In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite (...) strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers. (shrink)

David Miller is the foremost exponent of the purist critical rationalist doctrine and here presents his mature views, discussing the role that logic and argument play in the growth of knowledge, criticizing the common understanding of argument as an instrument of justification, persuasion or discovery and instead advocating the critical rationalist view that only criticism matters. Miller patiently and thoroughly undoes the damage done by those writers who attack critical rationalism by invoking the sterile mythology of induction and justification that (...) it seeks to sweep away. In addition his new material on the debate on verisimilitude is essential reading for all working in this field. (shrink)

How Galileo created the problem of consciousness -- Is there a ghost in the machine? -- Can physical science explain consciousness? -- How to solve the problem of consciousness -- Consciousness and the meaning of life.

The idea that there can be cases of faultless disagreement, cases of disagreement in which neither party is making a mistake, is frequently discussed in connection with relativist views in philosophy of language. My goal is to argue that we can make sense of faultless disagreement without being committed to any form of relativism if we recognise that disagreement sometimes involves attitudes other than belief, such as desires or preferences. Furthermore, this way of making sense of faultless disagreement allows us (...) to avoid some of the problems that have been raised in connection with relativist accounts of faultless disagreement. (shrink)

Traditional arguments for moral error theory are based on identifying a problem with the metaphysics of moral properties. I provide a new argument that is based on the inconsistency of first‐order moral judgments. I illustrate this using impossibility results in population axiology.

I here defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game—specifically, a ‘Suitsian’ game that meets the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one from Thomas Hurka (2006) and another from within The Grasshopper (...) itself. In the process, I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book. (shrink)

Do the senses represent causation? Many commentators read Nicolas Malebranche as anticipating David Hume’s negative answer to this question. I disagree with this assessment. When a yellow billiard ball strikes a red billiard ball, Malebranche holds that we see the yellow ball as causing the red ball to move. Given Malebranche’s occasionalism, he insists that the visual experience of causal interaction is illusory. Nevertheless, Malebranche holds that the senses represent finite things as causally efficacious. This experience of creaturely causality explains (...) why Aristotelian philosophers and others struggle to recognize occasionalism’s truth. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational members for (...) which the syllogism is empirically valid. The reconstruction also sheds light on the question of the status of common sense and normativity in Sellars’ naturalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these fail objections to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical (...) Value Claim: a dubious claim about the importance of choice relative to other valuable capacities. I argue that this misunderstands what is really valuable in life, and show how it causes libertarianism to generate counterintuitive public policy recommendations. (shrink)

In this paper, I first seek a relatively plausible formulation of the safety principle. To this end, I refute a recent form of safety by Duncan Pritchard and then defend another weaker form of safe...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 586-606, November 2021.

Coming from Hubert Dreyfus’ recent book ‘‘Retrieving Realism”, the paper presents embodied pre-conceptual perception and representational cognition as two contrasting perspectives on accessing the world. It further characterises the ‘different forms of knowledge emerging from these perspectives and how they dynamically relate to each other. Taking up the Peircean theory of signs and abductive reasoning as methods of discovery, computers are analysed as semiotic machines that formally model and objectify explicit knowledge about social practices and that can be embedded in (...) the sign processes of thereby restructured practices. This practice theoretical perspective allows for both, understanding the limits of AI and pointing to options for productively combining the performance of ‘‘cognitive artifacts” with the tacit skills of knowledge workers. (shrink)

En este trabajo se explora el rol que la verdad de los enunciados fácticos juega en la aplicación de normas jurídicas y en la justificación de las decisiones judiciales. Se sostiene que la verdad es irrelevante respecto de la aplicación de normas jurídicas, entendida esta última en términos «inferenciales», y que lo es también respecto de la justificación interna de las decisiones que aplican esas normas. Se argumenta luego que la verdad de la premisa fáctica tampoco es condición necesaria de (...) la justificación externa, en diferentes sentidos. Se sostiene, en definitiva, que la verdad de la premisa fáctica no es condición necesaria de la justificación de la decisión judicial en ningún sentido plausible en que dicha justificación pueda ser evaluada. Esto no significa, sin embargo, que la verdad de dicha premisa sea irrelevante. (shrink)

Certain familiar theoretic claims of both popular and academic postmodernism are examined for their implications as to the necessary and desirable limits of social life. Taken to the end, these claims promote errancy as a means of freeing conduct from the constraints of foundation. But this kind of freedom, one which treats all limitation as pernicious, generates social action that is mechanical, scattered, and without substance—it is a pyrrhic emancipation which trades content for self-sufficiency and thus constitutes an empty life (...) of unhappy social dispersion. And yet an opportunity does remain to address the way a limit can also be inspiring if we think through how interpretation, a limit which is itself limited, invites nevertheless what Derrida glossed as joyous affirmation. Interpretation, though imperfect, offers powers that are genuine and enjoyable because these powers supply life with content and thus with the vitalizing collective and individual possibility of conduct which is affirmative (and disaffirmative). Perhaps it could even be said that interpretation emancipates us from the emptiness of pure freedom. (shrink)

This paper reads Republic 583b-608b as a single, continuous line of argument. First, Socrates distinguishes real from apparent pleasure and argues that justice is more pleasant than injustice. Next, he describes how pleasures nourish the soul. This line of argument continues into the second discussion of poetry: tragic pleasures are mixed pleasures in the soul that seem greater than they are; indulging them nourishes appetite and corrupts the soul. The paper argues that Plato has a novel account of the ‘paradox (...) of tragedy’, and that the Republic and Philebus contain complementary discussions of tragic and comic pleasure. (shrink)

Experimenters sometimes insist that it is unwise to examine data before determining how to analyze them, as it creates the potential for biased results. I explore the rationale behind this methodological guideline from the standpoint of an error statistical theory of evidence, and I discuss a method of evaluating evidence in some contexts when this predesignation rule has been violated. I illustrate the problem of potential bias, and the method by which it may be addressed, with an example from (...) the search for the top quark. A point in favor of the error statistical theory is its ability, demonstrated here, to explicate such methodological problems and suggest solutions, within the framework of an objective theory of evidence. (shrink)

A genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 in order to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, which was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. But (...) this approach was not formulated to address anti-black racism. The limitations of this strategy were quickly exposed by black thinkers such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. It could not be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation: the problem had been misdiagnosed from the outset. (shrink)

I argue that the Bayesian Way of reconstructing Duhem's problem fails to advance a solution to the problem of which of a group of hypotheses ought to be rejected or "blamed" when experiment disagrees with prediction. But scientists do regularly tackle and often enough solve Duhemian problems. When they do, they employ a logic and methodology which may be called error statistics. I discuss the key properties of this approach which enable it to split off the task of testing (...) auxiliary hypotheses from that of appraising a primary hypothesis. By discriminating patterns of error, this approach can at least block, if not also severely test, attempted explanations of an anomaly. I illustrate how this approach directs progress with Duhemian problems and explains how scientists actually grapple with them. (shrink)

... [T]here manifestly is not one drop of principle in the whole vast reservoir of established scientific theory that has sprung from any other source than the power of the human mind to originate ideas that are true. But this power, for all it has accomplished, is so feeble that as ideas flow from their springs in the soul, the truths are almost drowned in a flood of false notions; and that which experience does is gradually, and by a sort (...) of fractionation, to precipitate and filter off the false ideas, eliminating them and letting the truth pour on in its mighty current. But precisely how does this action of experience take place? It takes place by a series of surprises. Throughout the.. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of Michael Thau's interesting critique in Chapter 2 of Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, of the common view that beliefs are internal states.