In the context of animal cognitive research, anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of uniquely human mental characteristics to animals. Those who worry about anthropomorphism in research, however, are immediately confronted with the question of which properties are uniquely human. One might think that researchers must first hypothesize the existence of a feature in an animal before they can, with warrant, claim that the property is uniquely human. But all too often, this isn't the approach. Rather, there is an a (...) priori argument against attributing some properties to animals. Which features are thought to be uniquely human on a priori grounds? The class can be quite large, including psychological states such as beliefs and desires, personality traits such as confidence or timidity, emotions such as happiness or anger, social organizational properties such as culture or friendship, moral behavior such as punishment or rape. For convenience, I will refer to the members of the class as "psychological properties". One critic includes feeling, purpose, intentionality, consciousness, and even cognition in his list of psychological properties that are incorrectly attributed to animals (Kennedy 1992). Among the critics, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what counts as an anthropomorphic attribution, and this alone should raise questions about the charge. We can identify two different questions about the practice of attributing psychological properties to animals within a scientific context. First we can ask whether it is scientifically respectable to examine questions about the mental, psychological, cultural, etc. states of animals. Those who bemoan anthropomorphism think that we ought not even ask such questions. I will look at the worries about asking the question, and argue that there is no special problem with it. The second question arises with an affirmative answer to the first. Given that it is scientifically respectable to examine whether an animal has a psychological property, there must be some scientifically respectable method for doing the examination.. (shrink)

In the twenty-five or so years since Paul Churchland (1981) proposed its elimination, defenders of folk psychology have argued for the ubiquity of propositional attitude attribution in human social cognition. If we didn’t understand others in terms of their beliefs and desires, we would see others as ‘‘baffling ciphers’’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 29) and it would be ‘‘the end of the world’’ (Fodor, 1990, p. 156). Because the world continues, and we seem to predict and explain what others do with (...) a remarkable degree of accuracy, the advocates of folk psychology tend to accept that we do rely on a third-person attribution of propositional attitudes as the central means for understanding other people. Based on this shared assumption, a central project in folk psychology since Churchland’s paper has been focused on the cognitive architecture that subsumes this understanding. Humans attribute propositional attitudes to predict and explain, but how do they do it? Is our understanding of others’ behavior theoretical, as Churchland originally argued? Is.. (shrink)

Roderick Chisholm argued that ‘look’ can be used in three different ways: epistemically, comparatively and non-comparatively. Chisholm’s non-comparative (non-epistemic) sense of ‘look’ played an important role in Frank Jackson’s argument for the sense-datum theory. The question remains whether Chisholm’s distinction is a genuine semantic distinction and if so, which conclusions follow concerning the contents of perception. I argue here that Chisholm’s..

I respond to three arguments aimed at establishing that natural kind properties occur in the experiential content of visual experience: the argument from phenomenal difference, the argument from mandatory seeing, and the argument from associative agnosia. I conclude with a simple argument against the view that natural kind properties occur in the experiential content of visual experience.

"Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation." — Sarah Addison Allen (The Sugar Queen).

A proof of a theorem in mathematics is what we require to convince ourselves and others of the truth of the statement made by the theorem. Here ‘truth’ is taken in its prima facie sense, i.e. the notions involved in the statement of the theorem are supposed to be meaningful, and if it is to be truth for us, we are supposed to understand the meaning of those notions. In order to be convinced of a proof, one must follow the (...) argument and check the various steps for ourselves, making use not only of what is given in the proof itself but what is required from background knowledge, i.e. previous statements that we have already accepted to be true on some ground or other. And that background knowledge may require understanding other notions not explicitly involved in the statement of the theorem. So both background knowledge and the understanding of meanings is an essential component of what it takes to accept a given proof. Even given that, it is possible to go through the steps of a given proof and not understand the proof itself. That is a further kind of understanding, which, when successful, leads one to say, ”Oh, I see!” In other words, this “really understanding the proof” is a special kind of insight into how and why the proof works. And that is necessary if one wants to follow proofs of related theorems and contribute to the subject by creating new proofs oneself. It follows that one cannot truly be a consumer and producer of mathematics without achieving real understanding of the arguments. (shrink)

