Testimony is an indispensable way of gaining knowledge and also a voluntary act for which the teller can be held responsible. This dissertation analyzes these two aspects of testimony, the epistemological and the normative. Indeed, it argues that these two aspects cannot be separated: A satisfactory account of testimony's epistemology must allow for testimony's normative status, while an account of testimony's normative status can be derived from testimony's epistemology. ;Epistemologically, the general reliability of testimony should be treated differently from the (...) reliability of particular pieces of testimony. We are justified in believing that testimony is generally reliable, without needing evidence to that effect. This avoids the problems that would arise from attempting to gather evidence for testimony's general reliability. Particular pieces of testimony, however, can only provide a justification for belief by providing evidence for what is told. This view about particular pieces of testimony faces the problem of how the teller can present her testimony as evidence while accepting responsibility for it, and how the hearer can take testimony as evidence while holding the hearer responsible for it. ;To solve this problem, I give an account, based on inference to the best explanation, of the specific way testimony provides evidence for what is told. To see testimony as evidence for what is told, we must explain it in terms of the reasons people have for choosing to say one thing rather than another. On this account, the evidence that testimony provides depends on the teller's choice to assume responsibility for her testimony, rather than precluding that assumption of responsibility. ;On the other hand, the epistemology of testimony imposes certain norms on the act of telling someone something. The teller is responsible for the truth of her testimony, in that she stakes her future credibility on its truth. Loss of credibility would count as a sanction for violating the responsibility to tell the truth, because a teller ordinarily intends her testimony to be believed. This responsibility to tell the truth is derived from the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion holds that it is improper to assert that p unless the speaker knows that p. This paper argues against the knowledge account of assertion; there is no general norm that the speaker must know what she asserts. I argue that there are cases in which it can be entirely proper to assert something that you do not know. In addition, it is possible to explain the cases that motivate the knowledge account by postulating a general (...) norm that assertions would be true, combined with conversational norms that govern all speech acts. A theory on which proper assertions must be true explains the data better than a theory on which proper assertions must be known to be true. (shrink)

Recently attention has been paid to the epistemic requirements for proper assertion. The most popular account has been the knowledge account, that we can only properly assert what we know. Others have criticized the knowledge account and argued that the norm of assertion is truth, belief, or assertion of what it is reasonable to believe.

We suggest a rigorous theory of how objective single-case transition probabilities fit into our world. The theory combines indeterminism and relativity in the “branching space–times” pattern, and relies on the existing theory of causae causantes (originating causes). Its fundamental suggestion is that (at least in simple cases) the probabilities of all transitions can be computed from the basic probabilities attributed individually to their originating causes. The theory explains when and how one can reasonably infer from the probabilities of one “chance (...) set-up” to the probabilities of another such set-up that is located far away. (shrink)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider (...) two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider (...) two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

Suppose we consider knowledge to be valuable because of the role known propositions play in practical reasoning. This, I argue, does not provide a reason to think that knowledge is valuable in itself. Rather, it provides a reason to think that true belief is valuable from one standpoint, and that justified belief is valuable from another standpoint, and similarly for other epistemic concepts. The value of the concept of knowledge is that it provides an economical way of talking about many (...) epistemic concepts that are valuable in itself from one standpoint or another. In this way knowledge is like a Swiss Army Knife; a Swiss Army Knife is not useful as such on any occasion, but it provides an efficient way of carrying around different tools that are useful in themselves on different occasions. (shrink)

