An unadorned form of process reliabilism (UPR) contends that knowledge is true belief, produced by a reliable process, undefeated by a more reliable process. There is no requirement that one know that one’s belief meets this requirement; that it actually does so is sufficient. An integral aspect of UPR, then, is the rejection of the KK thesis. One popular method of showing the implausibility of UPR is to specify a case where a subject satisfies all of UPR’s conditions on knowledge (...) but “clearly” fails to know. Since the subject satisfies all of UPR’s conditions on knowledge, but fails to know, the conditions for knowledge are not as UPR maintains. UPR’s analysis, it is alleged, leaves something out. That something is usually taken to be that the subject lacks appropriate evidence for his belief. This is the internalist counterexample to UPR. In this paper I argue that the internalist counterexample fails to refute UPR. (shrink)

A standard view in legal and political theory is that, to a first approximation, (1) we should aim to bring about the most legitimate institutions possible to solve the problems that should be solved at the level of politics, and (2) individual people are required to follow the directives of legitimate institutions, at least insofar as those institutions have the authority to issue those directives, and insofar as other considerations are nearly equal.1 On this standard view, the philosophical analysis of (...) institutional legitimacy can appear to be of the utmost importance because it can seem to answer the most important questions about what we should actually do in the realm of law and politics, and because it may also seem to serve as the crucial bridge between ideal and nonideal theory, at least if institutional legitimacy is analyzed as it often is as a matter of doing well enough along dimensions that are familiar from ideal APA NEWSLETTER | PHILOSOPHY AND LAW theory (e.g., ideal justice, universal consent, respecting basic rights, social welfare maximization, and so on). In what follows I identify a number of possible counterexamples to this standard view, which suggest that there may be no straightforward connection between institutional legitimacy and facts about what reasons, rights, and duties we actually have, and what institutions we should actually try to bring about, contrary to what the standard view assumes. (shrink)

In 1962 Hilary Putnam forced us to face the possibility of robot cats. More than twenty years later Daniel Dennett found himself doing battle with mad scientists and other “bogeymen.” Though these two examples are employed in different philosophical arena, there is an important connection between them that has not been emphasized. Separating the concept associated with a kind term from the extension of that term, as Putnam and others have urged, raises the possibility of accepting counterexamples to compatibilistic (...) analyses without rejecting compatibilism. Even if no compatibilist analysis of our concept of free action is acceptable, a compatibilist account of the essential nature of free action may be. (shrink)

In this paper we challenge the moral consensus against selection for disability. Our discussion will concern only those disabilities that are compatible with a life worth living from the point of view of the disabled individual. We will argue that an influential, impersonal argument against selection for disability falls to a counterexample. We will then show how the reach of the counterexample can be broadened to make trouble for anyone who objects to selection for disability. If we are right about (...) the problems for objections to selection for disability, why are objections are so widespread? We suggest that intuitions are being skewed against selection for disability by certain quirks in the usual ways of presenting the issue. Nevertheless, we must confess to finding our own result surprising. (shrink)

Fodor’s asymmetric-dependence theory of content is probably the best known and most developed causal or informational theory of mental content. Many writers have attempted to provide counterexamples to Fodor’s theory. In this paper, I offer a more fundamental critique. I begin by attacking Fodor’s view of the dialectical situation. Fodor’s theory is cast in terms of laws covering the occurrence of an individual thinker’s mental symbols. I show that, contrary to Fodor’s view, we cannot restrict consideration to hypothetical cases (...) in which his conditions for content are satisfied, but must consider whether the relevant laws exhibit the specified asymmetric-dependence relations in actual cases. My central argument is that the laws that the theory requires do not in fact exhibit the appropriate asymmetric-dependence relations. I show that, in general, part of the mechanism for the crucial, supposedly content-determining law for a mental symbol is not shared by the mechanisms for the other laws covering the occurrence of the same mental symbol. As a result, the former law can be eliminated (by eliminating the non-overlapping part of the mechanism) without eliminating the latter laws. The latter laws do not asymmetrically depend on the former law. (shrink)

