Aaron Zimmerman presents a new pragmatist account of belief, in terms of information poised to guide our more attentive, controlled actions. And he explores the consequences of this account for our understanding of the relation between psychology and philosophy, the mind and brain, the nature of delusion, faith, pretence, racism, and more.

There was a brief interval, around the turn of the century, when philosophers of mind had converged around a bio-psycho-functionalist account of our ‘propositional attitudes’. Our beliefs and desir...

How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also (...) draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. (shrink)

Neo-Cartesian approaches to belief place greater evidential weight on a subject's introspective judgments than do neo-behaviorist accounts. As a result, the two views differ on whether our absent-minded and weak-willed actions are guided by belief. I argue that simulationist accounts of the concept of belief are committed to neo-Cartesianism, and, though the conceptual and empirical issues that arise are inextricably intertwined, I discuss experimental results that should point theory-theorists in that direction as well. Belief is even less closely connected to (...) behaviour than most contemporary functionalists allow. (shrink)

Constitutivist accounts of self-knowledge argue that a noncontingent, conceptual relation holds between our first-order mental states and our introspective awareness of them. I explicate a constitutivist account of our knowledge of our own beliefs and defend it against criticisms recently raised by Christopher Peacocke. According to Peacocke, constitutivism says that our second-order introspective beliefs are groundless. I show that Peacocke’s arguments apply to reliabilism not to constitutivism per se, and that by adopting a functionalist account of direct accessibility a constitutivist (...) can avoid reliabilism. I then argue that the resulting view is preferable to Peacocke’s own account of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions of self-knowledge have focused on basic cases: our knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs, sensations, experiences, preferences, and intentions. Empiricists argue that we acquire this sort of self-knowledge through inner perception; rationalists assign basic self-knowledge an even more secure source in reason and conceptual understanding. I try to split the difference. Although our knowledge of our own beliefs and thoughts is conceptually insured, our knowledge of our experiences is relevantly like our perceptual knowledge of the external world.

In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about such cases are. To account for these (...) results, one must develop a better conception of the connection between a subject's interests and her body of knowledge than those offered by Stanley and Schaffer. (shrink)

Jordi Fernandez has recently offered an interesting account of introspective justification according to which the very states that (subjectively) justify one's first-order belief that p justify one's second order belief that one believes that p. I provide two objections to Fernandez's account.

Jordi Fernández has recently responded to my objection that his 'extrospectionist' account of self-knowledge posits necessary and sufficient conditions for introspective justification which are neither necessary nor sufficient. I show that my criticisms survive his response unscathed.

The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology brings together philosophers, cognitive scientists, developmental and evolutionary psychologists, animal ethologists, intellectual historians, and educators to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the prospects for moral knowledge ever assembled in print. The book’s thirty chapters feature leading experts describing the nature of moral thought, its evolution, childhood development, and neurological realization. Various forms of moral skepticism are addressed along with the historical development of ideals of moral knowledge and their role in law, education, legal (...) policy, and other areas of social life. -/- Highlights include: -/- • Analyses of moral cognition and moral learning by leading cognitive scientists -/- • Accounts of the normative practices of animals by expert animal ethologists -/- • An overview of the evolution of cooperation by preeminent evolutionary psychologists -/- • Sophisticated treatments of moral skepticism, relativism, moral uncertainty, and know-how by renowned philosophers -/- • Scholarly accounts of the development of Western moral thinking by eminent intellectual historians -/- • Careful analyses of the role played by conceptions of moral knowledge in political liberation movements, religious institutions, criminal law, secondary education, and professional codes of ethics articulated by cutting-edge social and moral philosophers. (shrink)

[1] If only Boghossian’s eminently reasonable book were required reading for every freshman considering entrance into the humanities—the next generation of lay-people would be saved from the uncomprehending repetition of relativist slogans, and future scholars would be kept from mounting baroque, ineffectual attempts at their defense. Fear of Knowledge is engaging, easy to read, and hard to dispute. It’s a satisfying work for those in the choir who will enjoy seeing written on the page precisely what we would say to (...) constructivists were we endowed with Boghossian’s rhetorical elegance. And a great many in the po-mo congregation can expect the book sent to them as suggested reading by their more analytically minded colleagues. I’ve already ordered a few in an attempt to stave off inane conversations I would otherwise certainly face this holiday season. [2] Boghossian begins by addressing a relativistic claim he calls equal validity, ‘that there are many radically different yet “equally valid” ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them’ (p. 2). As Boghossian surely re-. (shrink)

Ordinary thinking about morality and rationality is inconsistent. To arrive at a view of morality that is as faithful to common thought as consistency will allow we must admit that it is not always irrational to knowingly act against the weight of reasons.

