One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surpriseepistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore’s paradoxical ‘p and I don’t believe that p.’ Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin’s. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work in (...) the student’s paradoxical argument against the teacher. The weak reductio is easy to fault. Its invalidity determines the structure of the strong reductio, so-calledbecause it is more difficult to refute, but ultimately unsound because of reasons associated with Moore-paradoxicality. Previous commentators have not always appreciated this difference, with the result that the strong reductio is not addressed, or the response to the weak reductio is superfl uous. This is one reason why other analyses in the tradition are vulnerable to objections to which mine is not. (shrink)

It is raining but you don’t believe that it is raining. Imagine accepting this claim. Then you are committed to saying ‘It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining’. This would be an ‘absurd’ thing to claim or assert, yet what you say might be true. It might be raining, while at the same time, you are completely ignorant of the state of the weather. But how can it be absurd of you to assert something about yourself (...) that might be true of you? This is Moore’s paradox as it occurs in speech. What is the source of the absurdity? And why does it strike us that a contradiction is somehow at work when there is no contradiction in the content of what is asserted? In Section 2, I describe Moore’s formulation of the paradox and evaluate his own solutions. In Section 3, I discuss Wittgenstein’s inf luence in solving the paradox. In Section 4, I discuss Shoemaker’s priority thesis that once the absurdity in belief has been explained, then this will translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. In Section 5, I discuss work on omissive and commissive Moore-paradoxical assertions, i.e. those of the forms p & I don’t believe that p and p & I believe that not-p. In Section 6, I discuss work on assertions of the form p & I don’t know that p. (shrink)

I argue that Moore's propositions, for example, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' cannot be rationally believed. Their assertors either cannot be rationally believed or cannot be believed to be rational. This analysis is extended to Moorean propositions such as God knows that I am an atheist and I believe that this proposition is false. I then defend the following definition of assertion: anyone asserts that p iff that person expresses a belief (...) that p with the intention of causing relevant epistemic change in the cognition of an actual or potential audience. (shrink)

This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411–444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first part is that know-how sometimes does and sometimes (...) does not consist in propositional knowledge. The second part defends an analysis of know-how inspired by Katherine Hawley’ (2003). Success and knowledge-how. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40, pp. 19–31, insightful proposal that know-how requires counterfactual success. I conclude by showing how this analysis helps to explain why know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

'An impressive synthesis of semiotics and anthropology which puts human experience in a new light. Deely gives us the foundation for a new paradigm for anthropology.' -Nathan Houser, Peirce Edition Project.

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Krista Lawlor and John Perry have proposed an explanation of the absurdity that confines itself to semantic notions while eschewing pragmatic ones. We argue that this explanation faces four objections. We give a (...) better explanation of the absurdity both in assertion and in belief that avoids our four objections. (shrink)

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective (...) being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory. (shrink)

The absurdity of (i) and (ii) arises because asserting 'p' normally expresses a belief that p. Normally, when (i) is asserted, what is conjointly expressed and asserted, i.e. a belief that p and a lack of belief that p, is logically impossible, whereas normally, when (ii) is asserted, it is differently absurd, since what is conjointly expressed and asserted, i.e. a belief that p and a belief that -p, is logically possible, but inconsistent. A possible source of confusion between 'impossible' (...) and 'inconsistent' is the fact that a proposition which is inconsistent tout court is always self-contradictory and hence necessarily false, unlike one which is inconsistent with other propositions. Whereas the proposition Ibp&-Ibp is inconsistent, the proposition IBp &IB-p is not. I cannot hold a belief which I lack, but I can.. (shrink)

Using concepts from abstract algebra and type theory, I analyze the structural presuppositions of any holistic ethical theory. This study is motivated by such recent holistic theories in environmental ethics as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Arne Naess’ deep ecology, and various aesthetic ethics of the sublime. I also discuss the holistic and type theoretic assumptions of suchstandard ethical theories as hedonism, natural rights theory, utilitarianism, Rawls’ difference principle, and fascism. I argue that although there are (...) several common senses of part-whole in ethical theory, the central sense of holism in ethics is that of a theory that defines its key moral idea as an emergent group property grounded in the relational properties of its individual constituents. Hedonism and Kantianism do not count as holistic in this sense. Natural rights theory does in adegenerate way. Utilitarianism and various environmental ethics are paradigm examples. I point out as a general structural weakness of environmental holistic theories that their first-order grounding in nonmoral vocabulary seems to preclude an explanation of many moral intuitions about human ethics. (shrink)