Animal research is a challenging issue for the animal advocate because of what, besides animal well-being, is considered to be at stake, namely, human health. This article seeks to vindicate the antivivisectionist position. The standard defense of animal research as promoting the overwhelming good of human health is refuted on both factual and logical, or normative-theoretical, grounds. The author then attempts to clinch the case by arguing that animal research violates a deontic principle. However, this principle falls to counterexample. The (...) author concludes, nevertheless, that the principle retains force as a presumption that the current state of affairs fails to overthrow. This does suggest, though, that the antivivisection movement would be well advised to keep ahead of the curve. The author proposes it do so by emulating the vegan movement against animal agriculture with the active promotion of alternatives to animal research. (shrink)

Orthodox Probabilists hold that an inquirer ought to harbor a precise degree of confidence in each hypothesis about which she is concerned. Modest Probabilism is one of a family doctrines inspired by the thought that Orthodox Probabilists are thereby demanding that an inquirer effect a precision that is often unwarranted by her evidence. The purpose of this essay is (i) to explain the particular way in which Modest Probabilism answers to this thought, and (ii) to address an alleged counterexample to (...) Modest Probabilism meant to offer proof that Modest Probabilism is no better than its orthodox predecessor at avoiding unwarranted precision. (shrink)

Andy Clark and David Chalmers claim that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head.1 Call this the “hypothesis of extended cognition” (HEC). HEC has been strongly criticised by Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa and Robert Rupert.2 In this paper I argue for two claims. First, HEC is a harder target than Rupert, Adams and Aizawa have supposed. A widely-held view about the nature of the mind, functionalism—a view to which Rupert, Adams and Aizawa appear to subscribe— entails HEC. Either (...) HEC is true, or functionalism is false. The relationship between functionalism and HEC goes beyond support for the relatively uncontroversial claim that it is logically or nomologically possible for cognition to extend (the “can” part of HEC); functionalism entails that cognitive processes do extend in the actual world. Second, I argue that the version of HEC entailed by functionalism is more radical than the version that Clark and Chalmers suggest. I argue that it is so radical as to form a counterexample to functionalism. If functionalism is modified to prevent these consequences, then HEC falls victim to Rupert, Adams and Aizawa’s original criticism. An advocate of HEC has two choices: (1) accept functionalism and radical HEC; (2) give up HEC entirely. Clark and Chalmers’ intermediate position of a modest form of HEC is unsustainable. The argument of this paper, although initially appearing to support Clark and Chalmers, ultimately argues against their position. The price of HEC is rampant expansion of the mind into the world, and the implausibility of such expansion is indicative of deep-seated problems with functionalism. The argument of this paper consequently speaks to wider issues than just the status of HEC. The reasons for.. (shrink)

Adam Pautz (Pautz, Nanay (ed), Current Controversies in philosophy of perception, Routledge, New York and London, 2017, Pautz, Philosophical Issues 30:257–272, 2020 ) coined the phrase “the Laws of Appearance” for some underappreciated features of perceptual experience. Pautz suggests that the modal status of the Laws presents a puzzle: it is problematic to regard them as necessary, and also problematic to regard them as contingent. This paper presents possible counterexamples to the laws, suggesting that they are contingent as originally (...) stated (Sect. 1 ). But the laws are readily modified so as to express constitutive features of normal human visual experience, and thus understood they are metaphysically necessary (Sect. 2 ). Analogous pictorial laws govern representational painting, and these can be explained by appealing to the representational format of the medium (Sect. 3 ). This invites the question whether there might be format-based explanations of the Laws of Appearance. If so, can the contingency of the format facts be squared with the necessity of the Laws? The paper answers “Yes” to both questions (Sect. 4 ). (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient from an important objection due to Daniel Whiting, in this journal. Whiting argues that this view fails to deal adequately with a familiar sort of counterexample to analyses of knowledge, fake barn cases. I accept Whiting’s conclusion that my earlier paper offered an inadequate treatment of fake barn cases, but defend a new account of basic perceptual reasons that is consistent (...) with the account of knowledge and successfully deals with fake barns. (shrink)