It has been claimed that justification, conceived traditionally in an internalist fashion, is not an epistemologically important property. I argue for the importance of a conception of justification that is completely dependent on the subject’s experience, using an analogy to advice. The epistemological importance of a property depends on two desiderata: the extent to which it guarantees the epistemic goal of attaining truth and avoiding falsehood, and the extent to which it depends only on the information available to the believer. (...) The traditional intermalist notion of justification completely satisfies the second desideratum and largely satisfies the first. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the Assurance View of testimony as put forth by Angus Ross (1986) and Richard Moran (1999). The Assurance View holds that someone who offers testimony gives the hearer a non-evidential justification for belief by assuming responsibility for the truth of her testimony. I agree that testimonial justification depends on the teller’s assumption of her responsibility for her testimony, but argue that it is nevertheless evidential justification. Testimonial justification is a sort of evidence that is within the (...) teller’s power to create or withhold at will, and that power is essential to the justification. (shrink)

This handbook unites leading scholars from around the world in exploring anarchism as a political ideology, from an examination of its core principles, an analysis of its history, and an assessment of its contribution to the struggles that face humanity today. Grounded in a conceptual and historical approach, each entry charts what is distinctive about the anarchist response to particular intellectual, political, cultural and social phenomena, and considers how these values have changed over time. At its heart is a sustained (...) process of conceptual definition and an extended examination of the core claims of this frequently misunderstood political tradition. It is the definitive scholarly reference work on anarchism as a political ideology, and should be a crucial text for scholars, students, and activists alike. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs. Why do behaviorally overlapping phenomena sometimes require different treatment approaches−for example, sensory shielding strategies (...) versus exposure therapy for autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively? Certain clues may be found in recent models of basal ganglia function that extend well beyond action selection and motivational control, and have implications for sensorimotor integration, prediction, learning under uncertainty, as well as aesthetic learning. In this paper, we systematically compare three exemplary conditions with basal ganglia involvement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and autism spectrum conditions, to gain a new understanding of RSBs. We integrate clinical observations and neuroanatomical and neurophysiological alterations with accounts employing the predictive processing framework. Based on this review, we suggest that basal ganglia feedback plays a central role in preconditioning cortical networks to anticipate self-generated, movement-related perception. In this way, basal ganglia feedback appears ideally situated to adjust the salience of sensory signals through precision weighting of new sensory information, relative to the precision of predictions based on prior generated models. Accordingly, behavioral policies may preferentially rely on new data versus existing knowledge, in a spectrum spanning between novelty and stability. RSBs may then represent compensatory or reactive responses, respectively, at the opposite ends of this spectrum. This view places an important role of aesthetic learning on basal ganglia feedback, may account for observed changes in creativity and aesthetic experience in basal ganglia disorders, is empirically testable, and may inform creative art therapies in conditions characterized by stereotyped behaviors. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

_This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." _ Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four (...) men in which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's _Angelus Novus _(1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi and Gabrielle Seethaler present a revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide. (shrink)

This is a review of Carl Knight's recent book, _Luck Egalitarianism_.