A satisfactory solution to the problem of consciousness would take the form of a simple yet fully general model which specifies the precise conditions under which any given state of consciousness occurs. Science has uncovered numerous correlations between consciousness and neural activity, but it has not yet come anywhere close to this. We are still looking for the Newtonian laws of consciousness. One of the main difficulties with consciousness is that we lack a language in which to formulate illuminating generalizations (...) about it. Philosophers and scientists talk about "what it’s like", sensations, feelings, and perceptual states such as seeing and hearing. This language does allow a precise articulation of the internal structures of conscious states and their inter-relations. It is inadequate to capture relations of the kind we are looking for between conscious states and physical states. In this thesis I refine and defend a theory of consciousness which promises to solve this regimentation problem: the representational theory of consciousness. I argue that the representational theory can solve the regimentation problem and smooth out other important obstacles to a fruitful study of consciousness. I also make a case for the theory independently of its payoffs, and I discuss the leading opposing theories at some length. (shrink)

Little work has been done to explore the moral foundations of the state’s right to territory.1 In modern times, the state has mostly been assumed to be a territorial unit, and no need was perceived to reflect on precisely what justifies its territorial jurisdiction. The state’s territoriality is related to another topic that has remained under-theorized: immigration. There is, moreover, an obvious relationship between these topics: the more powerful a state’s rights over its territory, the more powerful the right to (...) constrain access to that territory might become – or so, at any rate, we might suppose. Rights to territory and rights to immigration are usefully theorized together.2 Our starting point is a Lockean analysis of the moral foundations of territoriality offered by Simmons (2001). This is a natural starting point not only because Simmons is one of the very few contemporary writers who have taken up philosophical questions about territoriality in the first place, but also because Locke’s thought, as Simmons makes clear, actually allows for the development of a sophisticated account of territoriality. This makes Locke stand out simply because generally modern political.. (shrink)

We show that Bayesian ex post aggregation is unstable with respect to refinements. Suppose a group of Bayesians use ex post aggregation. Since it is a joint problem, each agent’s problem is captured by the same model, but probabilities and utilities may vary. If they analyze the same situation in more detail, their refined analysis should preserve their preferences among acts. However, ex post aggregation could bring about a preference reversal on the group level. Ex post aggregation thus depends on (...) how much information is used and may keep oscillating (‘‘flipping’’) as one keeps adding more information. (shrink)

The usage of sorts in first-order automated deduction has brought greater conciseness of representation and a considerable gain in efficiency by reducing the search spaces involved. This suggests that sort information can be employed in higher-order theorem proving with similar results.

The semantics of everyday language and the semantics..

Semantic analysis, – inference on the basis of semantic information and world knowledge – still is largely uncharted territory in dy- (3) namic semantics. It is needed, among other things, for the reconstruction of linguistically unspecified parts of the discourse or for restricting ambiguities introduced by prior analysis processes, i.e.

We propose an infrastructure for collaborative content management and version control for structured mathematical knowledge. This will enable multiple users to work jointly on mathematical theories with minimal interference. We describe the API and the functionality needed to realize a cvs-like version control and distribution model. This architecture extends the cvs architecture in two ways, motivated by the specific needs of distributed management of structured mathematical knowledge on the Internet. On the one hand the one-level client/server model of cvs is (...) generalized to a multi-level graph of client/server relations, and on the other hand the underlying change-detection tools take the math-specific structure of the data into account. (shrink)

Harvard University 1. Julian Le Grand offers an account of public policy that arranges views along two axes: a motivational axis, along which individuals can be knights or knaves, and an agency axis, along which they can be pawns or queens. Knaves are concerned to further their self-interest, understood broadly in terms of whatever people may care about. Following Hume, Le Grand calls such characters “knaves,” but this has no automatic connotations with illegal activities. Knights, on the other hand, are (...) motivated to help others for no private reward, even to the detriment of their interests. Pawns, like the pieces on the chess board, are passive victims of circumstances, unable to make responsible choices. Queens do make such choices: they are empowered agents responsible for their fates. Taken literally, these characterizations are a caricature, but they are useful to sketch political standpoints. For instance, social democrats take individuals to be largely products of circumstances and thus treat them as pawns qua targets of policy. At the same time, they have an optimistic view of human nature, thinking of those empowered to execute policy as knights. So they design policy in such a way that service recipients are left with rather limited choices, whereas providers (doctors, teachers, etc.) are taken to want the best for their clients. Neo-liberals take a pessimistic.. (shrink)