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails (...) for a different pair of hypotheses. (shrink)

The debate over the meanings of indexical expressions has relied heavily on the method of counterexamples. This paper challenges that method by showing that purported counterexamples can often be explained away by appeal to perspective shifts. For these counterexamples to establish anything about indexical reference, we must identify the conditions under which theorists can legitimately appeal to perspective shifts. Some tests for semantic content are considered and it is argued that none of them can tell us when (...) appeal to perspective shift is admissible. The paper then considers how we should proceed if we become convinced that there is no way to identify the content of indexical expressions, offering reasons in favour of a nihilist conception of character over an epistemicist or pluralist conception. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile extant replies to Jonathan Schaffer’s putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding have made significant strides against the charge of transitivity failure, the replies pay insufficient attention to the common structure of the counterexamples, overlooking a deeper structural feature that contributes to their prima facie plausibility. Putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding, I argue, trade on the distinction between what I call ‘rigid’ and ‘non-rigid’ grounding, and confusion over how rigid and non-rigid grounding react when (...) combined pumps the intuition that the counterexamples’ chained conclusions are false. The rigid/non-rigid grounding distinction also reveals plausible weakening inference rules that have been overlooked in treatments of the logic of grounding. (shrink)

In a previous paper, I briefly profiled unsafe beliefs as either: (1) beliefs formed using a method that is conditionally reliable and (2) beliefs formed using a method with unstable reliability. I dubbed these profiles as B-type and C-type, respectively. Extending this analysis, I will demonstrate how these belief types operate and why they fail in some notable counterexamples to safety offered by Neta and Rohrbaugh, Cosmesaña, Baumann, Kelp, Bogardus, and Freitag. Examining these cases also motivate my thesis that (...) a method’s conditional reliability or instability does not render a belief formed by an actually reliable method unjustified; its epistemic worth remains intact, unsafe as it may be. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to defend safety as a necessary condition on knowledge. First, I introduce Ernest Sosa’s safety condition. Second,I set up and grapple with Juan Comesaña’s recent putative counterexample to safety as a necessary condition on knowledge; Comesaña’s case forces us to consider Sosa’s updated safety condition. From such grappling a principled modification to Sosa’s safety condition emerges. Safety is safe from this, and like, attacks.

The lottery problem is often regarded as a successful counterexample to reliabilism. The process of forming your true belief that your ticket has lost solely on the basis of considering the odds is, from a purely probabilistic viewpoint, much more reliable than the process of forming a true belief that you have lost by reading the results in a normally reliable newspaper. Reliabilism thus seems forced, counterintuitively, to count the former process as knowledge if it so counts the latter process. (...) -/- I offer a theory of empirical knowledge which, while being recognizably reliabilist, restricts empirical knowledge to cases in which the fact that p and the belief that p are causally connected. I show that this form of reliabilism solves the lottery problem, avoids the problems that beset the causal theory of knowledge, and show how it handles a number of problematic cases in the recent literature. (shrink)

I present a counterexample to the claim that it is never true to say "I falsely believe that so-and-so." .

Despite receiving considerable philosophical attention, the concept of autonomy remains contested. In this paper, we diagnose one source of the continuing problem—an excessive emphasis on reflective self-appraisal in the dominant procedural models of autonomy—and suggest a solution. We argue that minimalist conceptions of rational self-appraisal are subject to fatal counterexamples. Yet, attempts to provide a more robust account of rational self-appraisal are too demanding to capture our intuitions about who counts as an autonomous agent. We argue that no procedure (...) of rational reflection will confer autonomy; rather autonomy is a matter of an agent’s actions flowing from her substantive commitments. Instead of rational self-reflection, autonomous actions are the product of the motive of care, which anchors an agent’s occurent desires to her system of value. (shrink)