Like philosophy itself, Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Voyaging through psychic expanses, Frank Herbert hits upon some of the same insights discovered by indigenous people from the Americas. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. These outlooks share a regard for mind as ecological, which is more or less to say that minds extend (...) beyond the brain into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. -/- The cross-cultural strands in Dune tie closely to Herbert’s life and interests. An outdoorsman born in the Pacific West, he had an abiding bond with a friend from the Quileute tribe, Howie Hansen. Herbert advocated for aboriginal rights and crafted well-intentioned if slightly stereotypical tales about indigenous characters, partly based on his visits with Northwest tribes. Carl Jung (1875-1961), whose idea of collective consciousness echoes aboriginal views, was among Herbert’s European influences. So was existential phenomenology, especially as developed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The names of characters in one of Herbert’s novels—The Santaroga Barrier—in fact coincide with terms that Heidegger used to articulate how emotionally colored coping with our environment defines our existence. Many indigenous philosophers have treated phenomenology and its American cousin pragmatism in approving ways. Indeed, the ideas of North America’s first inhabitants seem to have been absorbed by pragmatists and even earlier by transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). -/- These different philosophies all advance a place-based psychology. Anne Waters, herself of mixed tribal heritage, generalizes the mindset of her people this way: “American Indian consciousness, and hence American Indian identity is … interdependent with our land base.” Lee Hester, a Choctaw thinker, adds that practices—not mere beliefs—are most important for native thought. American transcendentalists and pragmatists, as well as European phenomenologists, similarly see hands-on practices and environmental interactions as the core of experience. Extending this a little, they sometimes suggest experience isn’t individual but instead cultural. “Culture” is here understood as interactions within communities that define our worlds and experiences, as when we talk about the “French experience,” “culture” or “world,” or the “experience of parenthood.” This theme also shows up in indigenous thought. -/- Exploring the Dune universe, we find everything from land-based concepts of personal identity, to the idea of sharpening the mind through hands-on training, to collective notions of experience in cooperative tribes or through the genetic memory of central characters. The stories explore fate versus free will in cosmic contexts, introducing views from indigenous thought and the pragmatic philosophy of William James (1842-1910). Different forms of spiritualism mingle to shape minds and cultural mixtures around the globe, and the same occurs in the Dune series. The customs and personalities of characters fuse elements from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and especially Islam. The series not only highlights that religion shapes psychology, but also that faith connects to place, especially paralleling Judeo-Christian-Islamic desert faiths. In capturing these points, the Dune novels show that “our values, our lifestyles and even the ways we think and feel have been strongly influenced by our locations in history and geography. The study of the human mind is fundamentally the study of place.”. (shrink)

Simon Peter undergoes a considerable development from his first introduction in the Gospel of Mark to later narratives, where he gains remarkable miraculous abilities. In Mark, he witnesses Jesus performing numerous miracles without himself being named as the performer of a single one, but in Matthew’s Gospel Peter walks on water (Matt 14:22–33), in Acts he heals two paralytics and raises a woman from the dead (Acts 3:1–10; 9:32–42), and in the fourth-century Latin Acts of Peter, also known as (...) Actus Vercellenses, he makes a dog speak (Acts Pet. 9.9–15), miraculously restores a shattered marble statue (11.8–23) and revives several people from the dead (27.1–11; 28.63–66). This article examines how Peter’s various miracles contribute to their respective stories, analyses how they reflect the needs of their respective authors, and discusses what they tell us about the use of genre in the narrative tradition about the apostle Peter and his miracles. (shrink)

This article examines the different approaches to the relation between law, state and economy in the works of Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Evgeny Pashukanis. It begins with Kelsen’s depiction of law as a dynamic and ‘self-regulating’ system of norms, founded on his rejection of ‘dualist’ separations of state and law, before turning to Schmitt and Pashukanis’s respective critiques. For all their differences, both agree Kelsen ignores the historical basis of the law – for Schmitt, the sovereign power of (...) ‘the political’, for Pashukanis, the social relations of commodity exchange. The article responds to these criticisms in a most un-Kelsenian manner, drawing upon historical sociological literature on early modern state formation to cast doubt on both Schmitt and Pashukanis’s historical accounts. It argues that the forms of political power and commodity exchange upon which Schmitt and Pashukanis’s theories rely were historically specific possibilities opened up by the same process of generalisation and depersonalisation of power relations that allowed for an autonomous ‘public’ system of legal norms. Thus, rather than the fixed causal ground for the development of modern law, ‘the political’ and exchange between equals exist in a relation of ‘difference-in-unity’ with the law. The article concludes that Kelsen’s notion of the Grundnorm is best explained as an attempt to capture the new possibilities and responsibilities opened up a normative system whose ultimate justification now lies only within itself. (shrink)

