Analytic Philosophy最新文献

Frankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as bullshit or not and show that this account generalizes to many other kinds of act as well. I show that this illuminates some of Graeber's classification of “bullshit jobs,” though it doesn't fully agree with it.

Neo-Aristotelian views of goodness hold that the goodness of something is strictly connected with its goal(s). In this article, I shall present a power-based, Neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. I shall claim that there are certain powers (i.e., Goodness-Conferring Powers, or GC-powers in short) that confer goodness upon their bearers and upon the resulting actions. And I shall suggest that GC-powers are strongly teleological tendencies. In Section 1, I shall present the kernel of Neo-Aristotelian conceptions of goodness. In Section 2, I shall introduce strongly teleological powers and tendencies. In Section 3, GC-powers will be characterized. I shall also examine a number of options with regard to their number and features and how to single out their goodness value. In Section 4, I shall focus on good agents and on three distinct ways in which they may be good: tendential goodness, actual goodness, and purely actual goodness. Relatedly, among the actions connected with a certain GC-power, I shall also distinguish between primary and secondary actions and between pure and impure actions. In Section 5, good actions will be examined. Actions may be good in three distinct ways. Indeed, actions may be endowed with primary goodness, secondary goodness and preventative goodness. In Section 6, I shall face the remaining problems.

Pragmatic encroachment in epistemology is the idea that whether one knows some proposition depends on whether one can rely on it practically. Total pragmatic encroachment affirms that practical considerations of this sort encroach not just on knowledge but on all interesting normative epistemic statuses a belief might have. Ichikawa, Jarvis, and Rubin (2012) have argued that this stronger thesis conflicts with mainstream belief-desire psychology. Worse still, they argue that attempting to defend the thesis gets one caught in vicious circularities. The aim of this paper is to show that, if we are careful in how we understand the key idea of being sensitive to practical considerations, we can defend total pragmatic encroachment and avoid the circularities. In fact, depending on how it is understood, we can even square mainstream belief-desire psychology with total pragmatic encroachment as well.

Jeremy Fix, in ‘Two Sorts of Constitutivism’ (2021), makes a case for the possibility of contingent essential properties to account for the metaphysical status of constitutive standards of things. In this brief note, I will present an open problem affecting Fix's conception, namely, the explanation of the membership of particulars to a genus, which is necessary to identify particulars subject to standards.

In this paper, I examine a case for fundamental indeterminacy (FI) by Elizabeth Barnes and offer my counterarguments. Barnes' account of FI includes both the characterization of FI and why we need to accept it. I argue that her reasons for accepting FI can be challenged even when we accept her characterization of FI. Her main claim is that finding a fundamental proposition that our fundamental theory is indeterminate about (FPF) gives us a reason to accept FI in metaphysics. I challenge her claim by pointing out more plausible options to address FPFs. An FPF may either indicate that the theory is nonfundamental or lead us to accept the antirealist view; there is no room for FI in either option. One may insist on accepting FI, but I argue that it is not theoretically rewarding enough. Hence, Barnes' case for FI can be contested.

Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints. While the argument is substantive rather than exegetical, I engage in detail Judith Shklar's “Liberalism of Fear”. I share with Shklar her pessimistic starting point, but I also show how a focus on suffering (rather than cruelty and fear) is what plausibly follows from such a starting point. I then pursue the implications of this difference—they are theoretically profound, but perhaps less significant practically.

The problem of creeping minimalism is the problem of drawing a principled distinction between expressivists and non-expressivists. Explanationism is a popular strategy for solving the problem, but two of its forms—ontological explanationism and representational explanationism—have fatal problems. Christine Tiefensee and Matthew Simpson have recently, and independently, endorsed a third form: subject matter explanationism. But this form also fails. At bottom, the problem is that it does not note the existence of non-reductive expressivist views, just as earlier forms of explanationism did not note the existence of error theories, or non-naturalist realists, or realists who wanted to endorse deflationary views of truth and representation. The failure of this latest version of explanationism—one that does indeed avoid problems with earlier versions—strengthens the case that we may not actually want a solution to the problem of creeping minimalism after all. Rather, a form of global expressivism—neopragmatism—might be regarded as yielding a version of non-naturalist normative realism.

An account is proposed of the nature of indeterminacy in visual experience. Along the way, alternative proposals by Block, Morrison, Munton, Prettyman, Stazicker and Nanay are considered.

Evidential Preemption occurs when a speaker asserts something of the form “Others will tell you Q, but I say P,” where P and Q are incompatible in some salient way. Typically, the aim of this maneuver is to get the audience to accept P despite contrary testimony of others, who might otherwise be trusted on the matter. Phenomena such as echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and other political speech of interest to epistemologists today, all commonly involve evidential preemption, so the question arises: What effect, if any, does evidential preemption have on the audience's epistemic situation? In a widely discussed paper, Begby (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2021, 102, 515) argues that evidential preemption can change the audience's epistemic situation in such a way that future testimony that Q, which would otherwise have been persuasive, can be rationally discounted to a significant degree. If so, evidential preemption is not a mere rhetorical flourish, but rather results in a rationally insulated belief that P. Since evidential preemption is a common feature of echo chambers and conspiracy theories, this would be a disturbing result. We bring good news: it is not so, at least not in the way Begby suggests. If evidential preemptions can change one's epistemic situation in a worrying way, it is a mystery how.

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.