InUtilitarianism, Mill defers to Alexander Bain's expertise on the subject of moral judgment to answer common criticisms of the creed. First, we do not blame people or label them immoral when they are less than ideal. Judgments of immorality are commonly reserved for substandard behavior, not suboptimal comportment. Second, we do not commonly insist on full neutrality in benevolence. Indeed, some philosophers argue that we are obliged to exhibit partiality, insofar as it is demanded by our roles as friends, parents, (...) or children. My primary aim in this essay is to explicate Bain's theory of moral judgment and explain how Mill used Bain's psychological doctrines to inform his development of an indirect utilitarian moral philosophy, immune to the criticisms described above. (shrink)

The proximity of introspection makes it difficult to explain. In what does our knowledge of our own beliefs and desires consist? Do we observe them with an inner eye? Do we infer their existence from premises concerning our actions and feelings? I reject both of these suggestions. Instead, I defend the view that facts about what we believe, and certain facts about what we want, are known by us in a direct or unmediated fashion. When one has genuinely introspective knowledge (...) of a belief one's reason for believing that one believes that p is the very fact that one believes that p . ;According to this account, our knowledge of certain mental states is infallible relative to its grounds: there are no false introspective beliefs that have the same kind of justification as our typical, true introspective beliefs. A significant part of the dissertation is spent defending this claim against those who argue for the possibility of certain forms of self-directed error. I argue that it cannot be the case that a subject falsely believes that she believes that p because she instead either believes some other proposition or bears some other attitude toward p, and that these facts impugn observational and inferentialist accounts of self-knowledge. I also develop accounts of what beliefs and desires are to help explain the relative infallibility of introspection. ;The view of self-knowledge I offer is one according to which we have reasons for believing that we believe certain things and reasons for believing that we want certain things. I argue that any adequate account of self-knowledge must have this feature because justification is necessary for knowledge and we must have reasons to be justified. But I reject the view that only phenomenal or experiential states can endow a subject with reasons. Beliefs and desires are individuated by their causal roles---they are not purely phenomenal in nature---but the fact that one believes that p can nevertheless directly ground one's introspective beliefs. Introspective knowledge is both direct and grounded in reason. (shrink)

Hume's claim that reason is a slave to the passions involves both a causal thesis: reason cannot cause action without the aid of the passions, and an evaluative thesis: it is improper to evaluate our actions in terms of their reasonableness. On my reading, Hume motivates his causal thesis by arguing that accurate representation is the function of reason, where a faculty of this kind cannot produce action on its own. (The interpretation helps vindicate Hume of the common charge that (...) he "begs the question" against his opponents.) But Hume's causal thesis does not entail his evaluative thesis, and his commitment to the latter is incredibly thin. According to Hume's positive theory, our evaluative judgments originate in reason integrated with sympathy or humanity. And, I argue, the resulting view depicts us as having substantive, non-instrumental reasons to fulfill our obligations to both prudence and morality. (shrink)

In Belief: A Pragmatic Picture, I define “belief” as information poised to guide relatively attentive, controlled action. Though I admit that this is one of several definitions compatible with science and common speech, I mount a pragmatic argument for its adoption as the best means for structuring egalitarian social relations. I here further explicate and defend the pragmatic view of belief in response to my critics.

Teachers not only serve as caretakers for the students in their classroom but also serve as stewards for society's next generation. In this way, teachers are charged with responsibility for the present and the future of their world. Shouldering this responsibility is no less than an existential dilemma that requires not only professional solutions but also personal responsibility rooted in subjective authenticity. In the edited volume, authors will explore how the philosophy of Existentialism can help teachers, teacher educators, educational researchers, (...) and policymakers better understand the existential responsibility that teachers shoulder. The core concepts of Existential philosophy explored in this edited volume imply that a teacher's lived experience cannot be defined solely by professional knowledge or dictates. Teachers have the capacity to create subjective meaning through their own agency, and there is no guarantee that those subjective meanings will accord with professional dictates. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that professional dictates are more valid than the existential realities of individual teachers. The philosophy of Existentialism encourages individuals to reflect on the existential realities of isolation, freedom, meaninglessness, and death in an effort to propel individuals towards more authentic ways of engaging in the world. The chapters of this edited volume advance the argument that being and becoming a teacher must be understood - at least in part - from the subjective perspective of the individual and that teachers are responsible for authoring the meaning of their lives and of their work. (shrink)