This book unites the worlds of physics and depth psychology through analysis of carefully selected existing and new dream materials. Their interpretation by Matthews provides fertile ground for the unifying of the extreme opposites of psyche and matter and forms a continuation of the deep dialogue between acclaimed psychologist Carl Jung and Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli. What emerges is an individuation process where inner and outer worlds are intertwined through a succession of dream images, culminating with that of the (...) ring i, the mathematical function at the heart of quantum physics. This mysterious function unites wave and particle and symbolically carries the quality of paradox. The occurrence of the ring i in Pauli's and the author's dreams suggests paradox is a necessary psychological state to experience a living union between psyche and matter. Analysis of accompanying materials further indicates the arising of a new world view where inner and outer, mind and matter, may again be seen as a unified whole. This book is an engaging read for academics and researchers in the field of Jungian psychology and will appeal to those interested in the novel application of quantum physics to philosophy, psychology and spirituality. (shrink)

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopolitical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as (...) Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of .. (shrink)

“1750”, the French enlightenment, was a retrospective casualty of the catastrophes set in chain by 1914. German Kulturpessimismus, heightened by the war and enflamed by the abuse of liberal ideals at the Treaty table at Versailles, has since been disseminated through, amongst other things, the intellectual normalisation of Heidegger’s metapolitical, radically antimodern “history of Being”, and more recently Carl Schmitt’s work. The paper recalls that the French enlightenment, a divided period of intellectual ferment, was characterised as much by scepticism (...) as rationalism, Deism as atheism, anticolonialism as Eurocentrism, the recovery of Roman antiquity, and the philosophical use of literature to break with old modes of intellectual production, and create new public spheres. (shrink)

The first section reconstructs Dugin’s claims to have charted a “fourth political theory” (4PT), which would have broken from “fascism” and “Nazism”, the “third political theory” (as well liberalism and communism, the first and second “PTs” respectively). The second section of the paper critically unpacks four Duginian claims to defend this position, despite his avowed recourse to intellectuals who became Nazi Party Members and public advocates of the Third Reich, led by Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. In the third (...) section, we assess whether Dugin’s substantive claims hold up about “Nazism” and “fascism”, which enable him to present his 4PT as “anti-Nazi/fascist/racist”, by recourse to Aurel Kolnai’s monumental 1938 work The War on the West: the most extensive anglophone examination of the intellectual sources, texts, and parameters of “the Nazi creed, … its fundamental principles and its details” (Kolnai 1938: 18). Our argument is that Dugin’s “4PT” involves a more or less clever ideological repackaging of the “3PT” in the face of continuing horror at the Nazi’s crimes, rather than a novel political theory, based on a “retreat[ing] from the “sub-standard” Hitler to the “eminent” Spengler, Heidegger or Nietzsche” (Lukács 1980: p. 8). (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a criticism by Matthew Weiner to Grice’s thesis that cancellability is a necessary condition for conversational implicature. I argue that the purported counterexamples fail because the supposed failed cancellation in the cases Weiner presents is not meant as a cancellation but as a reinforcement of the implicature. I moreover point out that there are special situations in which the supposed cancellation may really work as a cancellation.

Recent epistemology has reflected a growing interest in issues about the value of knowledge and the values informing epistemic appraisal. Is knowledge more valuable that merely true belief or even justified true belief? Is truth the central value informing epistemic appraisal or do other values enter the picture? Epistemic Value is a collection of previously unpublished articles on such issues by leading philosophers in the field. It will stimulate discussion of the nature of knowledge and of directions that might be (...) taken by the theory of knowledge. The contributors are Jason Baehr, Michael Brady, Berit Brogaard, Michael DePaul, Pascal Engel, Catherine Elgin, Alvin Goldman, John Greco, Stephen Grimm, Ward Jones, Martin Kusch, Jonathan Kvanvig, Michael Lynch, Erik Olsson, Wayne Riggs and Matthew Weiner. (shrink)

