Analytic Philosophy最新文献

Marušić & Schwenkler (Analytic Philosophy, 59, 309) offer a simple and elegant defense of strong cognitivism about intention: the view that an intention to φ is a form of belief that one will φ. I show that their defense fails: however simple and elegant, it fails to account for various aspects about intention and its expression, and faces distinctive challenges of its own, including a dilemma and counterexample. These also undermine Marušić & Schwenkler's claim to a best-explanation type of account and recommend alternatives to strong cognitivism altogether.

A centerpiece of Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne's Narrow Content (OUP 2018) is the parameter proliferation argument. The authors consider a series of cleverly constructed cases of pairs of corresponding thoughts of qualitatively identical twins and argue that divergence in truth value for such thoughts forces the internalist to admit novel alethic parameters for semantic evaluation that are not independently motivated. I argue that the internalist will resist this argument by denying that such pairs of thoughts diverge in truth value. I then argue that the construal of content presupposed by the argument should be rejected or amended by the internalist on independent grounds. I end in a more diagnostic vein by considering why parameter proliferation might have seemed pressing for internalism to begin with.

Suppose you can save one group of people or a larger group of different people, but you cannot save both groups. Are you morally required, ceteris paribus, to save the larger group? Some say, “No.” Far more say, without qualification, “Yes.” But some say, “It depends on the sizes of the groups.” In this paper, I argue that an attractive moral principle that seems on its face to support the second answer in fact supports a version of the third. In the process, I defend some revisionary claims about how the lives and deaths of different people compare evaluatively to one another. The most important of these for my purposes is the claim that the deaths of different people are on a par, other things being equal.

The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty-imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well-known within the philosophy of law: authority-conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti-normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority-conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority-conferring structure, and show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it.

In this paper, I critically analyze the notion that self-interest distorts moral belief-formation. This belief is widely shared among modern moral epistemologists, and in this paper, I seek to undermine this near consensus. I then offer a principle which can help us to sort cases in which self-interest distorts moral belief from cases in which it does not. As it turns out, we cannot determine whether such distortion has occurred from the armchair; rather, we must inquire into mechanisms of social power and advantage before declaring that some moral position is distorted by self-interest.

According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), ordinary perceptual experience ensures an opportunity for perceptual knowledge. In recent years, two distinct models of this idea have been developed. For Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological disjunctivism, 2012, Oxford University Press; Epistemic angst: Radical skepticism and the groundlessness of our believing, 2012, Princeton University Press), perception provides distinctly powerful reasons for belief. By contrast, Clayton Littlejohn (Journal of Philosophical Research, 41, 201; Knowledge first, 2017, Oxford University Press; Normativity: Epistemic and practical, 2018, Oxford University Press) and Alan Millar (The nature and value of knowledge: Three investigations, 2010, Oxford University Press; Philosophical Issues, 21, 332) argue for a version of ED in terms of a “knowledge first” program, on which perception directly provides knowledge, without relying on antecedent reasons or justification. Specifically, both Littlejohn and Millar argue that “reasons first” ED faces a problematic regress. In this article, I defend “reasons first” ED by arguing that experience provides a type of reason that escapes the regress. I also argue that reasons are a fundamental aspect of ED, especially in its anti-skeptical stance.

It is widely accepted among philosophers that there is a tension between acquaintance constraints on singular thought and the plausible assumption that the truths of singular attitude reports ensure the subject's having singular thoughts. From this, anti-acquaintance theorists contend that acquaintance constraints must be rejected. As a response, many acquaintance theorists maintain that there is good reason to doubt a strong connection between singular attitude reports and singular thoughts. In this paper, however, I defend the acquaintance theory by arguing that there is in fact no tension at all. I consider three objections regarding singular attitude reports against the acquaintance theory: (i) ultra-liberal singular attitude reports, (ii) the “There is something that S believes to be F” locution, and (iii) infelicities of singular attitude reports. Then, I argue that none of them succeed in showing a genuine tension.

Bundle Theory is the view that every concrete particular object is solely constituted by its universals. This theory is often criticized for not accommodating the possibility of symmetrical universes, such as one that contains two indiscernible spheres two meters from each other in otherwise empty space. One bundle theoretic solution to this criticism holds that the fact that the spheres stand in a weakly discerning—i.e., irreflexive and symmetric—relation, such as being two meters from, is sufficient for the numerical diversity of the spheres. For this solution to be effective, however, it should be established that weak discernibility not only necessitates but also explains numerical diversity. In this paper, I argue that the fact that two objects have a certain distance between them does explain why they are non-identical. I also argue that the worry that the weak discernibility approach has some circularity problems is not well-founded.

This article introduces a non-cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth-apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to, and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.

David Lewis has argued that we cannot identify the fundamental properties. It is generally accepted that we can resist Lewis's conclusion if we are prepared to accept a structuralist account of fundamental properties, according to which their causal/nomological role is essential to their identity. I argue, to the contrary, that a structuralist construal of fundamental properties does not sustain a successful independent strategy for resisting Lewis's conclusion. The structuralist can vindicate our ability to identify fundamental properties only if she accepts epistemic principles that suffice for blocking Lewis's conclusion even if fundamental properties are not construed along structuralist lines.