In “The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety”, Neil Sinhababu and I gave Backward Clock, a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of knowledge. In “Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True Belief”, Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke propose that a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. They argue that their analysis evades Backward (...) Clock. Here I show that it doesn’t. Backward Clock likewise shows their analysis to be too weak. The broader lesson seems to be that Backward Clock tells us the time is up for purely modal analyses of knowledge. (shrink)

“The real issue concerns the need for authentic and representative black leadership being included within the highest levels of the legislative decision-making of South Africa. Apart from this, all other overtures for change would be void.”.

This book contains perspectives of world-renowned scholars from the fields of law, economics, and political science about the relationship between law and norms. The authors take different approaches by using a wide variety of perspectives from law, legal history, neoclassical economics, new institutional economics, game theory, political science, cognitive science, and philosophy. The essays examine the relationship between norms and the law in four different contexts. Part One consists of essays that use the perspectives of cognitive science and behavioral economics (...) to analyze norms that influence the law. In Part Two, the authors use three different types of common property to examine cooperative norms. Part Three contains essays that deal with the constraints imposed by norms on the judiciary. Finally, Part Four examines the influence formal law has on norms. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology is new in one sense but old in another. The new tradition starts with figures such as Code, Greco, Montmarquet, and Zagzebski. The old tradition has its pedigree in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their modern interpreters such as Anscombe and MacIntyre. Virtue epistemology recognizes that knowledge is something we value and that propositional knowledge requires intellectual virtues, that is to say, virtues as applied to the intellect. Although much pioneering work in the new tradition has been done on (...) propositional knowledge, comparatively little in it has been done on know-how. This is surprising, because one might naturally think of know-how as something to be refined into a skill, and virtues may be thought of as skills. In the modern epistemological tradition that does not take its direction from virtue ethics, propositional knowledge, as opposed to know-how, has received by far the bulk of the discussion, although since Ryle first argued that knowhow is not always propositional knowledge, there has been a fairly recent resurgence of interest in know-how.We value intellectual virtues because they are skills that promote our flourishing, both as individuals and as members of a community. The intellectual virtues are truth- seeking virtues and stem from a love of the truth. Since love is itself a virtue - indeed it was what Tyndale called the greatest Christian virtue before the King James translation renamed it as charity—it may be seen as the virtue that motivates all other intellectual virtues. A commitment to the truth is presupposed by any intellectual virtue. For example, logic is important to a community, and in particular to the intellectual community, not only because there are rules governing the activity of logic but also because there are those within the community who are trustworthy in following the activity and because there are publically accepted standards of accountability in the way the activity of logic is practiced. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2 we sketch a metaphysics of natural purposes that supports the claim that there are objective goods that beings need qua the kinds of being they are in order to flourish. In section 3 we argue that flourishing includes the acquisition of virtues. We give a general account of virtue, roughly as a stable disposition to act upon a habit elevated to a skill of putting one’s know-how into practice that springs from one’s motivation to pursue what one perceives as good. In section 4 we give a general sketch of intellectual virtues as truth-seeking virtues that stem from a love of the truth that are the skills to flourish intellectually. In section 5 we discuss connaturality, namely those specific metaphysical accidents readily acquired by beings due to their first nature. We make an original distinction between ontological connaturality, namely the connaturality that belongs to animals qua beings of a certain kind, and habitual connaturality, namely our first natures suffused with virtues—or vices, although we will concentrate only on virtues. Habitual connaturality is acquired through the practice of virtue and involves perceptiveness awakened by the possession of the virtue in question. The knowledge arising from this form of connaturality may be a form of know-how. In section 6 we give an account of connatural apprehension and connatural propositional knowledge. In section 7 we discuss connatural know-how and argue that it makes certain virtues possible. At this point we will have shown that intellectual and moral virtues are informed by know-how. In sections 8 and 9 we give analyses of know-how and skill in terms of counterfactual success. We show how skill is a refined form of know-how and how both know-how and skill are informed by moral and intellectual virtues. We conclude in section 10 that know-how informs intellectual and moral virtues in the sense that virtue is to be elucidated in terms of skill, which is in turn to be elucidated in terms of know-how. Moreover, virtues inform know-how in the sense that know-how is to be elucidated in terms of intellectual and moral virtues. No circularity arises because different virtues and different forms of know-how are involved. (shrink)

