Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

A familiar form of alethic pluralism is built on the view that while there is a single concept of truth, there are multiple properties associated with it. A newer form of alethic pluralism develops the view that there are multiple concepts of truth. Importantly, this form of pluralism has been offered an empirical footing, notably in the work of Barnard and Ulatowski, Mizumoto, and Wyatt. My paper offers a critical appraisal of that project: while the appeal to empirical data is a welcome addition to the philosophy of truth, I doubt that it supports conceptual pluralism. First, I argue that there are severe challenges involved in the very formulation of conceptual pluralism about truth: it risks being an incoherent thesis. Once that problem is addressed, I review the empirical data that have been associated with the thesis, and argue that the evidence points not toward a plurality of concepts but rather a plurality of theories and conceptions.

In Appearance and Explanation, McCain and Moretti propose a novel internalist account of epistemic justification called phenomenal explanationism, which combines phenomenal conservatism and explanationism. I argue that the current version of phenomenal explanationism faces a dilemma: either it omits the awareness requirement but implies an implausible form of logical-mathematical omniscience, or it preserves the requirement but leads to a vicious regress. I suggest how phenomenal explanationism might be revised to avoid this dilemma.

Traditionally, causal arguments for physicalism have been taken to favour a ‘reductive’ brand of physicalism, according to which all the mental stuff is identical to some of the physical stuff. Many flaws have been found with these traditional causal arguments. Zhong (Asian Journal of Philosophy, 2(2), 1–9, 2023) develops a new causal argument that avoids these flaws and favours a milder, non-reductive brand of physicalism instead. The conclusion is that all mental stuff is metaphysically necessitated by some of the physical stuff. I argue that neither the traditional nor the new causal argument holds much sway over non-physicalism. The problem is that causation just does not run that deep. It is a fairly superficial relationship and a poor guide to the metaphysically weighty facts of our world, such as what is identical to what, and what metaphysically necessitates what.

A prominent position about moral responsibility claims that a necessary condition on accountability blame is that, at the time of action, the agent must be sufficiently reasons-responsive so as to be capable of acting differently by following the pertinent moral reasons and thus avoid wrongdoing. Call this the Accountability with Avoidability view (or AWA). In this paper I aim to show that AWA is false by doing three things. First, I argue that it badly contradicts moral commonsense concerning the moral responsibility of a particularly egregious kind of wrongdoer. Second, I show that AWA’s three most prominent rationales—based on the notions of desert, demands, and excuses—all fail to support a robust reasons-responsiveness requirement on accountability. Finally, I sketch an alternative conception of accountability—accountability without avoidability—that dispenses with robust reasons-responsiveness and appeals instead to the capacity of agents to convey moral meaning through their conduct as the key element in the moral psychology of responsible agency.

Histories of philosophy usually incorporate logical empiricism into the story of either analytic philosophy or empiricism. Alan Richardson’s Logical Empiricism as Scientific Philosophy (2023) tells a different story, in which the diverse group of thinkers associated with logical empiricism is united by an attitude rather than a single philosophical methodology or epistemological project. I examine some historiographical consequences of adopting Richardson’s new story, paying particular attention to its significance for our current moment.

In Appearance and Explanation, McCain and Moretti raise three objections to Phenomenal Conservatism: the problem of explaining defeaters, the problem of reflective awareness, and the bootstrapping problem. I address all three problems and then raise three objections to Phenomenal Explanationism: the problem of necessary truths, the problem of unreflective observers, and the problem of excessive flexibility. I conclude that there is no need to supplement Phenomenal Conservatism with Explanationism.

The overall aim of this article is to reorient the contemporary debate about epistemic consequentialism. Thus far, the debate has to a large extent focused on whether standard theories of epistemic justification are consequentialist in nature and therefore vulnerable to certain trade-off cases where accepting a false or unjustified belief leads to good epistemic outcomes. We claim that these trade-offs raise an important—yet somewhat neglected—issue about the epistemic demands on inquiry. We first distinguish between two different kinds of epistemic evaluation, viz., backing evaluation and outcome evaluation, and then go on to outline and discuss a consequentialist metatheory about the right combinations of decision procedures to adopt in inquiry. Note that the piece is exploratory in the following sense: we try to explore epistemic evaluation in consequentialist terms, which involves stating a form of epistemic consequentialism, but also pointing to what non-consequentialist alternatives might be. Rather than trying to argue decisively for a particular conclusion, we aim to outline various intricate issues in an underexplored area of theorizing. In the course of doing this, we’ll transpose some well-known themes from discussions of consequentialism in ethics to the current debate about consequentialism in epistemology, e.g., agent-neutrality, options, and side-constraints.

JeeLoo Liu makes two main arguments in her insightful essay “The metaphysical as the ethical.” First, against claims made by Wing-tsit Chan and others, she demonstrates that Wang Yangming’s metaphysics is not a problematic form of subjective idealism but in fact “aligns with commonsense realism.” Second, against both Chan and Chen Lai, she maintains that Wang does not commit a problematic conflation of fact and value. Instead, Liu shows that Wang can be read along lines very similar to contemporary pragmatist metaphysics, which itself resists a hard distinction between fact and value. This essay offers a range of clarifications and cautions against the background of general agreement and ends with a question about how far we can really push the parallel between Wang and pragmatism.

On Kant’s account, “public use of reason” is the use that a truth-seeking scholar makes of his reason when he communicates his thoughts in writing to a world of readers. Commentators tend to treat this account as expressing an egalitarian ideal, without taking seriously the limiting conditions—especially the scholarship condition—built into it. In this paper, I interrogate Kant’s original account of public reason in connection with his construction of the “Oriental” as a linguistically and therefore epistemically and culturally inferior Other. I thereby give reasons to worry that Kant’s account is substantively inegalitarian (even if it is nominally egalitarian). I also draw attention to the fact that Kant constructed a linguistic Other against the backdrop of colonialism and from a position of power. This positionality gave what he said about the Other an ideology-forming and world-making effect. In this way, his exclusionary discursive practices—such as depicting the Oriental as an inferior linguistic Other—could have a lasting impact on knowledge production and on the real-world exercise of public reason.

In this paper, we will report results of two sets of cross-linguistic studies about truth judgments and correctness judgments by speakers of English and Japanese, which will show a significant influence of a moral-political factor in an utterance on Japanese truth/correctness judgments. Following up Mizumoto (2022), which demonstrated such an effect on Japanese truth judgments and correctness judgments about utterances containing a contrastive conjunction (such as “but”), Study 1 shows the same effect on Japanese correctness judgments about utterances containing a pejorative. Study 2 then shows that a moral-political factor in utterances can affect Japanese truth/correctness judgments about them even if they are simple utterances containing neither a contrastive conjunction nor a pejorative. In conclusion, we will briefly discuss whether this effect is linguistic or psychological, and present three hypotheses: the semantic hypothesis, pragmatic hypothesis, and error theory hypothesis, to account for the data, which we leave open for future studies.