But the outcome of that first experiment whereby man became conscious of his reason as a faculty which can extend beyond the limits to which all animals are confined was of great importance, and it influenced his way of life decisively. (Immanuel Kant, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History)1..

Although championed by the Marquis the Condorcet and many others, majority rule has often been rejected as indeterminate, incoherent, or implausible. Majority rule’s arch competitor is the Borda count, proposed by the Count de Borda, and there has long been a dispute between the two approaches. In several..

When it comes to name-calling, structural realists have heard pretty much all of it. Among the many insults, they have been called ‘empiricist anti-realists’ but also ‘traditional scientific realists’. Obviously the collapse accusations that motivate these two insults cannot both be true at the same time. The aim of this paper is to defend the epistemic variety of structural realism against the accusation of collapse to traditional scientific realism. In so doing, I turn the tables on traditional scientific realists by (...) presenting them with a dilemma. They can either opt for a construal of their view that permits epistemic access to non-structural features of unobservables but then face the daunting task of substantiating a claim that seems to have little hope of being true or they can drop the requirement of epistemic access to non-structural features but then face a collapse to epistemic structural realism. There is thus only one well supported way to be a realist. No wonder then that many traditional scientific realists have over the years expressed views that are strikingly similar to epistemic structural realism. It is high time to let these epistemic structural realists out of the closet. (shrink)

This study is concerned with john R0emer’s Equality of Opportunity} I argue that his theory is committed to compatibilism but that one of its central claims is plausible only within a libertarian view on the free-will problem. Thus Roemer’s theory is troubled by a deep structural inco— herence and should be rejected as an account of equality of opportunity? Let me briefly introduce some background to Roemer’s theory. Contemporary egalitarians face two major challenges: first, they need..

January 21, 2010 will go down as a dark day in the history of American democracy, and its decline. The editors of the New York Times did not exaggerate when they wrote that the Supreme Court decision that day “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding” – more explicitly, for permitting corporate managers to do so, since current laws (...) permit them to spend shareholder money without consent. (shrink)

Historically, opponents of realism have argued that the world’s objects are constructed by our cognitive activities—or, less colorfully, that they exist and are as they are only relative to our ways of thinking and speaking. To this realists have stoutly replied that even if we had thought or spoken in ways different from our actual ones, the world would still have been populated by the same objects as it actually is, or at least by most of them. (Our thinking differently (...) could cause some differences in which objects exist, or in what some existing objects are like, but that is another matter.) Yet this reply has repeatedly failed to amount to a decisive objection. For opponents of realism have repeatedly argued, in one way or another, that we construct the world’s objects in just such a way as to render such a counterfactual true. We construct them so as to appear not to be our constructs. Just such a debate is currently underway concerning the properties that are essential to the world’s objects. It is widely agreed, with varying caveats1, that there are such properties—that by virtue of belonging to one or another natural kind, the world’s objects possess certain properties essentially, and have individual careers that last exactly as long as those essential properties are jointly present. But what underlies the status as essential of the properties that are thus essential to objects in the world? The realist answer treats essential status as mind-independent, and assigns it to the way the world works (Elder.. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that, in Hilary Putnam’s phrase, there are no “ready-made objects” (Putnam 1982; cf. Putnam 1981, Ch. 3). Instead the objects we consider real are partly of our own making: we carve them out of the world (or out of experience). The usual reason for supposing this lies in the claim that there are available to us alternative ways of “dividing reality” into objects (to quote the title of Hirsch 1993), ways which would afford us every bit (...) as much practical and cognitive mastery as we now possess. Hence there is no warrant for supposing that the objects recognized by such alternative schemes are any less real than the objects we actually consider real—unless we are to appeal to a “God’s-eye perspective”, which virtually no one wants to do. The reasonable conclusion, many philosophers suppose, is that any system of objects exists only relative to a particular conceptual scheme or system of predicates. Our system of objects is, in this sense, partly of our own making. But this claim should not be heard as a reaffirmation of the idealism of Fichte or Husserl. It is more accurate to take it merely as a claim about sameness and difference among the objects of the world. It is the claim that sameness and difference, whether at the level of kinds or of individual objects, do not obtain mind-independently, but only relative to a conceptual scheme or predicate system (see, e.g., Putnam 1981, pp. 53-54). That is, whether two objects are of the same kind, and whether one and the same individual object now exists at such-and-such.. (shrink)