A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and speech, both in its comissive and omissive forms. Williams argues that Moorean absurdity comes in degrees, and shows that contrary to one tradition in the literature on Moore's Paradox, we cannot explain Moorean absurdity in speech in terms of Moorean (...) absurdity in thought, but must account for each form of absurdity in its own terms. Williams also explores the extent to which Moore's paradox may arise for attitudes other than belief, such as desire. Written with Williams' trademark clarity and wit, the book is packed with arguments bearing on a wide range of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The article is an extended review of the The Deacon Reader. The fourteen papers in this volume address historical, theological, pastoral and spiritual aspects of the modern Roman Catholic diaconate as developed in the United States. These papers are of mixed quality, and also illustrate the difficulties which supporters of the diaconate experience in developing a coherent theology and praxis of the diaconate. In contrast with several recent major Anglican and Lutheran approaches to the diaconate, these North American reflections have (...) yet to come to terms with the implications for the diaconate of the new linguistic profile of diakonia provided by the reviewer’s 1990 study Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources. (shrink)

What explanation is there of the source of my justification for my beliefs about my beliefs that respects the fact that I am normally the best authority on them? Moore's paradox demands an explanation of the absurdity of believing or asserting possible truths of the forms p but I don't believe that p or p but I believe that not-p. I argue for Evans principle that whatever justifies me in believing that p also justifies me in believing that I believe (...) that p. This helps explain how I come to know my own beliefs and also shows that it is impossible for a Moorean belief to be justified. I then explain the absurdity of Moorean assertion while avoiding the messy notion of 'expressing belief' yet acknowledging Shoemaker’s constraint that if I cannot non-absurdly believe that p then I cannot non-absurdly assert that p. (shrink)

I supply an argument for Evans's principle that whatever justifies me in believing that p also justifies me in believing that I believe that p. I show how this principle helps explain how I come to know my own beliefs in a way that normally makes me the best authority on them. Then I show how the principle helps to solve Moore's paradoxes.

The present paper is a very hastily executed attempt to provide a philosophical account of personality within the framework of a more or less Platonic ontology. I am writing it because I believe the conscious person, the “soul” as it would have been called in an earlier thought-dispensation, to be one of the most interesting and pivotal of cosmic structures, one which, if dealt with in a careless or reachme-down manner, as a side-issue or queer offshoot of things not conceived (...) in its peculiar terms and manner, will throw one’s whole cosmic picture and system of fundamental categories out of joint. The conscious person may be an extremely rare, transitory, fortuitously produced phenomenon—there are increasing grounds for regarding it in this manner—but its modes of operation and some of its basic logical properties are so very extraordinary as perhaps to throw more light on the universe out of which it arises than the indefinitely numerous, unconscious, impersonal things which surround it on every side and which will with some probability ultimately engulf it. I am also writing it because I have come to entertain the conviction that what absolutely and unambiguously is, is more of the nature of a universal, a subsistent, an essence, something which is a Nature or Character itself, rather than anything which transitorily or inadequately embodies or exemplifies or is a case of it, and because I wish to accommodate these two profoundly held convictions to one another. My problem is the one Plato dealt with whenever, as in the Phaedo, Timaeus, and other writings, he tried to see how Soul, the source of motion in the changeable world, and itself internally changeable, can stand to essences of which it does not make sense to predicate intrinsic change. And it is also the issue dealt with by Hegel when he makes conscious Spirit the carrying out into full reality of the eternal Idea, and when he goes so far as to identify the Ego, which is the center of the conscious person, with absolute universality and negativity in its purest, most intransigent, all-sublating form. (shrink)

An interpretation in modal and tense logic is proposed for Boethius's reconciliation of God's foreknowledge with human freedom from The consolation of philosophy, Book V. The interpretation incorporates a suggestion by Paul Spade that God's special status in time be explained as a restriction of God's knowledge to eternal sentences. The argument proves valid, and the seeming restriction on omnipotence is mitigated by the very strong expressive power of eternal sentences.