In a recent paper, I launch an attack on a fundamental doctrine of legal positivism. I argue that nonnormative facts cannot themselves constitutively determine the content of the law. In a response published in this journal, Ram Neta defends the view that nonnormative social facts are sufficient to determine normative facts, including both moral and legal facts. Neta's paper provides a useful opportunity to address a spelled-out version of this view, which in various forms is widely held in philosophy of (...) law and other areas of philosophy. I begin by addressing Neta's attempts to show that descriptive facts can alone determine moral and legal facts. First, Neta's account of why it is wrong to break promises fails. In addition to other problems, it begs the question by taking for granted that a person's desires or other motivational states necessarily justify the actions that they motivate. Next, I turn to Neta's attempt to provide a counterexample to my view about law. In my original paper, I claim that the nature of the constitutive determination relation in the legal domain is what I call rationaldetermination. Roughly speaking, a full constitutive account of the legal facts must include reasons that explain the relation between the determining facts and the legal facts. The facts on which Neta's putative counterexample depends cannot be reasons of the required sort because they take for granted what they are supposed to explain—the way in which nonnormative social facts contribute to the content of the law. Finally, I address the larger issue of how far my argument applies to other domains. I consider and reject Neta's argument that purports to show that all normative domains have the relevant features of the legal domain. I then sketch a competing picture of some normative domains. (shrink)

A very plausible and common view of meaning supposes that linguistic meaning is to be understood in terms of speakers' intentions. This program proposes to analyse the meaning of a sentence in terms of what speakers mean by or in uttering it; and this speaker meaning in turn is to be analysed in terms of the speaker's intentions. This essay argues that intention-based semantics cannot provide an adequate analysis of linguistic meaning: not because of contrived counterexamples, nor because it (...) conflicts with scruples about intentionality which we do or should have. It fails because research in psychology shows that children do not attribute beliefs to others in the way demanded by the theory. Empirical evidence is provided for the claim that two- and three-year-old children do not satisfy the conditions for speaker meaning, and thus cannot be said to mean anything by their utterances. It seems to me that children both mean something by their utterances and that their utterances have linguistic meaning. Hence the intention-based analysis does not provide necessary conditions for meaning. (shrink)

Psychological Altruism (PA) is the view that everyone, ultimately, acts altruistically all the time. I defend PA by showing strong prima facie support, and show how a reinterpretive strategy against supposed counterexamples is successful. I go on to show how PA can be argued for in ways which exactly mirror the arguments for an opposing view, Psychological Egoism. This shows that the case for PA is at least as plausible as PE. Since the case for PA is not plausible, (...) neither is that for PE. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the general problem of how to give a philosophical account of the nature of representation by looking at three specific philosophies of language and the philosophic treatment of fictional discourse. I argue that Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin all try to give accounts of meaning by arguing for what I call a "closure of meaning" in language. The closure thesis is the claim that some set of criteria can exhaustively determine the ways in which (...) language can be meaningful. This thesis is implicit in Husserl's theory of expressive meaning in the Logical Investigations, in Wittgenstein's picture theory, and in J. L. Austin's pragmatic account of meaning in speech act theory. My general thesis is that the three philosophers in question do not successfully defend the closure thesis for linguistic representation. Since fictional discourse is a source of counterexamples to the closure thesis, I look specifically at two recent philosophical accounts of fiction by David Lewis and John Searle. I criticize these attempts to account for fictional discourse within referential and pragmatic theories of language. Since such attempts are usually part of a closure thesis, my discussion of fiction provides further reasons for doubting the general possibility of accounting for a closure of meaning in language. (shrink)