Hume's claim that reason is a slave to the passions involves both a causal thesis: reason cannot cause action without the aid of the passions, and an evaluative thesis: it is improper to evaluate our actions in terms of their reasonableness. On my reading, Hume motivates his causal thesis by arguing that accurate representation is the function of reason, where a faculty of this kind cannot produce action on its own. (The interpretation helps vindicate Hume of the common charge that (...) he "begs the question" against his opponents.) But Hume's causal thesis does not entail his evaluative thesis, and his commitment to the latter is incredibly thin. According to Hume's positive theory, our evaluative judgments originate in reason integrated with sympathy or humanity. And, I argue, the resulting view depicts us as having substantive, non-instrumental reasons to fulfill our obligations to both prudence and morality. (shrink)

Descartes famously argued, on purely conceptual grounds, that even an extremely powerful being could not trick him into mistakenly judging that he was thinking. Of course, it is not necessarily true that Descartes is thinking. Still, Descartes claimed, it is necessarily true that if a person judges that she is thinking, that person is thinking. Following Tyler Burge (1988) we call such judgments ‘self-verifying.’ More exactly, a judgment j performed by a subject S at a time t is selfverifying if (...) and only if the fact that S has made j at t entails that j is true at t.2 Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, ‘I am thinking that p’. We call such judgments ‘cogito’ judgments. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Theorists have tried to account for the self-verifying status of cogito judgments by arguing that the second-order judgment that one is thinking that p contains the thought that p as a part of it. I argue (§1) that the accuracy of the containment model is entailed by a Russellian view of content (according to which ‘‘belief’’ contexts are both extensional and transparent) when the Russellian view is attached to some fairly uncontroversial assumptions. The accuracy of the containment model is also entailed by non-hierarchical Fregean views of content according to which expressions in oblique contexts both denote and express first-level senses (§2), but there are compelling arguments against non-hierarchical Fregean views (§3). Moreover, the extremely plausible account of self-verification provided by Russellianism is not entailed by theories that follow Frege in accepting a hierarchy of senses and so allow that expressions in oblique contexts express senses that are not identical to the senses they there denote (§4).. (shrink)

Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, 'I am thinking that p'. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Burge's intuitively compelling claim that cogito judgments are conceptually self-verifying poses a real challenge to neo-Fregean theories of content.

Recent years have brought relativistic accounts of knowledge, first-person belief, and future contingents to prominence. I discuss these views, distinguish non-trivial from trivial forms of relativism, and then argue against relativism in all of its substantive varieties.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the eighth volume in (...) the series. It contains essays by Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne, Maya Eddon, Shamik Dasgupta, Bill Dunaway, Cody Gilmore, Ted Sider, Aaron Cotnoir, Katherine Hawley, Frabrice Correia and Sven Rosencrantz, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Ross Cameron. (shrink)

I provide a brief précis of Aaron Zimmerman’s book, Belief: A Pragmatic Picture, then explore two possible problems for the view. The first concerns whether the account of belief can successfully intervene in the debate between those who hold emotions are partly constituted by evaluative beliefs and those who deny this. The second concerns whether the view can explain that distinctive form of white ignorance that is manifest in an unwillingness to draw relatively obvious action-guiding beliefs from widely (...) shared information. Thinking about cases of this kind raises the question of whether Zimmerman’s account is problematically individualist, because of downplaying the importance of converging on an account of belief given the role of belief attribution in a suite of critical practices that are essential to communities of inquiry. If we, collectively, must commit to converging on an account of belief, but different accounts serve the interests of different groups, then the meta-level thesis that we should choose an account on pragmatic grounds raises the question of whose interests such an account should serve. (shrink)

While Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief is rightly subtitled “A Pragmatic Picture”, it concerns a set of topics about which Pragmatists themselves are not always in agreement. Indeed, while there has been a noticeable push back against evidentialism in contemporary analytic epistemology, the view can at times seem ascendant within the literature on pragmatism itself. In particular, Peirceians tend to presuppose something closer to evidentialism when they accuse Jamesians of taking pragmatism in an unproductive and irrationalist direction. This split goes (...) back at least as far as Peirce’s reaction to James’s “The Will to believe” which Peirce “scorned” as the view that “Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did.” Pragmatists of the more Peircian bent have shared this scorn for the suggestion that our beliefs could be justified for pragmatic reasons, but Zimmerman’s book gives us reason to think that we should take a Jamesian rather the Peircian approach to these issues. (shrink)

_ Belief: A Pragmatic Picture _ By ZimmermanAaron Z.Oxford University Press, 2018. viii + 180 pp.