ABSTRACT Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focussing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders (...) a category mistake about the nature of constraints on assertion. After giving an analysis of assertion I propose that the norm of a type of assertion is the epistemic state one needs for one’s speech-act to succeed in being an assertion of that type and that the epistemic state in question is determined by the point of the type of assertion. One is practically irrational in violating the norm. (shrink)

In this journal, Hamid Vahid argues against three families of explanation of Mooreparadoxicality. The first is the Wittgensteinian approach; I assert that p just in case I assert that I believe that p. So making a Moore-paradoxical assertion involves contradictory assertions. The second is the epistemic approach, one committed to: if I am justified in believing that p then I am justified in believing that I believe that p. So it is impossible to have a justified omissive Mooreparadoxical belief. The (...) third is the conscious belief approach, being committed to: if I consciously believe that p then I believe that I believe that p. So if I have a conscious omissive Moore-paradoxical belief, then I have contradictory second-order beliefs. In their place, Vahid argues for the defective- interpretation approach, broadly that charity requires us to discount the utterer of a Mooreparadoxical sentence as a speaker. I agree that the Wittgensteinian approach is unsatisfactory. But so is the defective-interpretation approach. However, there is a satisfactory version of each of the epistemic and conscious-belief approaches. (shrink)

It is first argued that there are two types of beliefs-in; beliefs in X which are identical with the belief that X exists and beliefs-in which entail no existential belief but which do entail a commendatory attitude. It is then shown that belief in God is not identical with, but rather entails, the belief that God exists. Pace Norman Malcolm, the converse holds neither as a logical nor psychological claims.

Bayesianism tells a story about the epistemic trajectory of an ideally rational agent. The agent begins with a ‘prior’ probability function; thereafter, it conditionalizes on its evidence as it comes in. Consider, then, such an agent at the very beginning of its trajectory. It is ideally rational, but completely ignorant of which world is actual. Let us call this agent ‘superbaby’. We show that superbaby is committed to sincerely asserting propositions of the form [p and I am not justified in (...) believing that p]. (shrink)

Clearly, if a man holds a self-contradictory belief, then his belief cannot be rational, for there can be no set of evidence sufficient to justify it. This is most apparent when the self contradictory belief is a belief in a conjunction, , rather than when it is a non-conjunctive self-contradictory belief, e.g. a belief that red is not a color.

While Saint Augustine has been a household name for centuries, the same cannot be said of long-overlooked philosopher John Poinsot. But in _Augustine and Poinsot_, John Deely contends that the history of semiotics cannot be conceived of without Poinsot’s landmark contribution. According to Deely, even though Augustine was the first to describe _what_ the sign does, Poinsot was the first to show _how_ the sign mediates between nature and culture. This revolutionary volume demonstrates how Poinsot’s account of semiotics (...) allows us to produce human knowledge and experience. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox in belief is the fact that beliefs of the form ‘ p and I do not believe that p ’ are ‘absurd’ yet possibly true. Writers on the paradox have nearly all taken the absurdity to be a form of irrationality. These include those who give what Timothy Chan calls the ‘pragmatic solution’ to the paradox. This solution turns on the fact that having the Moorean belief falsifies its content. Chan, who also takes the absurdity to be a (...) form of irrationality, objects to this solution by arguing that it is circular and thus incomplete. This is because it must explain why Moorean beliefs are irrational yet, according to Chan, their grammatical third-person transpositions are not, even though the same proposition is believed. But the solution can only explain this asymmetry by relying on a formulation of the ground of the irrationality of Moorean beliefs that presupposes precisely such asymmetry. I reply that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the irrationality that the contents of Moorean beliefs be restricted to the grammatical first-person. What has to be explained is rather that such grammatical non-first-person transpositions sometimes, but not always, result in the disappearance of irrationality. Describing this phenomenon requires the grammatical first-person/non-first person distinction. The pragmatic solution explains the phenomenon once it is formulated in de se terms. But the grammatical first-person/non-first-person distinction is independent of, and a fortiori, different from, the de se /non- de se distinction presupposed by pragmatic solution, although both involve the first person broadly construed. Therefore the pragmatic solution is not circular. Building on the work of Green and Williams I also distinguish between the irrationality of Moorean beliefs and their absurdity. I argue that while all irrational Moorean beliefs are absurd, some Moorean beliefs are absurd but not irrational. I explain this absurdity in a way that is not circular either. (shrink)

John N Andrews; General Thinking Skills: are there such things?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 71–79, https://doi.o.