This article looks at the way Matthew Weiner deploys double vision in his historical re-imagination of the 1960s in Mad Men. At issue is both the way the past haunts the present on the diegetic level in the form of flashback sequences, as well as the way Weiner performs simultaneity by virtue of parallel editing, especially in the closing sequences of individual episodes. At issue also is the way stock footage of key historical events such as the (...) moon landing is deployed so as to offer a further juxtaposition of present and past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 295 [Access article in PDF] Agency, Narrative, and Self:A Philosophical Case Conference John Z. Sadler and K. W. M. Fulford This issue of PPP features our second "philosophical case conference," which addresses three important and interrelated concepts in the philosophy of psychiatry. Our first philosophical case conference (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology Volume 5, Number 2, 1998) featured detailed case material concerning the manifold (...) issues involved in psychiatric euthanasia. For this issue, guest edited by J. Melvin Woody, the rich cases supplied by Lloyd Wells provide the foundation for a discussion of narrative accounts of the self and what it means to be an agent.Philosophical case conferences are an occasional feature of PPP, and develop topics to satisfy one or more criteria: to provide discussions that are important to clinical practice or research, to embed current or perennial philosophical debates in the nitty gritty of clinical practice and personal experience, and/or to provide a clinical testing ground for new conceptual developments relevant to the philosophy of psychiatry.The format for this issue involves four feature articles, the first by Wells, presenting detailed case material of several patients, followed by discussions (by Kennett & Matthews, Phillips, and Woody) inspired by, or addressing explicitly, the philosophical questions implied in such cases. Following these four feature articles, a panel of commentators (Glas, Hardcastle, Radden, Thornton, Weiner, Woodbridge) respond to the four feature articles as they wish, providing the variations on the agency, narrative, and self themes. We think you will find this issue of PPP to be a fine example of what the philosophy of psychiatry can do, and we give our abundant thanks to Mel Woody for putting this issue together.... (shrink)

This article examines Martin Heidegger's concept of conscience in Being and Time as it is manifested by the characters Don Draper from the television series Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007-2013) and Chauncey Gardiner in the film Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979). The article suggests that Draper hears and occasionally responds to what Heidegger terms the “call of conscience,” whereas Gardiner neither hears this call nor responds to it. Gardiner poses a problem case for Heidegger’s account of Dasein by (...) virtue of failing to exhibit conscience. A question latent in Gardiner’s makeup is what causes him to be this way. The contrast of the characters Draper and Gardiner is approached through the lens of the portrayal of secret identity in filmic media. Both characters live public lives that are at odds with their genuine selves, but they react to this disconnect differently. Core concepts addressed vis-a-vis Heidegger’s account of conscience include facticity, falling, discourse, authenticity, and death. The article concludes that Draper hears and responds to conscience’s call because he has a discursive comprehension of the disconnect between his true self and the public life he has lived; a crucial component of the phenomenon of conscience according to Heidegger is the existential capacity for discourse. Gardiner, in contrast, does not hear conscience at all because his Dasein lacks the discursive element that conscience requires in order to be activated. Gardiner’s being-in-the-world is such that he fails to understand the divide between his lived self and his public self. For Gardiner, these are the same. (shrink)