The use of intuition abounds in modern analytic philosophy. In particular, intuition is considered evidence that is used in the analysis of concepts, often in an attempt to find the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of the concept under consideration. Alternatively, intuition is used as evidence that one or more of the proposed necessary conditions is unacceptable, as in Gettier counterexamples to the classical analysis of knowledge. This view of intuition can be thought of as a form of (...) rationalism. However, in the middle part of the 20th century intuition cam under attack through the influence of Quine's project of naturalizing philosophy. The two very general positions on intuition are: intuition provides evidence, but only of necessary truths or intuition does not provide evidence at all. ;I critically analyze the philosophical positions on intuition of many modern philosophers. I pay particular attention to the defense of moderate rationalism presented by Bealer and Bonjour, who place intuition at the heart of rationalism. I criticize their respective views by arguing that their defenses are viciously circular because they overtly appeal to intuition in order to defend intuition as a source of evidence. I further criticize the inability of the moderate rationalists to defend their stipulation that intuition must be of apparent necessary truths. ;On the positive side, I defend that intuition is best thought of as a basic source of evidence that provides evidence for both necessary and some contingent truths. This is how I split the difference between and from above. This view has many virtues, with one if its primary virtues being its ability to account for contingent, grammatical intuitions of he sort used in modern day linguistics. Finally, I argue that my view is more amenable to modern evolutionary psychology by giving a genealogy of intuition. (shrink)

According to genuine modal realism, some things (including numbers and properties) lack distinct counterparts in different worlds. So how can they possess any of their properties contingently? Egan (2004) argues that to explain such accidental property possession, the genuine modal realist must depart from Lewis and identify properties with functions, rather than with sets of possibilia. We disagree. The genuine modal realist already has the resources to handle Egan's proposed counterexamples. As we show, she does not need to amend (...) her analysis of possibility statements, or her theory of what properties are. (shrink)

We address the issue of the normativity of representation and how Grush might address it for emulations as constituting representations. We then proceed to several more detailed issues concerning the learning of emulations, a possible empirical counterexample to Grush's model, and the choice of Kalman filters as the form of model-based control.

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s Paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP?, and (iii) What should be done about SP? By developing a logic-based account of SP, it is argued that (i) and (ii) must be divorced from (iii). This account shows that (i) and (ii) have nothing to do with causality, which plays a role only in addressing (iii). A counterexample is also presented against the causal account. Finally, the causal and logic-based (...) approaches are compared by means of an experiment to show that SP is not basically causal. (shrink)

According to a subjectivist view of some concept, C, there is an a priori implication of subjective responses in C's application or possession conditions. Subjectivists who intend their view to be descriptive of our practice with C will hold that it is possible for there to be true empirical claims which explain such responses in terms of certain things being C. Mark Johnston's "missing-explanation argument" employs a substitution principle with a view to establishing that these strands of subjectivism are (...) inconsistent. I suggest that Johnston's substitution principle survives an attempt by Alex Miller to show that it is unreliable, but that it is prey to a counterexample which cannot be explained away by the proponent of the missing-explanation argument. I conclude that the missing-explanation argument poses no threat to subjectivism. (shrink)

I give a simple counterexample to Salmon’s account of causal processes in terms of mark transmission. The example has the advantage that not only does it appear to qualify as transmission of a mark under Salmon’s definition of mark transmission, but it appears to actually be an instance of mark transmission.

Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet (...) stimulus-dependent. The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

Unadorned process reliabilism (hereafter UPR) takes any true belief produced by a reliable process (undefeated by any other reliable process) to count as knowledge. Consequently, according to UPR, to know p, you need not know that you know it. In particular, you need not know that the process by which you formed your belief was reliable; its simply being reliable is enough to make the true belief knowledge. -/- Defenders of UPR are often presented with purported counterexamples describing subjects (...) who have true beliefs resulting from reliable (and undefeated) processes, but whom we do not intuitively take to know the propositions that they believe (call this “the internalist objection”). Mark McEvoy has recently challenged such arguments claiming (1) that the internalist objection against UPR simply begs the question against it, and (2) our intuitions about cases structurally similar to the standard examples characteristic of the internalist objection are actually often in line with UPR. In what follows I’ll argue that the plausibility of (1) depends on McEvoy’s success in establishing (2), but with the level of description provided, (2) seems undermotivated. (shrink)