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a ‘mental number line’. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. Here we show that preverbal infants transfer the discrimination of an ordered series of numerosities to the discrimination of an ordered series of line lengths. Moreover, infants construct relationships between individual numbers (...) and line lengths that vary positively, but not between numbers and lengths that vary inversely. These findings provide evidence for an early developing predisposition to relate representations of numerical magnitude and spatial length. A central foundation of mathematics, science and technology therefore emerges prior to experience with language, symbol systems, or measurement devices. (shrink)

3-; much of this book attests, a wealth of research provides evidence that human infants have a core capacity for representing objects and their zotions. The environment contains a diversity of objects, however, with varied properties and behaviors. Objects such as pebbles and blocks are inert; tev move or change only in response to an external force. Objects such as utterflies and cars have internal mechanisms generating forces that can propel them. Self-propelled objects can be further differentiated, according to ine (...) nature and characteristic pattern of their motions and the circumstances fiat evoke them. To navigate successfully in this diverse and changing envitonment, perceivers and actors must categorize the objects around them appropriately, determining what kind of thing each object is and how it is Llcely to behave. (shrink)

The idea that temporal propositions are vague predicates is examined with attention to the nature of the objects over which the predicates range. These objects should not, it is argued, be identified once and for all with points or intervals in the real line (or any fixed linear order). Context has an important role to play not only in sidestepping the Sorites paradox (Gaifman 2002) but also in shaping temporal moments/extent (Landman 1991). The Russell-Wiener construction of time from events (Kamp (...) 1979) is related to a notion of context given by a string of observations, the vagueness in which is brought out by grounding the observations in the real line. With this notion of context, the context dependency functions in Gaifman 2002 are adapted to interpret temporal propositions. (shrink)

Temporal propositions are mapped to sets of strings that witness (in a precise sense) the propositions over discrete linear Kripke frames. The strings are collected into regular languages to ensure the decidability of entailments given by inclusions between languages. (Various notions of bounded entailment are shown to be expressible as language inclusions.) The languages unwind computations implicit in the logical (and temporal) connectives via a system of finite-state constraints adapted from finite-state morphology. Applications to Hybrid Logic and non-monotonic inertial reasoning (...) are briefly considered. (shrink)

The lecture that we have heard consists of excerpts from Professor Stanley’s forthcoming book Knowledge and Interest, and it consists of two parts, a messy part and a clean part; the messy part is from the book’s introduction, which describes the “central data that is at issue in this debate,” and the clean part is from Chapter 7, which presents an interesting criticism of a semantical theory of knowledge-attribution sentences that makes their truth-conditions relative to non-time-world circumstances of evaluation, e.g. (...) to a judgment-maker at a time. There is a nice discussion of Peter Lasersohn’s semantical views, with kudos, bricks, and bats to Mark Richard, Jeff King, Gareth Evans, John Hawthorne, David Kaplan, and David Lewis. Though I found this discussion of great interest and would have welcomed more discussion of an earlier view of Jason Stanley’s in which “what is said” and “what is believed” can be used to refer to entities that are not propositional, e.g. semantic values that are neutral with respect to time and place, a view of Stanley’s of which I am a fan, I was more provoked by the messy part: the appeal to intuitive linguistic data employed by supporters of epistemological contextualism, e.g. Stewart Cohen, Keith De Rose, a time-slice of David Lewis, among others. I will focus on what Professor Stanley says about the data in his paper and not worry the scholarly question about their relation to other views. (shrink)