Midnight: The Tempest Essays, the second book in Molly Nesbit's 'Pre-Occupations' series, returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian working in the late 20th century. These essays take their cues from the work of specific artists and writers, beginning in the late 1960s, a time when critical commentary found itself in a political and philosophical crisis. Illustrated case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, (...) Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Matthew Barney and Richard Serra, among others, continue the legacy of a pragmatism that has endured while debates over postmodernism and French philosophy raged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 138-139 [Access article in PDF] Erich H. Reck, editor. From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 470. Cloth, $65.00. The volume is divided into four main parts: I: "Background and general themes," II: "Frege," III: "Frege to early Wittgenstein," and IV: "Early Wittgenstein." Part I includes the following essays: Erich (...) H. Reck, "Wittgenstein's 'great debt' to Frege: biographical traces and philosophical themes"; Gottfried Gabriel, "Frege, Lotze, and the continental roots of early analytic philosophy"; and Steven Gerrard, "One Wittgenstein?". Part II includes: Hans Sluga, "Frege on the indefinability of truth"; Sanford Shieh, "On interpreting Frege on truth and logic"; Marco Ruffino, "Logical objects in Frege's Grundgesetze, section 10"; and Joan Weiner, "Section 31 revisited: Frege's elucidations." Part III includes: Warren Goldfarb, "Wittgenstein's understanding of Frege: the pre-tractarian evidence"; Danielle Machbeth, "Frege and early Wittgenstein on logic and language"; Thomas Ricketts, "Wittgenstein against Frege and Russell"; and Cora Diamond, "Truth before Tarski: after Sluga, after Ricketts, after Geach, after Goldfarb, Hylton, Floyd, and Van Heijenoort." Part IV includes: Ian Proops, "The Tractatus on inference and entailment"; Juliet Floyd, "Number and ascriptions of number in Wittgenstein's Tractatus"; Matthew B. Ostrow, "Wittgenstein and the liberating word"; and James Conant, "The method of the Tractatus."Reck, while opposing the "widespread view" that Wittgenstein's "debt" to Frege was "rather minimal," warns the reader against going too far in the contrary direction (exemplified by Geach). Gabriel maintains (39) the thesis that "at least early analytic philosophy has its roots in the tradition of continental philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Hermann Lotze" (the founder of neo-Kantianism). Gerrard argues against the common distinction of an "early" and a "late" Wittgenstein.Sluga writes in favor of the significance of Frege's remark (rather neglected in the Fregean literature) that "the content of the word 'true' is altogether unique and indefinable." Shieh's "principal question," observing that Frege's philosophy of logic has been interpreted in two opposite ways: "semantical" (Dummett), and "antisemantical" (Ricketts), is: "Did Frege provide an explanatory justification of logical laws in semantic terms?" The "central result" of the essay is that "the substance of the disagreements between the antisemantical interpreters and their perceived opponents is not what they suggest it to be" (97). Ruffino focuses on the Fregean attempt to determine the nature of the extensions introduced by his (in)famous Axiom V, and compares Frege's handling of this issue with the seemingly analogous issue of determining the nature of numbers introduced by what is nowadays called "Hume's principle." Weiner attacks another crucial portion of Frege's work: Grundgesetze I §31, and proposes to read it as "elucidation" rather than as proof.Goldfarb intends to "cast doubt on the assessment of Frege's influence on Wittgenstein" expressed by several scholars. Goldfarb holds that Frege and Wittgenstein arrive at views that "have many similarities" but that they do it independently (187). Rather, in Wittgenstein "the basic framework and the basic stance are thoroughly inherited from Russell" (197). Macbeth argues that Frege and Wittgenstein have radically different conceptions of meaning: inferentialist and representative respectively. Ricketts argues that Wittgenstein's critique of Frege "is mounted from within his own distinctive approach to language and logic," so that "while Wittgenstein does not meet Frege on Frege's own terms, neither does he straightforwardly misunderstand Frege" (228). The content of Diamond's paper is more than hinted at by its long title.Proops aims at investigating "Wittgenstein's well-known, yet obscure, objection to the views of Frege and Russell on deductive inference and its justification," (283) an objection set out in Tractatus5.132: laws of inference are senseless, superfluous. Floyd intends to highlight the philosophy of arithmetic found in the Tractatus against a "tendency to pass over the Tractatus remarks on arithmetic in silence" (309). Ostrow points out that "it is not at once apparent" how the "Wittgensteinian liberation" is to be conceived (353), and his... (shrink)

It is common to defend the Homeostatic Property Cluster ( HPC ) view as a third way between conventionalism and essentialism about natural kinds ( Boyd , 1989, 1991, 1997, 1999; Griffiths , 1997, 1999; Keil , 2003; Kornblith , 1993; Wilson , 1999, 2005; Wilson , Barker , & Brigandt , forthcoming ). According to the HPC view, property clusters are not merely conventionally clustered together; the co-occurrence of properties in the cluster is sustained by a similarity generating ( (...) or homeostatic ) mechanism . I argue that conventional elements are involved partly but ineliminably in deciding which mechanisms define kinds , for deciding when two mechanisms are mechanisms of the same type, and for deciding where one particular mechanism ends and another begins. This intrusion of conventional perspective into the idea of a mechanism raises doubts as to whether the HPC view is sufficiently free of conventional elements to serve as an objective arbiter in scientific disputes about what the kinds of the special sciences should be. (shrink)

