic, should they ground their arguments on an endorsement of strict antirealism. The crucial case of excluded middle is telling. Because of the splitting of the constants in linear logic (Handout: 12], two distinct laws of excluded middle may be formulated (Handout: 15), but the traditional arguments of Brouwer and Heyting against the classical law yield a stronger revision than the substructural revision with its admission of these two (very) weak versions of the law. (Project: a clearer conception is needed of how the introduction and elimination rules for the logical connectives in the intuitionistic calculus depend on the structural rules which the radical antirealist wishes to reject.). (shrink)

In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly regarding Carnap’s work. In this paper, I argue against the interpretation that Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having been published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the revisionist idea that Carnap “would have found Structure philosophically congenial”. I claim that Kuhn’s book, from Carnap’s point of view, is not in philosophy of science but rather in history of science (...) (in the context of a sharp discovery–justification distinction). It could also explain the fact that, despite his sympathetic letters to Kuhn as editor, Carnap never refers to Kuhn’s book in his work in philosophy of science. (shrink)

In a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on Zhang Zai's (1020-1077) development of the notion qi ( 'vital energy') in the context of his critique of the Buddhist, I observe that there is a prevalent imposition of a Western concept, namely, 'substance monism', on his understanding of qi . It is assumed that he posits that 'the myriad things ( wanwu )' and 'the vast emptiness ( taixu )' are simultaneously differentiated and unified in that they are but different manifestations (...) of an undifferentiated singular entity, that is, qi . I argue that such understanding distorts the 'logic' of Zhang Zai's qi that accounts for the simultaneous differentiation and the unity of 'the myriad things' and 'the vast emptiness' in terms of relationally opposed polarities and the dynamic unity amongst them. I also argue that this understanding distorts his practical message that emphasizes the endeavor to create coherence among our differences without recourse to a realm of 'oneness' that transcends our differences. (shrink)

Revisionism about moral responsibility is the view that we would do well to distinguish between what we think about moral responsibility and what we ought to think about it, that the former is in some important sense implausible and conflicts with the latter, and so we should revise our concept accordingly. In this paper, I assess two related problems for revisionism and claim that focus on the first of these problems has thus far allowed the second to go largely unnoticed. (...) Here I develop this new objection to revisionism and argue that, while revisionists can successfully respond to the reference-anchoring problem, the normativity-anchoring problem poses a serious objection to the view. In particular, the methodological commitments used to motivate revisionism make it uniquely difficult for revisionists to justify our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. I conclude by briefly addressing a potential objection based on a common charge against revisionism: that there is no real difference between the view and its conventional competitors and thus the normativity-anchoring problem is of little interest in the broader dialectic. I argue that both of these claims are false. (shrink)

A reply to Quentin Smith's argument (abstracted in this section; 9607133) that important ideas of the "new theory of reference" do not emanate from the work of Saul Kripke, as is commonly assumed, but from an article by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961). In an analysis of the historical records, Smith's claims are found to be false. It is argued that Marcus's papers do not concern natural language & do not contain defenses of proper names. Kripke's role, unlike that of Marcus, (...) is claimed to be central in the elaboration of the theory of reference. (shrink)

In the literature on supervaluationism, a central source of concern has been the acceptability, or otherwise, of its alleged logical revisionism. I attack the presupposition of this debate: arguing that when properly construed, there is no sense in which supervaluational consequence is revisionary. I provide new considerations supporting the claim that the supervaluational consequence should be characterized in a ‘global’ way. But pace Williamson (1994) and Keefe (2000), I argue that supervaluationism does not give rise to counterexamples to familiar inference-patterns (...) such as reductio and conditional proof. (shrink)

Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the origins of contemporary traditionalist just war theory in Michael (...) Walzer's work to the revisionist critique of Walzer and the subsequent revival of traditionalism. I discuss central questions of methodology, as well as consider the morality of resorting to war and the morality of conduct in war. I show that although the revisionists exposed philosophical shortcomings in Walzer's arguments, their radical conclusions should prompt us not to reject the broad contemporary consensus, but instead to seek better arguments to underpin it. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to analyze a recent text by Nenad Miščević dealing with social epistemology in the context of Foucault's theory of knowledge. In the first part, we briefly note Miščević's thoughts on the difference between analytic and continental philosophy and his thoughts on the latter. In the second part, we analyze both Miščević’s thesis about Foucault's dual understanding of knowledge and his placement of social epistemology as a proper framework for Foucault’s concept of “new” knowledge. (...) In opposition to Miščević's dualistic view, we are more inclined to accept Goldman’s characterization of Foucault’s position as a revisionist project in the context of standard analytical epistemology that legitimately embraces even very serious expansions of epistemological themes. Finally, we propose that Miščević’s dualistic interpretation reflects his general dualistic position concerning the previously described distinction between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. (shrink)

Revisionists such as Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Dunn argue that in order to understand an historical text, one must recover the particularity of intended meaning. According to this view, in the sphere of political/ social reality, thought has no universal truth, no independence of its context, no significance for the present, and no meaning beyond the author's intentions. Although this is a variant of classic historicism, it goes far beyond the latter. A study of Gramsci's historicism (...) shows that only the first of the above claims is entailed by historicism or justifiable in its own terms. The revisionist program would prevent us from understanding our own political ideas as they are founded upon our philosophical traditions. (shrink)