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

Many years ago, when the world and we were young, in 1978 in fact, John Searle published in Erkenntnis 13: 207-24 (reprinted in Searle 1979: 117-36) a provocative article “Literal Meaning”. In the essay Searle considers the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ in circumstances in which the cat and mat are in the prototypical spatial relationship of one being snuggled up to the other, except that they are both floating freely in various orientations in outer space, in which (...) there is no gravitational field with respect to which the cat is “above” the mat. Is the cat on the mat? Searle asserts that the notion of a literal meaning of ‘The cat is on the mat’ depends on assumptions like the existence of a local gravitational field in which ‘above’ and ‘below’ have an application. (What this amounts to in the ordinary, earth-bound case is that the assertion of ‘The cat is on the mat’ is true if and only if the cat is above and touching – in some typical fashion -- the mat beneath it. The earth’s local gravitational field provides a preferred spatial orientation; freely falling bodies fall “down”.) Searle’s thesis was that for: a large class of unambiguous sentences such as ‘The cat is on the mat’, the notion of the literal meaning of the sentence only has application relative to a set of background assumptions. The truth conditions of the sentence will vary with variations in these background assumptions; and given the absence or presence of some background assumptions the sentence does not have determinate truth conditions. These variations have nothing to do with indexicality, change of meaning, ambiguity, conversational implication, vagueness or presupposition as these notions are standardly discussed in the philosophical and linguistic literature. …[O]ur examples suggest that the assumptions are not specifiable as part of the semantic content of the sentence, or as presuppositions of the applicability of that semantic content… (1979: 125-6) 1.. (shrink)

One of the most powerful arguments against intentionalism and in favour of disjunctivism about perceptual experiences has been formulated by M. G. F. Martin in his paper The Transparency of Experience. The overall structure of this argument may be stated in the form of a triad of claims which are jointly inconsistent.

Taxation policy is driven by many factors, including public opinion, but little research has examined the strength and stability of the public’s taxation preferences. This paper demonstrates one way in which preferences for progressiveness depend on the framing of the question asked. Participants indicated how they would share a fixed tax burden between two individuals who earned different amounts of money, either by adjusting the amount of tax paid by the two individuals, or by adjusting the amount of post-tax income (...) retained. The units in which tax was described — amount of money or percentage tax rate — were manipulated orthogonally. There was a strong metric effect: Participants favored progressiveness more when tax was described as a percentage rather than amount. However, there was also a clear interaction: for amounts, participants favored progressiveness significantly more when considering post-tax money retained rather than tax paid; for percentages, no such effect was found. (shrink)

The debate in the Oxford Union on 29 January 2010 was on the motion "This House believes that in politics, money talks loudest". Ted Honderich's speech in support of the motion was followed by those of Stuart Wheeler, known for his contribution of £5,000,000 to the Conservative Party, and of Hugo Rifkind, a columnist for The Times and The Spectator . The motion was opposed by Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute, Lord Oakeshott the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, and (...) Dr. Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon. In the vote at the end, the motion was carried. The debate took place the evening of the day when Tony Blair appeared to defend himself in the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war. (shrink)

In their new book Relativism and Monadic Truth, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne seek to defend a “mainstream” view of the contents of thought and talk, which they call Simplicity, against recent “analytic relativist” heresays (including my own). Simplicity consists in five theses: T1 There are propositions and they instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. T2 The semantic values of declarative sentences relative to contexts of utterance are propositions.