The Standard Picture holds that the contribution to the law made by an authoritative legal pronouncement is directly explained by the linguistic content of that pronouncement. This essay defends the Standard Picture from Mark Greenberg’s purported counterexamples drawn from patterns of statutory interpretation in U.S. criminal law. Once relevant features of the U.S. rule of recognition are admitted into the analysis—namely, that it arranges sources of law hierarchically, and that judicial decisions are sources of valid law—Greenberg’s counterexamples (...) are revealed as only apparent, not genuine. The legal norms that result from the patterns of interpretation he identifies can be directly explained in terms of the linguistic contents of authoritative pronouncements: judicial decisions. Furthermore, those norms can be understood as modifications of the valid norms contained in their originating statutes because judicial decisions are permitted ‘explanatory intermediaries’ of statutes by the rule of recognition. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has recently presented apparent counterexamples to the standard account of the distinction between the right and the wrong kinds of reasons. We argue that these examples appear to refute the standard account only because they blur the distinction between two kinds of reasoning: reasoning about whether to intend or believe that p and reasoning about whether to take up the question of whether to intend or believe that p.

This thesis investigates the distinction, or distinctions, between response-dependent and response-independent concepts or subject matters. I present and discuss the three most influential versions of the distinction: Crispin Wright’s, Mark Johnston’s, and Philip Pettit’s. I argue that the versions do not compete for a single job, but that they can supplement each other, and that a system of different distinctions is more useful than a single distinction. I distinguish two main paradigms of response-dependence: response-dependence of subject matter, and response-dependence (...) of concepts only. I develop Pettit’s ‘ethocentric’ story of concept acquisition into an account of concept evolution that suggests answers to a range of hard questions about language, reality, and the relation between them. I argue that while response-dependence theses of subject matter can be motivated in very different ways, the resulting theses are less different than they might seem. I suggest that the traditional ways of distinguishing response-dependent subject matters from response-independent ones – in terms of a priori biconditionals connecting facts of the disputed class with responses in subjects in favourable conditions, and fulfilling some further conditions such as non-triviality and sometimes necessity – may not be the best approach. I also discuss two general problems for response-dependence theses: the problem of ‘finkish’ counterexamples, and the problem of specifying the ‘favourable conditions’ a priori, yet in a non-trivial way. The discussion of response-dependence is informed by a framework based on the idea that some realism disputes can be viewed as location disputes: disputes over the correct location of the disputed properties among several levels of candidate properties. The approach taken in this work is a charitable one: I try to make sense of response-dependence. The conclusion is the correspondingly optimistic one that the idea of response-dependence makes sense. (shrink)

Direct source incompatibilism (DSI) is the conjunction of two claims: SI-F: there are genuine Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs); SI-D: there is a sound version of the direct argument (DA). Eric Yang ( 2012 ) responds to a recent criticism of DSI (Campbell 2006 ). We show that Yang misses the mark. One can accept Yang’s criticisms and get the same result: there is a deep tension between FSCs and DA, between SI-F and SI-D. Thus, DSI is untenable. In this (...) essay, we use an important yet overlooked distinction between truthmakers and determiners to help drive this point home. (shrink)

This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way important issues (...) in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms for (...) the coherent acceptance of attitudes to explain why we hold certain combinations inconsistent. Against these accounts the paper presses two related objections: (1) The norms needed to do the explanatory work cannot be strong enough to do that work without also ruling clearly consistent attitudes inconsistent. And (2), the norms of rational attitude acceptance do not neatly track the distinction between consistent and inconsistent attitudes. (shrink)

This book is an examination of the nature of economic explanation. The opening chapters introduce current thinking in the philosophy of science and review the literature on methodology. Professor Blaug then turns to the troublesome question of the logical status of welfare economics, giving the reader an understanding of the outstanding issues in the methodology of economics. This is followed by a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, which shows how controversies in economics may be illuminated by paying (...) attention to questions of methodology. A final chapter draws the strands together and gives the author's view of what is wrong with modern economics. This book is a revised and updated edition of a classic work on the methodology of economics, in which Professor Blaug develops his discussion of the latest developments in macroeconomics, general equilibrium theory and international trade theory. A new section on the rationality postulate is also added. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's Direct Argument (DA) purports to establish the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, without appealing to the notion of avoidability, a notion on whose analysis compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree. Van Inwagen intended DA to refute compatibilism, or at least to shift the burden of proof onto the compatibilist. In this paper, we offer a critical assessment of DA. We examine a variety of objections to DA due to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Ishtiyaque Haji, Seth Shabo, (...) Michael McKenna, and David Widerker. We divide these objections into those based on dialectical considerations (section 1), and objections in the form of counterexamples to a central principle which the Direct Argument employs (sec 2). The conclusion we reach is that the proponent of DA can deal plausibly with these objections, thus establishing DA as a powerful argument in favor of incompatibilism. (shrink)

