Analytic Philosophy最新文献

William P. Alston argues in “Expressing” (1965) that there is no important difference between expressing a feeling in language and asserting that one has that feeling. My aims in this paper are (1) to show that Alston's arguments ought to have led him to a different conclusion—that “asserting” and “expressing” individuate speech acts at different levels of analysis (the illocutionary and the locutionary, respectively)—and (2) to argue that this conclusion can solve a problem facing contemporary analyses of expressing: the “no show tell” problem, or the problem of accounting for utterances that report feelings truly without expressing them. Alston's paper made an important contribution 50 years ago, and a reimagining of it can make another important contribution today.

The most common form of endurantism takes enduring objects to be wholly located at every time they occupy. Such a view is believed to give rise to a problem concerning intrinsic change. My laptop may have been shut before, but it is currently open. Yet, if we understand endurantism as above, then my laptop is in possession of two contradictory properties: the shapes of being open and shut. This problem is known as the “problem of temporary intrinsics,” and, to avoid it, two major kinds of moves have been made. The first is to meddle with the relationship between an enduring object and its properties by, for instance, claiming enduring objects bear their properties relationally to times rather than intrinsically. Many who have found this move unappealing have instead turned to presentism, claiming that endurantists should be presentists to avoid the problem. I take it that while both options can work, neither is optimal. Instead, I argue in favor of an alternative understanding of endurantism that allows endurantists to have it all: there is a version of endurantism that leaves the intrinsic properties of objects untouched, avoids the problem of temporary intrinsics, and does not require adopting presentism.

On the traditional approach to metaethics, theories are expected to be faithful to ordinary normative discourse—or at worst (if we think the ordinary discourse is metaphysically unsound) to deviate from it as little as possible. This paper develops an alternative, “conceptual engineering” approach to metaethical enquiry, which is not in this way restricted by our present discourse. On this approach, we will seek to understand the psychology, semantics, metaphysics and epistemology, not just of our present concepts, but also of other possible normative concepts. The ultimate point of the enquiry is to choose between the available alternatives: to decide what kinds of normative concepts to use, going forward. The paper aims to make this suggestion precise, in a way that (a) answers worries about circularity, (b) answers worries about “changing the subject”, (c) retains metaethics as a truth-seeking enquiry, and (d) leads to an independently plausible methodology.

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composed of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers, and its form is something like the structure of those bricks and timbers. It is widely agreed that matter bears a mereological relationship to substance; the bricks and timbers are parts of the house. But with form things are more controversial. Is the structure of the bricks and timbers best conceived as a part of the house, or is it related to the house in some non-mereological fashion? Kathrin Koslicki argues that substances have formal parts and that forms are best conceived as bearing a mereological relation to substances. This paper shows that her argument fails, given the traditional and plausible distinction between substances and accidental unities. I close with a brief suggestion for a non-mereological construal of forms.

This paper defends the claim that if a person P exists, there can be true positive comparisons between P's existence and P's never having existed at all in terms of what is better or worse for P. If correct, this view will have significant implications for various fundamental issues in population ethics. I try to show how arguments to the contrary fail to take note of a general ambiguity in comparisons when compared alternatives contain their own different standards (or, in the case of non-existence, a lack thereof) on which to base these comparisons. After having answered arguments against the possibility of making positive comparisons, the paper develops a positive account of how to make existence/non-existence comparisons in terms of personal value whilst accepting that a person's non-existence fails to make any contact with the relevant categories of personal value. The guiding idea is the following: When some item satisfies some relevant standard, we can, I argue, infer that it satisfies this standard better than something that fails to satisfy this standard (be this failure due to empirical or conceptual reasons).

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off.

Perceptual constancy has played a significant role in philosophy of perception. It figures in debates about direct realism, color ontology, and the minimal conditions for perceptual representation. Despite this, there is no general consensus about what constancy is. I argue that an adequate account of constancy must distinguish it from three distinct phenomena: mere sensory stability through proximal change, perceptual categorization of a distal dimension, and stability through irrelevant proximal change. Standard characterizations of constancy fall short in one or more of these respects. I develop an account of constancy that overcomes these problems. The account has two parts: an analysis of constancy mechanisms, and an analysis of the conditions under which a constancy capacity is exercised. I then employ this account to evaluate whether constancy is a necessary condition for perceptual representation, as some have conjectured. I argue that explanatory practice in perceptual psychology fails to support this view. Rather, it fits better with the weaker principle that representation requires specific tracking of a distal dimension.

Frankfurt-style cases suggest that an agent's moral responsibility for an action supervenes on the causal history of that action—at least when epistemic considerations are held constant. However, PAP-style cases suggest that moral responsibility does not supervene on causal history, for judgments concerning an agent's responsibility for an action are also sensitive to the presence of alternative—and causally idle—possibilities. I appeal to the causal modeling tradition and the definitions of actual causation that derive therefrom in an attempt to resolve this contradiction. I show that even the weakest definitions of actual causation proposed in the literature establish that some PAP-style cases constitute genuine counterexamples to the supervenience thesis. I consider several responses to these counterexamples on behalf of the defenders of supervenience and show that they fail. Our best current thinking on causation thus appears to be inconsistent with an intuitive and widely held claim concerning the nature of moral responsibility.

David Chalmers has recently developed a novel strategy of refuting external world skepticism, one he dubs the structuralist solution. In this paper, I make three primary claims: First, structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, even if it is combined with a functionalist approach to the metaphysics of minds. Second, because structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, the structuralist solution vindicates far less worldly knowledge than we would hope for from a solution to skepticism. For, solipsism threatens surprisingly vast swathes of worldly knowledge across multiple domains, including at least some knowledge about: political affairs, religious practices, artistic movements, historical events, and cultural trends. Third, the significance of these results exceeds their implications for the structuralist solution; these results suggest that no solution to external world skepticism which does not also solve the problem of other minds will ultimately yield the kind of solution we might have hoped for. Relatedly, these results suggest that the problem of external world skepticism should perhaps be construed as two different problems, since the problem might turn out to require two substantively different solutions, one for knowledge of the kind that is not dependent on other minds and one for knowledge that is.