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

An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others if they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call epistemic quacks, who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and epistemic charlatans, i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Neither type of false authority covers what Lackey (2021) calls predatory experts: experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No. I argue that they are false epistemic authorities because in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends.

Consequentialism is often criticized as being overly demanding, and this overdemandingness is seen as sufficient to reject it as a moral theory. This paper takes the plausibility and coherence of this objection—the Demandingness Objection—as a given. Our question, therefore, is how to respond to the Objection. We put forward a response relying on the framework of institutional consequentialism we introduced in previous work. On this view, institutions take over the consequentialist burden, whereas individuals, special occasions aside, are required to set up and maintain institutions. We first describe the Objection, then clarify the theory of institutional consequentialism and show how it responds to the Objection. In the remainder of the paper, we defend the view against potential challenges.

In situations where we ignore everything but the space of possibilities, we ought to suspend judgment—that is, remain agnostic—about which of these possibilities is the case. This means that we cannot sum our degrees of belief in different possibilities, something that has been formalised as an axiom of non-additivity. Consistent with this way of representing our ignorance, I defend a doxastic norm that recommends that we should nevertheless follow a certain additivity of possibilities: even if we cannot sum degrees of belief in different possibilities, we should be more confident in larger groups of possibilities. It is thus shown that, in the type of situation considered (in so-called “classical ignorance”, i.e. “behind a thin veil of ignorance”), it is epistemically rational for advocates of suspending judgment to endorse this comparative confidence, while on the other hand it is shown that, even in classical ignorance, no stronger belief—such as a precise uniform probability distribution—is warranted.

The view that first-person (de se) mental content is essential to the explanation of action in general is a strong essential indexicality thesis. A weaker essential indexicality claim is that de se mental content is an essential ingredient of intentional action. An argument by Bermúdez for the former thesis and an argument from Babb in support of the latter are discussed in Section 2, and for reasons presented there it seems that both arguments are unsound and the conclusions are false as well. However, the discussion of their arguments helps us identify a certain class of intentional action, and an apparently very large class, the members of which are guaranteed to have de se origin. This class of intentional action is identified in Sections 3 and 4 and it is shown that necessarily, any member of this class has its origin in indexical, specifically, de se mental content.

Fine’s discussion of McTaggart’s paradox and tense realism may be the most significant progress in the philosophy of time in recent years. Fine reformulates McTaggart’s paradox and develops a novel realist theory called fragmentalism. According to Fine, one major advantage of fragmentalism is its ability to account for the connection between reality and tensed truths. I will argue that fragmentalism cannot give an adequate account of this connection. The reason is that while external relations between fragments are required by this kind of account, these relations are not allowed in fragmentalism.

I identify a class of arguments against multiple realization (MR): BookofSand arguments. The arguments are in their general form successful under reasonably uncontroversial assumptions, but this, on the other hand, turns the table on identity theory: If arguments from MR can always be refuted by BookofSand arguments, is identity theory falsifiable? In the absence of operational demarcation criteria, it is not. I suggest a parameterized formal demarcation principle for brain state/process types and show how it can be used to identify previously unconsidered contenders for evidence for MR, e.g., binary classification, division, and sorting. For these to be actual instances of MR, the corresponding psychological kinds must be verifiably, relevantly similar. I also briefly discuss possible linguistic, behavioral, and experimental demarcation criteria for psychological kinds.

In this paper, I develop a serious new dilemma involving necessary truths for safety-based theories of knowledge, a dilemma that I argue safety theorists cannot resolve or avoid by relativizing safety to either the subject’s basis or method of belief formation in close worlds or to a set of related or sufficiently similar propositions. I develop this dilemma primarily in conversation with Duncan Pritchard’s well-known, oft-modeled safety-based theories of knowledge. I show that Pritchard’s well-regarded anti-luck virtue theory of knowledge and his recently proposed (allegedly superior) anti-risk virtue theory of knowledge clearly succumb to the dilemma, and so they are inadequate as they stand. If Pritchard’s safety-based theories of knowledge are shown to be inadequate by the dilemma that is developed in this paper, then a number of other safety-based theories of knowledge (e.g., Beddor and Pavese’s, Luper’s, Dutant’s, early Pritchard’s, and others) look to be in jeopardy in this connection as well.

Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this “contagion model,” beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman’s epidemiological approach in terms of epistemic trust. By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren’t the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier’s (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her “pathologies of trust.” The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such “pathological” epistemic trust inspired by Baier’s work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation.

Metaphysicians who are aware of modern physics usually follow Putnam (1967) in arguing that Special Theory of Relativity is incompatible with the view that what exists is only what exists now or presently. Partisans of presentism (the motto ‘only present things exist’) had very difficult times since, and no presentist theory of time seems to have been able to satisfactorily counter the objection raised from Special Relativity. One of the strategies offered to the presentist consists in relativizing existence to inertial frames. This unfashionable strategy has been accused of counterfeiting, since the meaning of the concept of existence would be incompatible with its relativization. Therefore, existence could only be relativistically invariant. In this paper, I shall examine whether such an accusation hits its target, and I will do this by examining whether the different criteria of existence that have been suggested by the Philosophical Tradition from Plato onwards imply that existence cannot be relativized.

The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—DPGB-theory—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present time). In this paper, I examine the additional arguments offered by P. Forrest and G. A. Forbes to back the DPGB-theory and show that they do not work. I also examine a proposal to rescue the DPGB-theory suggested by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and argue that it does not work either. Moreover, in line with D. Braddon-Mitchell and against Forbes, I argue that the DPGB-theory is indeed committed to the existence of zombies in the past. Being ad hoc and burdened by a very odd and counterintuitive ontological commitment, the DPGB-theory turns out to be rather unpalatable.