Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

Charlotte Witt contends that her externalist model of social role normativity, which draws on Aristotle’s artisanal model, can explain the puzzling phenomenon of self-creation, while no internalist model of social role normativity can do the same. She concludes from this that externalism on social role normativity is preferable to internalism, all else being equal. In this contribution, I argue that the paradox of self-creation does not break the tie between internalism and externalism, since both Kantian and Hegelian internalists can resolve this paradox by offering explanations similar to Witt’s, from an internalist perspective.

In The True and the Good, Chase Wrenn wrestles with the problem of truth’s value: those theories which take truth to be inherently valuable do not offer plausible theories of the nature of truth, while the most promising theories of the nature of truth face difficulties in establishing that truth is valuable. Wrenn argues that the reasons for truth being valuable are ultimately moral ones, issuing from the ways in which caring about the truth contributes to human flourishing. This virtue-theoretic solution offers “Aristotelian” theories of truth—which include both correspondence and deflationary theories—a plausible explanation of why truth is valuable. In this paper, I grant that Wrenn’s solution can prove persuasive for substantive Aristotelian theories (such as causal correspondence theories). But I argue that, given some of the reasons for Wrenn’s solution being persuasive for these accounts, it is unclear how deflationary accounts can similarly benefit from his solution. More specifically, I argue that Wrenn’s approach faces the challenge of showing how desires oriented towards truth qua expressive device could plausibly contribute to human flourishing. I also identify one way that Wrenn can meet this challenge, given a defense of deflationism he has developed in an earlier work.

In her excellent comments on Scientific Testimony, Dang raises an important question about the social dimensions of scientific justification. In this response, I take some steps toward characterizing the sense in which social dimensions are central to scientific justification.

In this response to de Melo-Martín’s insightful comments on Scientific Testimony, I consider whether reported skepticism about a factual scientific hypothesis reflects genuine attitudes toward it or merely negative attitudes toward an associated policy. On the basis of this discussion, I draw some lessons about policy-relevant science communication and try to articulate them in the form of a principle.

Building on Drew Johnson’s Radical Relativist Hinge Epistemology, this paper argues that deep disagreements between theistic and naturalistic epistemic systems are best understood as instances of epistemic incommensurability. I critique Duncan Pritchard’s quasi-fideism by focusing on his claim that a content-invariant über-hinge, articulated as the commitment that we are not radically and fundamentally mistaken, can alleviate relativist concerns by supporting only a weak form of relativism. I contend that this strategy is ineffective. On theistic frameworks, the commitment that we are not globally mistaken is secured by antecedent hinges that locate cognitive reliability in divine design and providence; on naturalistic frameworks, it is secured by antecedent hinges that locate reliability in evolutionary origins and the norms of empirical inquiry. Accordingly, the commitment lacks cross-framework uniformity in role and priority, and so cannot be the universal codifying hinge Pritchard requires. Therefore, the appearance of a shared über-hinge is superficial, and quasi-fideism lacks the resources to neutralize epistemic relativism.

In their perceptive and constructive discussion of Scientific Testimony, Gelfert and Schneider articulate important challenges regarding simplification of public scientific testimony. In this response, I argue that while proper simplification is a hard task with many pitfalls, it is a task that may be guided by the science communication strategy—Justification Reporting—that I set forth in the book.

Two arguments have been offered in recent years to show that Being, as Heidegger conceives of it, is a being. Since Heidegger also claims that ‘the Being of beings “is” not itself a being,’ each argument gives rise to a paradox. This paper accomplishes three things. First, it develops an objection to the two arguments. Second, it answers this objection by appealing to the principle of the utmost generality of Being (by which our concept of Being is the most general one that we have) and, in this way, recovers the paradoxes. Third, it develops a new argument to show that Being is a being based directly on this principle. Due to its direct employment of this principle—without which the other two arguments fail—the resultant paradox proves to be the most fundamental of the lot, hence the ‘arch-paradox’ of Being.

Evolutionary theory has been invoked in arguments both in support of scientific realism and in support of scientific antirealism. I will call the strategy of appealing to evolutionary theory in either context “the selectionist strategy.” Is the selectionist strategy ever philosophically legitimate? The Korean philosopher Seungbae Park (Park, Axiomathes 27:321–332, 2017) raises this question and argues that the selectionist strategy is question-begging when deployed in support of realism and self-defeating when deployed in support of antirealism. He further maintains that being self-defeating is a more serious argumentative flaw than being question-begging, since question-begging arguments merely lack persuasiveness, whereas self-defeating arguments generate contradictions. My primary concern in this paper is with Park’s critique of antirealist appeals to selectionism, rather than with his discussion of realist appeals, and I argue that Park’s objections to selectionism as an antirealist strategy are not well-founded.

Consciousness studies have relied on the subject’s remembering capacity as the primary tool for identifying and measuring selfless states, i.e., conscious states without self-consciousness. This paper critically examines whether memory can serve such a role. After outlining the requirements that remembering must meet when deployed in studies of selfless consciousness, I evaluate its competence accordingly. On this basis, I argue for three epistemic challenges to the use of remembering in the study of selfless states: one corresponds to the well-discussed memory challenge of selfless report in the literature, while the other two—the zero-inflation challenge and the measurement challenge—are newly introduced. Specifically, the memory challenge concerns avoiding false negatives—selfless states misclassified as self-conscious. The zero-inflation challenge concerns avoiding false positives—self-conscious states misclassified as selfless. And the measurement challenge concerns reliably capturing the non-self-related aspects of experience within selfless states.

According to the epistemic theory of propositional memory, one’s remembering that p entails his knowledge that p. The epistemic theory is grounded in English speakers’ intuition that a statement such as “X remembers that p, but X does not know that p” is absurd, but there exist counterexamples that challenge that intuition. This paper examines two types of putative counterexamples to the theory from a pragmatic perspective, and shows that the felicitous use of those statements results from the hearer’s accommodation of them in accordance with contextual clues. Ultimately, I contend that no putative counterexamples provide decisive grounds for rejecting the Epistemic Theory, leading to the “intuition-mongering” deadlock, as Chansheng Lai (Philosophical Quarterly, 72(4), 896–917, 2022b) correctly points out.