Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

Evidential Pluralism is an emerging philosophical theory of how to establish and evaluate causal claims. Shan & Williamson (2023) apply Evidential Pluralism across the social sciences. This article provides a concise overview of the book.

In this lead article for an article symposium, we investigate the possible intersection between metaphysical naturalism and the phenomenological tradition. Our guiding hypothesis is that nature constitutes phenomenology, whereas phenomenology constitutes our access to nature. Pace renowned phenomenologists Gallagher and Zahavi’s call to replace “classic naturalism” with “non-classic conceptions,” we reconstruct “classic naturalism” by drawing on the seminal works of Armstrong, Lewis, Jackson, Braddon-Mitchell, Ney, and others. On this basis, we argue against the common assertion that metaphysical naturalism entails scientism and methodological naturalism and demonstrate their theoretical incompatibility, and thereby contend that a properly characterized classic naturalism could, in fact, accommodate phenomenological approaches. Then, we revise contemporary phenomenologists’ notions of “mutual constraints” and “mutual enlightenment” and reframe the subtle intersection between phenomenology and the naturalistic perspective. Finally, we address standard phenomenological criticisms of naturalism, which appeal to the primacy of the experiential perspective, and explore how the perspective can, in fact, accommodate and critically inform naturalism’s core theoretical commitments. This two-way discussion, which is grounded in both traditions, results in a phenomenology-friendly naturalism and a naturalism-friendly phenomenology that critically complement one another.

A critical dicussion of Ángel Pinillos’s (2023) Why We Doubt, focusing on questions about delineating the boundaries of skeptical doubt, the nature of evidence and its connections to sensitivity conditions, specifying principal bases for beliefs, and the connections Pinillos posits between skeptical intuitions and Bayesian norms.

In The Right to Know, Lani Watson forcefully argues in favor of recognizing epistemic rights to all humans. In this paper, we apply Watson’s framework to three hard cases. First, we consider interpersonal relationships and suggest that there is room to explore how epistemic rights bear on, e.g., whether parents can permissibly lie to or mislead their children by asserting the existence of Santa Claus. Second, we turn to social media platforms and contend that Watson’s framework is compatible with contrasting moderation policies and transparency requirements. Third, we examine a foundational case of legal ethics—the buried bodies case—which raises the question of how professional and moral duties might be weighed alongside Watson’s epistemic ones. In exploring these cases, we hope to incite practically minded philosophers to reflect upon the implications of Watson’s theory for contemporary debates in applied ethics and political philosophy.

Pinillos (2023) provides a cognitive psychological explanation of our skeptical inclinations and utilizes this explanation for a rational explanation of various epistemic phenomena, such as skepticism in its various manifestations, obsessive compulsive disorder, conspiracy theories, relevant alternatives and more. In this paper, I raise concerns about his rational explanation of radical skepticism. That is, his attempt ‘to calm our intellectual anxiety’ by showing ‘how skeptical doubt is produced’. This is supposed to explain ‘why the skeptic’s doubt is not justified’ (2023:9). I conclude with some methodological worries about the dialectical transition from a cognitive explanation to a rational debunking explanation.

This paper explores the striking conceptual parallel between contemporary accounts of episodic memory (see e.g., Addis, De Brigard, Michaelian) and picture semantics (Abusch, Greenberg, Maier). It argues that picture semantics captures many familiar distinctions from philosophy of memory, while providing some additional—highly useful—tools and concepts (e.g., a mechanism for representation-to-content conversion and a general notion of situation that is independent of a given perspective). The paper uses these tools to (re-)structure and advance debate in contemporary philosophy of memory. Specifically, it (i) shows how these tools can be employed to defend the propositional nature of episodic memory contents, (ii) gives a sophisticated account of non-actual and non-particular episodic memory objects, and (iii) provides a new argument for pluralism about accuracy concepts and standards. Along the way, it defends a liberal version of the pictorial view of mnemic imagery, reveals faithfulness about accuracy as a (very) weak variant of radical authenticism, and explains different intuitions about the possibility of observer-perspective memories from dreams. The paper closes by suggesting, inversely, the import of these applications for picture semantics.

Mikkel Gerken’s book Scientific Testimony is a welcome step in reconnecting contemporary analytic epistemology with the philosophy of science. The central topic of the book—as it says in the title—is testimony, which has been a major area of research for epistemologists for the last couple of decades. Testimony refers to the process by which we can acquire knowledge or justified belief from what others have told us. Roughly speaking, epistemologists agree that testimony is an important source of knowledge but disagree over the exact conditions under which testimony can lead to knowledge. But for philosophers of science, learning from one another and pursuing inquiry collectively is so central to the scientific enterprise that testimony—as epistemologists understand it—was hardly recognized as a distinct phenomenon warranting its own systematic investigation. Rather, philosophers of science have turned their attention primarily to studying much more prosaic instances of knowledge transmission, like science communication or the interface between science and policy. In this commentary, I examine Gerken's characterization of scientific justification and argue for a social concept of scientific justification that arises out of philosophy of science.

A number of authors, including ourselves, have defended the view (which we call the “generationism about memory”) that memory is a generative, rather than preservative, source of epistemic justification. This paper clarifies the very distinction that the whole debate rests on; i.e. the distinction between preservative sources and generative sources of epistemic justification. Our aim is to present a “substantial” or “demanding” definition of preservative/generative distinction such that the candidate cases that are only superficially generative (including many of the cases that have been presented by other researchers in defence of generationism) do not count as counterexamples to preservationism. After some methodological remarks (Section 2), we propose a preservative/generative distinction, called “PM/GM”, as a first approximation (Section 3). Then, we argue the PM/GM distinction has to be revised in several ways in order to capture generationism in a substantial sense (Sections 4 and 5). Finally, we compare our revised distinction, “PM*/GM*”, with other distinctions in the literature (Section 6).

In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between knowledge that talk and knowledge how talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that knowledge that belongs to the former, whereas knowledge how belongs to the latter.