Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

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.

In empathic representation, experiences represent others’ experiences as the same as themselves. Feeling sad in empathizing with your friend represents your friend as feeling sad. The unusual role of identity in determining representational content explains how empathy helps us know what others’ experiences are like. Empathic representation is a counterexample to global externalism about content, as Twin Earth cases reveal. Applying it to moral feelings lets naturalistic realists in metaethics solve Moral Twin Earth problems and uphold the universality of morality.

Several recent interpretive controversies over Confucian metaethics concern the nature of moral properties. Specifically, they concern whether the early Confucians Mengzi 孟子 and Xunzi 荀子 believed moral properties are objective and mind-independent or constructed, subjective, or otherwise mind-dependent. In this paper, I challenge the cognitivist framework utilized in this debate and offer instead a noncognitivist, expressivist vocabulary for interpreting early Confucian metaethics. The expressivist vocabulary enables interpreters to pay due attention to the conceptual vocabulary of early Confucian ethics, emphasizing concepts such as ways (dao 道), norms, and basic attitudes of endorsement and rejection, and it shifts interpretive focus away from a conceptual framework favored by cognitivism that emphasizes the role of representation, belief, truth, and properties. It also locates new metaethical ambiguities within early Confucian ethics that better reflect the concerns of the early Confucians.

This is a comment on a not so major point in Alexander Bird’s recent excellent monograph Knowing Science (2022). Bird argues in the first few chapters for the thesis that science aims at knowledge (rather than at truth, verisimilitude, understanding, or problem solving). That is a major point. I will not quibble with this thesis, but rather with the kind of arguments he relies on to establish it. I will discuss the question of how best to argue for or against the claim that X is the aim of science. If one sticks with what I take to be the only adequate source for knowledge about the aim of science, Bird’s suggestion that knowledge is the aim might need to be qualified.

Peterson presents a new hybrid ethical theory in his paper “Dutilitarianism.” As the name suggests, the theory is a mixture of Utilitarianism and Duty ethics. Its main motivation is that it will improve on both. In my commentary, I raise some doubts about this idea. One problem is that Dutilitarianism will not have morally acceptable implications: it will classify some wrong acts as right. Another problem is that it cannot provide any plausible explanation for its verdicts: a believable combination of utilitarian and Kantian explanations for why right acts are right does not seem to fit dutilitarian verdicts. A third problem is that the formula that Peterson suggests for calculating dutilitarian degrees of rightness is unhelpful: it cannot be used to compare acts that are partly right in different ways. A fourth problem is that Dutilitarianism is needlessly complex: it uses degrees of rightness, rather than the standard binary rightness, but this invention neither reflects the potential complexities of rightness grounds nor helps us decide what to do.

When philosophers discuss philosophical views, theories, or arguments, their discussion is often not metaphysically innocent. Given certain substantial but widely accepted assumptions concerning relativization of truth, the worlds framework, and understanding ontological issues in terms of domains of discourse, it can be argued that the extent of metaphysical involvement of some philosophical discussion is considerable. In particular, philosophical discussion concerning modal metaphysics frequently makes the discussants incur nontrivial ontological commitments.