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language, but his projects—and the very terminology he employed in pursuing those projects—are still current in contemporary philosophy. This is undoubtedly why it seems so reasonable to assume that we can read Frege' s writings as if he were one of us, speaking to our philosophical concerns in our language. In Joan Weiner's view, however, Frege's words (...) can be accurately interpreted only if we set that assumption aside. Weiner here offers a challenging new approach to the philosophy of this central figure in analytic philosophy. Weiner finds in Frege's corpus, from Begriffsschrift on, a unified project of remarkable ambition to which each of the writings in that corpus makes a distinct contribution—a project whose motivation she brings to life through a careful reading of his Foundations of Arithmetic. The Frege that Weiner brings into clear view is very different from the familiar figure. Far from having originated one of the standard positions on the nature of reference, Frege turns out not to have had positive doctrines on anything like what contemporary philosophers mean by "reference." Far from having served as a standard-bearer for those who take the realists' side of contemporary disputes with anti-realists, Frege turns out to have had no stake in either side of the controversy. Through Weiner's lens, Frege emerges as a thinker who has principled reasons for challenging the very assumptions and motivations that animate philosophers to dispute these doctrines. This lucidly written and accessible book will generate controversy among all readers with an interest in epistemology, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In “What Makes a Scientific Explanation Distinctively Mathematical?” (2013b), Lange uses several compelling examples to argue that certain explanations for natural phenomena appeal primarily to mathematical, rather than natural, facts. In such explanations, the core explanatory facts are modally stronger than facts about causation, regularity, and other natural relations. We show that Lange's account of distinctively mathematical explanation is flawed in that it fails to account for the implicit directionality in each of his examples. This inadequacy is remediable in each (...) case by appeal to ontic facts that account for why the explanation is acceptable in one direction and unacceptable in the other direction. The mathematics involved in these examples cannot play this crucial normative role. While Lange's examples fail to demonstrate the existence of distinctively mathematical explanations, they help to emphasize that many superficially natural scientific explanations rely for their explanatory force on relations of stronger-than-natural necessity. These are not opposing kinds of scientific explanations; they are different aspects of scientific explanation. (shrink)

This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism, that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change and reference failure associated with the (...) Kuhnian tradition, which depend on a descriptivist approach to meaning, and we argue that descriptivism is not the right account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. We suggest that an account along the lines of the causal-historical theory of reference provides a more faithful picture of how terms for unobservable theoretical entities and properties come to refer; we argue that this picture works particularly well for TSR. In the last section we discuss how our account raises concerns specifically for perspectival forms of scientific realism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

This book explains how we can understand objective chance in a metaphysically neutral way, as reducible to certain patterns that can be discerned in the actual events of our world.

This is a comprehensive, authoritative and innovative account of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, one of the most enigmatic and influential philosophies in the West. In twenty-one chapters covering a timespan from the sixth century BC to the seventeenth century AD, leading scholars construct a number of different images of Pythagoras and his community, assessing current scholarship and offering new answers to central problems. Chapters are devoted to the early Pythagoreans, and the full breadth of Pythagorean thought is explored including politics, religion, (...) music theory, science, mathematics and magic. Separate chapters consider Pythagoreanism in Plato, Aristotle, the Peripatetics and the later Academic tradition, while others describe Pythagoreanism in the historical tradition, in Rome and in the pseudo-Pythagorean writings. The three great lives of Pythagoras by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus are also discussed in detail, as is the significance of Pythagoras for the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (shrink)