In the introduction to their vagueness reader, Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith classified accounts of vagueness with respect to how they handle the sorites paradox. The sorites paradox is set out in the standard way with reference to a sorites se- quence s of objects s1, . . . , sn and an associated vague predicate F . In S, there is a very small and seemingly negligible difference between any two adjacent elements si and si +1 with respect to (...) the dimension that is relevant to satisfying F (for instance, if F is ‘. . . is tall’, then the dimension is height). This suggests that if si satisfies F , then so does si +1. Since S is a sorites sequence for F it is also stipulated that s1 satisfies F and that sn does not. Let ti denote si, 1 ≤ i ≤ n. Then the sorites argument is set up as.. (shrink)

Bekanntlich gehört Joseph Levines Argument der Erklärungslücke zu den meist diskutierten Argumenten in der Philosophie des Geistes. Und bekanntlich geht es bei diesem Argument in erster Linie um das sogenannte Qualia-Problem – das Problem, wie sich phänomenale Zustände in ein naturwissenschaftliches Weltbild integrieren lassen. Tatsächlich gibt es an Levines Argument aber einen zweiten Aspekt, der ebenfalls äußerst interessant ist. Implizit geht es nämlich auch um die Frage, was es eigentlich heißt, ein Eigenschaftsphysikalist zu sein. Auf den ersten Blick wird das (...) gar nicht deutlich; denn Levine scheint sich einfach auf die Identitätstheorie von Place und Smart festzulegen. Doch das ist bestenfalls die Hälfte der Wahrheit. Tatsächlich entwickelt Levine nämlich Kriterien für die Wahrheit von Eigen- schaftsidentitätsaussagen, die, wie sich herausgestellt hat, keinesfalls selbstverständlich sind. Schauen wir uns Levines Argument daraufhin noch einmal an. In dem Aufsatz „Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap“ (1983) geht Levine von den beiden Aussagen aus (1) Schmerz ist identisch mit dem Feuern von C-Fasern und.. (shrink)

In some of the most important recent work in religious epistemology, Paul Moser (2002, 2004, 2008) develops a multifaceted reply to a prominent attack on belief in God—what we’ll call the Hiddenness Argument. This paper raises a number of worries about Moser’s novel treatment of the Hiddenness Argument. After laying out the version of that argument Moser most explicitly engages, we explain the four main elements of Moser’s reply and argue that it stands or falls with two pieces in particular—what (...) we call the Purposively Available Evidence Argument and the Cognitive Idolatry Argument. We then show that the Cognitive Idolatry Argument fails, leaving the Purposively Available Evidence Argument as Moser’s only potentially viable objection to the Hiddenness Argument. We conclude that Moser’s treatment of the Hiddenness Argument depends crucially on some controversial epistemological claims about certain of our moral beliefs, and is thus considerably more vulnerable than many have recognized. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Richard Foley’s account of rational belief faces an as yet undefeated objection, then try to repair one of Foley’s two failed replies to that objection. In §§I-III, we explain Foley’s accounts of all-things-considered rational belief and responsible belief, along with his replies to two pressing objections to those accounts—what we call the Irrelevance Objection (to Foley’s account of rational belief) and the Insufficiency Objection (to his account of responsible belief). In §IV, we argue that (...) both of Foley’s replies to the Irrelevance Objection fail as currently developed, and raise the question whether either of his replies can be salvaged. In §V, we invoke cases involving religious beliefs (broadly construed) to show that one of Foley’s failed replies to the Irrelevance Objection conflicts with his reply to the Insufficiency Objection; and we provide reason to think Foley should resolve this conflict in the latter’s favor. We conclude in §VI by suggesting a way to repair Foley’s other failed reply to the Irrelevance Objection, yielding an improved overall defense of Foley’s accounts of rational and responsible belief. We look forward to discussing the important question to what extent this improved overall defense succeeds.[1] I Let’s start with Foley’s account of all-things-considered rational belief (cf. 2008: 49, 2005a. (shrink)

Many who doubt its analytic status nonetheless agree with the claim that a spinster is a woman of marriageable age who has not yet married. They are also likely to agree that this claim has the look of a definition. After all, it has the following four features: 1) Extensional adequacy: It cites a particular condition that is met by all and only things of the kind being defined (the spinsters, in this case).

