PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES最新文献

Clearly, the fact that you are committed to these projects and those people is practically relevant. For example, a commitment to gardening can make it especially sensible for me to garden this afternoon, even in the presence of an equally and sufficiently good alternative like woodworking. We might capture commitment’s distinctive import by saying that it puts us in a ‘special relationship’ to the projects to which we are committed. But how do we go beyond the metaphor? After discussing the view that commitments bear on action by virtue of being a kind of normatively efficacious willing, I suggest that we reconceive commitment as a source of rational requirements. On my preferred view, a commitment to gardening strictly requires me to conduct my deliberation in a gardening-friendly way insofar as I remain committed. The distinctive way in which my commitment to gardening constrains my deliberation gives content to the metaphor without admitting special reasons or a powerful will. If my analysis is correct, then commitment’s practical import lends little support to voluntarist conceptions of normativity.

The aim of this paper is to make some headway in understanding the notion of zero-grounding. The account of grounding in terms of generalized identity, proposed by Correia and Skiles (2019), is employed to clarify issues of ground and zero-ground. I discuss some options for accommodating zero-grounding. According to one option, we slide dangerously close to violating the irreflexivity of ground. According to another option, zero-grounding leads to a worrying kind of overdetermination. A third option offers a way out, but a challenge remains of how best to make sense of it. I further contend that these arguments broaden to concern any notion of grounding according to which groundees are “nothing over and above” their grounds. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is exploratory. It lays out some of the different options and challenges that face the grounding theorist who wants to make sense of zero-grounding.

I take some initial steps toward a theory of real definition, drawing upon recent developments in higher-order logic. The resulting account allows for extremely fine-grained distinctions (it can distinguish between any relata that differ in their syntactic structure, while avoiding the Russell-Myhill problem). It is the first account that can consistently embrace three desirable logical principles that initially appear to be incompatible: the Identification Hypothesis (if F is, by definition, G, then there is a sense in which F is the same as G), Irreflexivity (there are no reflexive definitions), and Leibniz’s Law. Additionally, it possesses the resources needed to resolve the paradox of analysis.

Sosa emphasizes "firsthand intuitive insight" as a distinctive kind of epistemic aim and argues that this is a characteristic epistemic goal of humanistic inquiry. He draws from this some importantly antiskeptical conclusions for the epistemology of disagreement. I try to further develop this idea of insight, which I call ‘perceptio’, in which we "see" some truth to obtain. I agree that it is a distinctive epistemic good, although I think it is central to understanding in general and not just in the humanities. It is also central to a specific kind of knowing-that that does not involve understanding. The precise way in which perceptio is a distinctive epistemic good means that, although it cannot do the antiskeptical work for disagreement that Sosa probably wants, it can do some related work.

In his recent book, (Bias: A Philosophical Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022). Thomas Kelly argues that various phenomena that look initially like examples of how irrational we are in thinking about bias—especially our own biases—turn out to be exactly what you’d expect from ideally rational agents. The phenomena he discusses which I’ll focus on are (1) our inability to introspectively identify our biases, and (2) our tendency to respond to accusations of bias with counteraccusations. In this paper, I’ll concede that Kelly is right about how ideally rational agents would think about their biases, while raising questions about whether the fact that we think similarly is best explained by our rationality. In §2, I’ll explain how Kelly’s “perspectival account of bias attributions” predicts that rational agents would be unable to identify their own biases, and would respond to accusations of bias with counter-accusations of bias. In §3, I’ll describe how a certain sort of irrational agent would behave differently—these irrational agents would respond to accusations of bias with searching introspection, and that introspection might reliably turn up evidence of bias, which would then lead them to change their views in the direction of being less biased. We are clearly not such agents, since we do exhibit (1) and (2). I’ll argue that the sort of behavior we exhibit could be explained either because we’re more rational than the agents described, or because we’re less rational than them—just as incoherent, but also worse at introspectively noticing our incoherence. I’ll argue that it’s an empirical question, to which Kelly’s arguments don’t speak, whether the fact that we exhibit (1) and (2) is best explained by our rationality, or our irrationality.

Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years. But ‘fat-calling’ does not only have individual harms—it also perpetuates a subordinating social structure ranking fat people as inferior. Despite recent work on obesity and fatphobia, the conversational dynamics of ascribing fatness to someone else (rather than oneself) are relatively unexplored, especially in philosophy. This paper argues that fat-calling assigns its target a subordinate discourse role, constraining their subsequent conversational behaviour and permitting further discriminatory behaviour from interlocutors. And these conversational norm-changes alter the initial permissibility conditions of future conversations to the detriment of fat people. This is not to say that fat-calling is morally equivalent to slurs and hate speech—but it does show that it leverages similar conversational mechanisms to entrench injustice.

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems. It requires that we find a way of maintaining the following claim, which I call Negative Orientation: although you claim to value X, you are more accurately described as disvaluing Y. I argue that we cannot make sense of Negative Orientation at the level of evaluative judgments, for nothing about the etiology, content, or justification of evaluative judgments will support the Negative Orientation claim. we can make sense of it by attending to the psychology of valuing. Using spiteful hatred as a paradigm case, I explain how certain outlooks and ideologies induce and sustain spiteful hatred in their adherents and thereby render the Negative Orientation claim true.

This commentary on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study compares his Norm-Theoretic Account, which defines bias as involving systematic deviations from genuine norms, with the Functional Account of Bias, which instead conceptualizes bias as a functional response to the problem of underdetermination. While both accounts offer valuable insights, I explore their compatibility and differences, arguing that the Functional Account provides a more comprehensive understanding of bias by offering deeper explanatory insights, particularly regarding bias’s origins and purpose.

I propose that examining pointing and, especially, self-pointing helps us to better understand Self-Referring (knowingly and intentionally self-referring). I explain basic features of pointing and self-pointing, such as referring, reference-fixing and the subject’s knowledge of the referent. I propose to treat Self-Referring as a self-directed action. Self-pointing makes it explicit how Self-Referring is a self-directed action produced for intentionally expressing something about the agent of the self-directed action. My project is an attempt to naturalize the capacity for Self-Reference. The capacity for self-directed action predates and enables the acquisition of Self-Referring. The structure of self-pointing reveals how the referent of ‘I’ is fixed in such way that we can begin to see how it supports the cognitive significance of Self-Referring expressions. In arguing for my proposal, I reflect on findings from developmental and comparative psychology and analyze Self-Reference in both spoken and sign-languages.

It is commonplace amongst epistemologists to note the importance of grasping or appreciating one’s evidence. The idea seems to be that agents cannot successfully utilize evidence without it. Despite the popularity of this claim, the nature of appreciating or grasping evidence is unclear. This paper develops an account of what it takes to appreciate the epistemic relevance of one’s evidence, such that it can be used for some specific conclusion. I propose a basing account on which appreciating evidence involves being able to correctly base. That is, the agent is disposed to base various conclusions on her evidence that are objectively supported by that evidence. She can also derive correct conclusions if her evidence were slightly different. This account is cognitively undemanding, and explains why appreciation is crucial for the core functions of using evidence, like excluding hypotheses and probabilistic reasoning. I contrast this view with possible rival accounts and argue that the rival accounts add nothing over and above the basing account.