This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds.

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)

Hobbes emphasized that the state of nature is a state of war because it is characterized by fundamental and generalized distrust. Exiting the state of nature and the conflicts it inevitably fosters is therefore a matter of establishing trust. Extant discussions of trust in the philosophical literature, however, focus either on isolated dyads of trusting individuals or trust in large, faceless institutions. In this paper, I begin to fill the gap between these extremes by analyzing what I call the topology (...) of communities of trust. Such communities are best understood in terms of interlocking dyadic relationships that approximate the ideal of being symmetric, Euclidean, reflexive, and transitive. Few communities of trust live up to this demanding ideal, and those that do tend to be small (between three and fifteen individuals). Nevertheless, such communities of trust serve as the conditions for the possibility of various important prudential epistemic, cultural, and mental health goods. However, communities of trust also make possible various problematic phenomena. They can become insular and walled-off from the surrounding community, leading to distrust of out-groups. And they can lead their members to abandon public goods for tribal or parochial goods. These drawbacks of communities of trust arise from some of the same mecha-nisms that give them positive prudential, epistemic, cultural, and mental health value – and so can at most be mitigated, not eliminated. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

Lately, philosophers of mathematics have been exploring the notion of mathematical explanation within mathematics. This project is supposed to be analogous to the search for the correct analysis of scientific explanation. I argue here that given the way philosophers have been using “ explanation,” the term is not applicable to mathematics as it is in science.

Offers managers new tools to deal with the tough problems businesses face today. Reveals how analyzing the ethical dimensions of problems actually offers competitive advantages. Offers illustrative case examples from internally recognized companies showing that high ethics and high profits go hand in hand--and identifies the factors responsible for these companies' success.

Extensive literatures exist on the epistemology of testimony, memory, and perception, but for the most part these literatures do not systematically consider the extent of the analogies between the three epistemic sources. A number of the same problems reappear in all three literatures, however. Dealing simultaneously with all three sources and making a careful accounting of the analogies and disanalogies between them should therefore avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. Other than limits on the scope of which memorially- and testimonially-based beliefs (...) should be included in the Parity Thesis, I argue that most of the disanalogies that different philosophers have proffered between the sources do not mark distinctions among the universes of possible testimonially-, memorially-, and perceptually-based beliefs regarding the explanation of those beliefs' epistemic status. I first criticize the suggestion that perception is a generative epistemic source, while testimony and memory are not; I propose and defend counterexamples in which testimony and memory produce new beliefs. Next, I criticize a variety of distinctions that have been drawn between testimony and perception, taken chiefly from the reductionist-antireductionist literature on testimony. I criticize the suggestion that the conceptualization of content and the transparency of experience affect the epistemologies of testimony and perception in different ways. Regarding memory and testimony, I advocate modeling testimony on the legal relationship of a principal and an agent, arguing that law's apparatus used to analyze such situations suggests that using others' epistemic services in testimony will supply the same epistemic benefits and burdens as if we had performed those epistemic tasks personally and then relied only on memory. I apply this analysis to the transmission of defeaters in testimony. I argue that memory does feature the epistemic equivalent of a perceptual image and that both perceptually- and memorially-based beliefs can concern either the past or the present. Finally, I construct a set of six transformations that turn individual possible instances of perceptually-, memorially-, or testimonially-based beliefs into individual possible instances of the other two types of beliefs without changing the structure of those beliefs' epistemologies. (shrink)