Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition最新文献

In this paper, I examine Kenneth Silver’s (Journal of Business Ethics, 159, 253-265, 2019) defense of the claim that it is possible to attribute moral standing to corporations because they are sentient. I argue that corporations have moral standing, but not in virtue of being sentient. Following others in the philosophy of mind and the theory of wellbeing, I argue that consciousness is not normatively significant in the way that sentience theorists claim; sentience is not necessary for moral standing. Instead, I argue that computational intelligence tied to preferences is the ground of moral standing. Corporations are intelligent systems with preferences, and therefore, corporations deserve moral standing.

Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of “Rational Inconsistency,” as it were, claim that it’s also possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. Call this “Knowledgeable Inconsistency.” In this article, I explain why, if Knowledgeable Inconsistency is true, then, on pain of an absurd implication about how confirmation works, we should reject non-skeptical Infallibilism about knowledge. For that same reason, the recent proponents of Rational Inconsistency should also reject non-skeptical Infallibilism.

This article applies Alex Broadbent’s reverse counterfactual theory of causation to the causes of World War I (WWI), providing a novel framework for historical causal analysis. According to Broadbent’s theory, which differs radically from the more familiar account of David Lewis, an event Q is a cause of event R only if, without R, Q would not have occurred. The hypothesis posited here is that understanding the causes of WWI lies in identifying them based on a well-motivated causal philosophical framework. After showing that Broadbent’s theory is prima facie plausible, this study employs it to re-evaluate the extensively debated causes of WWI. Through doing so, it becomes evident that the Russian mobilization, rather than other frequently cited events, was the pivotal cause of Germany’s declaration of war and, consequently, the broader conflict. This analysis not only simplifies the complex causal reasoning process but also offers fresh insights into the historical narrative of WWI as well as reveals how a philosophical account of causation can have a weighty bearing on debates in social science. The implications of this approach extend beyond historical inquiry, suggesting broader applications for reverse counterfactual theory in understanding causation in complex events.

This article aims to reconcile the intuitions grounding two important positions from the ethics of belief: epistemic purism and reason pragmatism. They can conflict, especially at the level of what we ought to believe all-things-considered. They manifest themselves in two important meta-principles that constrain law and policy-making that seem to be in tension as well. The first is the principle of evidence-based regulation, which says that legal rules should only be based on current scientific knowledge. The second is the precautionary principle, according to which authorities should regulate (or even prohibit) an activity that may cause harm to humans or the environment, even if there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such a claim. However, I argue that the precautionary principle can be interpreted from the perspective of ethics of belief as political encroachment on evidence-based regulation. As such, it can reconcile both the epistemic and pragmatic intuitions underlying these two principles.

“Essential Indexical Thesis” is a label for a collection of theses claiming there are essential connections between explanations of actions and the first-person perspective (or de se mental state). Recently there are two notable defences for essential indexical theses: Babb’s defence of the thesis that all intentional actions are essentially indexical, and Francescotti’s defence of the thesis that necessarily all intention-to actions have de se origin. Through a critical examination of these defences, I discover that although Francescotti has defended a de dicto claim that “necessarily, an intention-to action results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, his defence remains compatible with the de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, because his defence fails to eliminate another de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily is an intention-to action.” Since Francescotti’s defence is compatible with the first de re claim, the essential indexical thesis he defends is vulnerable to the risk brought up by this de re claim: if the first de re claim is true, then no (first-order) action is necessarily/essentially indexical in Francescotti's sense. To fix this problem, I demonstrate that some (first-order) actions, for example, looking-for and pursuit, necessarily are intention-to actions. Then I propose my defence for a new essential indexical thesis called the further restricted essential indexical thesis.

In this reply paper, I address three objections that were raised against the goal-directed theory of emotions (Moors 2022). The first objection questions the appropriateness of aligning all emotions, including positive ones, with decision-making processes. The second objection challenges the theory’s ability to account for the valence aspect of all positive and negative emotions, highlighting two sets of counterexamples. The third objection asserts that the theory fails to give a satisfactory account of the irrational flavor of certain emotions, in particular recalcitrant ones.

Indexical contextualism has trouble explaining disagreements between utterances of “X is tasty” and “X is not tasty” because it treats them as semantically expressing propositions containing perspectives (e.g., judges) as their constituents. They are thus not incompatible. To overcome the problem, some philosophers suggested extending indexical contextualism with a pragmatic explanation of disagreements according to which the speakers of “X is tasty” and “X is not tasty” disagree because they pragmatically convey incompatible propositions by their respective utterances. The main aim of the present paper is to show that at least some pragmatically extended indexical contextualist theories face a serious problem. This is because the pragmatically conveyed propositions turn out to be inherently perspective-dependent, which means that the alleged incompatibility between them does not arise. Moreover, it is by no means easy to overcome the problem of the inherent perspective-dependence of pragmatically conveyed propositions. Although the discussion primarily focuses on Julia Zakkou’s superiority theory, which is rather novel and has not yet been subjected to thoroughgoing critical examination, its outcomes apply to some other theories too. 

In this paper, I discuss the goal-directed theory of emotion as advanced and defended by psychologist Agnes Moors. I give some reasons for supporting one of its main tenets, namely, that emotional episodes involve decision-making processes. I will however object that the theory has trouble to account for some aspects of positive emotions and in general to accommodate some instances of extremely positive and extremely negative emotions. I will also argue that, in order to account for the irrationality involved in emotional recalcitrance, some sort of duality of emotional mechanisms is also required.

The pragmatic encroachment thesis is the claim that pragmatic factors are relevant in determining whether a subject knows that p. Starting from the much-discussed Bank and Train Cases, Wolfgang Barz has argued that the examples used to illustrate, and so support the existence of, pragmatic encroachment, are misdescribed. Barz proposes that we do not have, as has been assumed, two subjects, A and B, who have the same evidence for a proposition, p, where A knows that p, and B, in a situation involving some different pragmatic factor, does not know that p. Rather, A knows one proposition, and B does not know another, different, proposition. Against Barz, I argue that there are serious problems involved with the specification of the pairs of propositions that Barz proposes to deal with the apparent pragmatic encroachment in the example cases he discusses. In addition, Barz’s account would force us to an untenable view of full retractions of knowledge claims made in the face of changed pragmatic conditions. Had Barz been right, pragmatic encroachment would not exist, and, in addition, he would have provided the basis for a very strong argument against contextualism.

Normative error theorists maintain the view that normative judgements ascribe normative properties, but these normative properties don’t exist. Many philosophers have tried objecting to this view, like Case (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(1), 92–104, 2019) arguing that it faces self-defeat. Others, like Streumer (Journal of Philosophy, 110(4), 194–212, 2013), have argued that it can’t even be believed because beliefs (in the full, rational sense) possess certain normative requirements. So, there is no self-defeating ‘belief’ in normative error theory. Recently, Taccolini (European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 20(1), 131-154, 2024) has accepted that Streumer’s response to self-defeat might work, and builds a stronger self-defeat argument. The argument attempts to illustrate that one cannot defend the normative error theory, regardless of whether they believe it or not. In response, we illustrate various plausible interpretations of ‘defense’ that are consistent with error theory, thereby diffusing the modal objection that one can’t defend error theory.