Faced with the live, forced, and momentous option of whether to accept some form of theism, William James had the will to believe in God. Moved by similar pragmatic principles, Aaron Zimmerman advises self-professed egalitarians to believe they lack racist beliefs—even in the face of less explicit indices that, for some, point in the opposite direction.

Property dualism is enjoying a slight resurgence in popularity, these days; substance dualism, not so much. But it is not as easy as one might think to be a property dualist and a substance materialist. The reasons for being a property dualist support the idea that some phenomenal properties (or qualia) are as fundamental as the most basic physical properties; but what material objects could be the bearers of the qualia? If even some qualia require an adverbial construal (if they (...) are modifications of the thing that is conscious because of them, not properties of something else to which the subject of consciousness is related), then the property dualist can be driven to speculative forms of materialism none of which, at this point, looks more likely to be true than the more modest versions of emergent dualism defended by contemporary substance dualists. (shrink)

At the heart of ethics reside the concepts of good and bad; they are at work when we assess whether a person is virtuous or vicious, an act right or wrong, a decision defensible or indefensible, a goal desirable or undesirable. But there are many varieties of goodness and badness. At their core lie intrinsic goodness and badness, the sort of value that something has for its own sake. It is in virtue of intrinsic value that other types of value (...) may be understood, and hence that we can begin to come to terms with questions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and so on. This book investigates the nature of intrinsic value: just what it is for something to be valuable for its own sake, just what sort of thing can have such value, just how such a value is to be computed. In the final chapter, the fruits of this investigation are applied to a discussion of pleasure, pain, and displeasure and also of moral virtue and vice, in order to determine just what value lies within these phenomena. (shrink)

... dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed.

The ‘friends of temporal parts’ and their opponents disagree about how things persist through time. The former, who hold what is sometimes called a ‘4D’ theory of persistence, typically claim that all objects that last for any period of time are spread out through time in the same way that spatially extended objects are spread out through space — a different part for each region that the object fills. David Lewis calls this manner of persisting ‘perdurance’. The opposing, ‘3D’ theory (...) has it that at least some objects do not persist in this manner; they ‘endure’ through time by ‘being wholly present at more than one time’.1 A related dispute pits ‘presentists’ against ‘non-presentists’. Presentists hold that the only things that really exist are those that exist now, at the present moment; and nonpresentists believe in something like a ‘block-universe’ in which non-simultaneous objects and events nevertheless co-exist (in a tenseless or non-temporal sense). Of late, the relations between these four positions have come under considerable scrutiny.2 As Ned Markosian has pointed out, it would be surprising if commitment to a perdurance or endurance theory of persistence automatically foreclosed one’s options in the presentism—non-presentism debate. But, says Markosian, that is just what the standard formulations of the perdurance and endurance theories imply.3 David Lewis has set the terms of the debate; in his usage, someone who thinks that all persisting objects endure would be said to hold the following. (shrink)

The fact that philosophy is systematic—that philosophical issues are thoroughly interconnected—was a commonplace among nineteenth century idealists, then neglected by analytic philosophers throughout much of the twentieth century, and has now finally started to get some renewed attention. But other than calling attention to the fact, few philosophers have tried to say what it consists in, or what its implications are. -/- I argue that the systematicity of philosophy has disastrous epistemological implications. In particular, it implies philosophical skepticism: philosophers are (...) rationally prohibited from believing any philosophical thesis. The argument goes by way of a new principle that connects inquiry with what is rational to believe. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between my argument and other, more well-trodden arguments for philosophical skepticism. (shrink)

This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements (...) that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close. (shrink)

In their target article, McKay & Dennett (M&D) conclude that only “positive illusions” are adaptive misbeliefs. Relying on overly strict conceptual schisms (deficit vs. motivational, functional vs. organic, perception vs. belief), they prematurely discount delusions asbiologicallyadaptive. In contrast to their view that “motivation” plays a psychological but not a biological function in a two-factor model of the forming and maintenance of delusions, we propose asingleimpairment in prediction-error–driven (i.e., motivational) learning in three stages in which delusions play a biologically adaptive role.