Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

In “Mnemic Scenarios as Pictures”, Kristina Liefke has offered a substantive, powerful and insightful account of episodic memory based on a version of picture semantics. Despite its ingenuity and sophistication, I am going to suggest that the scope of this account is much more limited than the author has suggested. More specifically, I will develop the following three interrelated points: (1) even if we consider visual-based episodic memory only, it is seldom the case that such experiences are pictorial in the relevant sense; (2) it is even more doubtful that non-visual-based episodic memory is pictorial as the author understands it and (3) most (if not all) cases of episodic memory are multisensory or multimodal. The upshot is that even if Liefke’s pictorial appropriation is by and large cogent for certain cases, the scope of such an account is much more limited than it might appear to be.

The other contributors to this forum raise a variety of important challenges to the position I defend in Phenomenalism: A Metaphysics of Chance and Experience. In this essay, I take up these challenges.

Martin Peterson explores a compromise between what he characterizes “textbook” Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. But what if the textbook Kantian is not in crucial respects the Kantian; indeed, what if the textbook Kantian’s duty ethics is an ethical theory purged of precisely those elements of Kantian ethical theory that not only eliminate any such drive to compromise, but even demonstrate why the quest for such a compromise might be deeply misguided? In what follows, I will take up just such an alternative interpretation of Kant, focusing in particular upon the version of this interpretation developed by Barbara Herman. I demonstrate first that on this alternative interpretation, Kantian ethical theory, although undeniably an ethics of duty, is not in Peterson’s sense a duty ethics. I then demonstrate that because Kantian ethics thus interpreted does take consequences into account, it need not compromise with utilitarianism to do so. Finally, I argue that this alternative Kantian has reasons to reject utilitarianism as a theory that appeals fundamentally to the wrong rather than the right kinds of reasons, a theory that distorts the quest in ethical theory for good reasons of the right kind.

The view that agency is central to explaining why actions are subject to moral and prudential norms has considerable appeal. With an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, we would have a unified agential picture of moral, prudential, and epistemic normativity. This paper argues against an agential explanation of epistemic normativity. Prominent proposals about epistemic agency cash the idea out in terms of voluntary agency, reasons-responsiveness, or judgment. I show that each of these proposals faces the following dilemma: either the proposal fails to capture any genuinely explanatory concept of agency or it fails to adequately capture the class of items that are governed by epistemic norms. I suggest that there is reason to think that any account of epistemic agency is likely to face this dilemma. My argument gives us grounds for pessimism about the prospects of an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, and a unified agential picture of all normativity. Furthermore, my paper motivates, without defending, an alternate picture of normativity: the idea that actions and beliefs are two distinct species of a common normative genus. Either there is some other property, apart from agency, which unifies all norm-governed phenomena, or there is no such unifying property at all.

I assess Zhong’s new “causal argument” for physicalism, which differs from previous such arguments in that the premises and conclusion pertain (not just to physical, but) to “physically acceptable” entities or features, which may be either physical or “grounded by” (i.e., metaphysically dependent on) the physical. Zhong argues that his new causal argument improves on previous versions in that the conclusion (unlike previous causal arguments, he maintains) supports non-reductive as well as reductive versions of physicalism, and in that the premises of his argument are better motivated than those of the original arguments. I argue that neither of these motivations are in place. Along the way, I offer a new reason to reject non-contrastive counterfactual accounts of causation.

In his clear, engaging, and highly original book, The Problem of Evil for Atheists (Nagasawa 2024), Yujin Nagasawa aims to defend two theses: “First, the problem of evil is (nearly) everyone’s problem, so everyone has to take it seriously. Second, the problem may well be a more formidable obstacle for naturalist atheists/non-theists than for supernaturalist theists” (p. 3). I focus my attention on the problem Nagasawa presents for pantheism. Nagasawa argues that a standard version of pantheism is vulnerable to what he christens the “divinity problem of evil.” I argue that the success of Nagasawa’s argument for the problem of evil for pantheism rests on controversial assumptions about the shared commitments of pantheistic proposals. I present a version of generic pantheism that is not vulnerable to the divinity problem of evil and I sketch a version of personal pantheism that has additional resources to respond to the problem of evil (and may do better than traditional theism).

Justification Reporting as a mode of science reporting demands that, whenever feasible, science reporters should report appropriate aspects of the nature and strength of scientific justification, or lack thereof, for a reported scientific hypothesis (Gerken 2022). The benefits of such a norm are deemed to be two-fold: First, Justification Reporting is meant to give the audience direct epistemic reasons for accepting the scientific hypothesis; second, it aims at ensuring that audiences do not just absorb scientific claims but also acquire the requisite justifications, thereby promoting better collective understanding of scientific explanations. Yet, by necessity, Justification Reporting must proceed in a simplified manner and should be phrased in layperson’s terms. We argue that the assumption that appropriate simplifications are possible and can be routinely achieved in contexts of science reporting is optimistic and requires further substantiation. In particular, we look at the issue of oversimplification and its epistemic dangers, and argue that, if attempts to render the presentation of scientific justification appropriate to a given target audience overshoot the mark (due to oversimplification or a misleading framing of the issue at hand), Justification Reporting may fall flat and collapse into one of its competitors, Deficit Reporting and Consensus Reporting.

This précis summarizes the main arguments from my book “Unsettled Thoughts. A Theory of Degrees of Rationality.” In my replies to commentators, I explain how the Bayesian framework can deal with evidential situations that are not covered by its standard assumptions, and how this impacts the approximation framework I develop in “Unsettled Thoughts.”

Recent philosophy of memory tends to treat confabulation as a distinctive type of representational error, marked by reference failure, often via direct analogy with the traditional conception of sensory hallucination. I argue that this model misrepresents the phenomenon. Drawing on the empirical possibility of referential confabulation—wherein confabulators mnemically refer to events in their past—I argue that mnemic reference and genuine remembering come apart. This, in particular, challenges causalist theories for which one element—appropriate causation—purports to secure reference and to separate genuine remembering from confabulation. Acknowledging referential confabulation requires causalists to complicate their story in a way that has implications on what remembering is. More generally, referential confabulation prompts a broader rethinking of memory error debates. Rather than being a distinctive type of content-level error, confabulation is better characterised as a processing malfunction: a breakdown in strategic retrieval and monitoring, but not necessarily in referential success. Appreciating this calls us to aim at a more nuanced conception of remembering and its frailties.

This paper aims to refine the dependency thesis, which posits that episodic memory is necessary for acquiring the concept of pastness. By incorporating the hybrid concept thesis, which holds that pastness involves an irreducible experiential component, and the communicability constraint, which states that such experiential content cannot be acquired purely through linguistic or inferential means, this paper argues that pastness cannot be fully explained by relational properties alone. Developmental psychological evidence suggests that temporal cognition progresses in stages, with an early categorical sense of pastness emerging before the ability to structure time sequentially. At this early stage, individuals lack the capacity for time-place indexing, which reinforces the need for direct experiential access in forming the concept of the past. This structured framework clarifies why empirical objections—such as amnesia cases used to challenge the necessity of episodic memory—fail to undermine the dependency thesis. While patients with episodic memory loss retain some relational understanding of time, their concept of pastness remains indirectly dependent on the episodic memory of others. Similarly, critiques arguing that episodic memory is not sufficient for past concept formation conflate different stages of cognitive development, overlooking the necessity of early direct experiential awareness. By integrating philosophical and psychological insights, this paper provides a structured argument for the specific way in which episodic memory contributes to our understanding of time.