It is argued that the many manifestation of the Knobe effect can be explained by the conjunction of two claims: (i) that in making propositional attitude attributions we are influenced by whether the agent intentionally violated or conformed to a norm; and (ii) there is a fundamental asymmetry between what is needed for intentional norm violation and what is needed for intentional norm conformity -- the former only requires knowing violation, whereas the latter requires that the norm function as a (...) guide. (shrink)

The Church-Fitch argument, or ‘paradox’ of knowability, apparently shows that, if all truths are knowable, then all truths are known. As some truths are unknown, anti-realists who hold that truths must be knowable have been at pains to block the argument. Here, I consider two such approaches: denying that knowledge distributes over conjunction, and moving to a typed logic. I argue that neither approach works. I first show that a Church-Fitch argument can be run with an assumption weaker than distribution (...) of knowledge over conjunction. I then argue that a modified Church-Fitch argument can be constructed in a typed logic. So neither approach will help those who hold that all truths are knowable. (shrink)

(Note: this is now a working pdf of the final version, March 2010)
It is uncontroversial that psychological verbs like ‘believe’, ‘think’, or ‘suspect’ have first person present tense uses that are transparent in the sense that they convey information about the world rather than about the speaker’s psychological states, as in ‘I believe it’s about to rain’. One explanation for these transparent belief reports or avowals, mainly coming from the Wittgensteinian tradition, is that the verbs in question are systematically ambiguous, (...) or that they have an expressive rather than descriptive function in the first-personal case. I maintain, in contrast, that there is no asymmetry between transparent and other uses of psychological verbs at the level of literal meaning. Instead, belief reports convey information about the world in virtue of standard Gricean conversational principles, which also serve to predict when they fail to be transparent. Thus, semantic continuity is maintained and the anomalous behaviour of the verbs explained by a simple pragmatic story. (shrink)

This book advocates dispositional essentialism, the view that natural properties have dispositional essences.1 So, for example, the essence of the property of being negatively charged is to be disposed to attract positively charged objects. From this fact it follows that it is a law that all negatively charged objects will attract positively 10 charged objects; and indeed that this law is metaphysically necessary. Since the identity of the property of being negatively charged is determined by its being related in a (...) certain way to the property of being positively charged, in any world in which these properties exist they must be related so that all negatively charged objects attract positively charged objects. 15 Bird opposes his dispositional essentialism to the view that properties are categorical in nature, with their identities grounded in quiddities that are not exhausted by their relations to other properties. The main exponents of this view are D.M. Armstrong and David Lewis. They take the laws of nature to be contingent though they entertain very different views about their nature: Armstrong is a necessitarian 20 about laws, taking them to be relations of nomic necessitation between universals, while Lewis is a Humean about laws who takes them to be a special kind of regularity. The book is a sustained defence of the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and laws against the competing conceptions espoused by Armstrong and Lewis. One rough way to characterize the difference between these conceptions is to say that 25 the categoricalist sees properties as passive and inert with the laws of nature being fixed independently of the nature of properties whereas, in contrast, the dispositional essentialist sees properties as active potencies from which the laws of nature automatically spring. A slightly more tendentious way to express the difference is to say, as Bird does, that the categoricalist views embrace the Humean doctrine that there are no 30 necessary connexions in nature, while the dispositional essentialist view, on the other hand, repudiates this doctrine.. (shrink)

Like all causal theories in philosophy, the causal theory of action is plagued by the problem of deviant causal chains. I have proposed a solution on the basis of the assumption that mental states and events are causally efficacious in virtue of their contents. This solution has been questioned by Torbjörn Tännsjö (2009). First, I will reply to the objection, and then I will discuss Tännsjö’s alternative.