In the accounts we give of one another, claims about our abilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so widespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the ability to walk, or to write one's name, or to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such as the ability to hit a Major League fastball, or to compose a symphony, or to tell an elm from a beech. In either case, (...) however, when we ascribe such abilities to one another we have the impression that we are making claims that, whether they are worth saying or not, are at least sometimes true. The impression of truth exerts a pressure towards giving a philosophical theory of ability. It is not an option, at least at the outset, to dismiss all our talk of ability as fiction or outright falsehood. A theory of ability can be reasonably expected to say what it is to have an ability in a way that vindicates the appearance of truth. Such a theory will deserve the name “philosophical” insofar as it gives an account, not of this or that range of abilities, but of abilities generally. (shrink)

1.1 Many have noted that there is a very close tie between disposition ascriptions such as: (1.1a) This glass is disposed to break when struck, or more generally (1.1b) x is disposed to M when C And counterfactuals such as: (1.1c) If this glass were struck it would break, or more generally..

The Similarity Constraint. The materials out of which M* is built should be broadly similar to those out of which M is built, so that M* is recognizably an extension of M..

Let cognitivism be the view that (1.1) is true, and that it is explained by (1.2). Cognitivism so understood is suggested by Harman and defended by Velleman and Setiya.

People generally are so common in one’s experience that it is natural to take them for granted, as presenting no puzzle or mystery, and to think only of such practical problems as arise in one’s relationships to them, as fish must take other fish for granted, or as we take for granted the air around us and the stones at our feet . . . but some philosophic spirits, sometimes, are overwhelmed by a seeming discontinuity between themselves and the rest (...) of physical nature, and they are sufficiently tormented by this apparent contrast to want to understand it and see what it implies. (shrink)

In arriving at the answer, I will be guided by two thoughts: First, that the “can” implicated by normative claims is best thought of as a capacity (Smith 2003). Second, that there is an important normative relation between belief and knowledge, namely that belief in some sense (a sense I will try to make clear) has knowledge as its aim (Owens 2000, Williamson 2000).

Laws of nature seem to take two forms. Fundamental physics discovers laws that hold without exception, ‘strict laws’, as they are sometimes called; even if some laws of fundamental physics are irreducibly probabilistic, the probabilistic relation is thought not to waver. In the nonfundamental, or special, sciences, matters differ. Laws of such sciences as psychology and economics hold only ceteris paribus – that is, when other things are equal. Sometimes events accord with these ceteris paribus laws (c.p. laws, hereafter), but (...) sometimes the laws are not manifest, as if they have somehow been placed in abeyance: the regular relation indicative of natural law can fail in circumstances where an analogous outcome would effectively refute the assertion of strict law. Many authors have questioned the supposed distinction between strict laws and c.p. laws. The brief against it comprises various considerations: from the complaint that c.p. clauses are void of meaning to the claim that, although understood well enough, they should appear in all lawstatements. These two concerns, among others, are addressed in due course, but first, I venture a positive proposal. I contend that there is an important contrast between strict laws and c.p. laws, one that rests on an independent distinction between combinatorial and noncombinatorial nomic principles.[ii] Instantiations of certain properties, e.g., mass and charge, nomically produce individual forces, or more generally, causal influences,[iii] in accordance with noncombinatorial laws. These laws are noncombinatorial in the sense that they govern the production of single causal influences. In the typical system, however, multiple causal influences operate in concert to determine the system’s behavior. This composing of forces accords with a further nomic principle, which I will call a ‘combinatorial law’. The earth exerts gravitational force on a baseball that has been thrown, yet that force alone does not determine the ball’s path; the gravitational force combines with other forces acting on the baseball, including other gravitational forces, resulting in the ball’s actual behavior.. (shrink)

Consider sentences like (1): 1. Null Complement Containing Sentences a. Aryn followed b. Marie-Odile promised c. Corinne left d. Samir found out at midnight e. I applied f. They already know g. He volunteered h. Abdiwahid insisted i. I suppose j. Paul gave to Amnesty International These illustrate the phenomenon of null complements -- also called ‘pragmatically controlled zero anaphora’, ‘understood arguments’, and ‘linguistically unrealized arguments’. In each case, a complement is (phonologically) omitted, yet (a) the sentence is well-formed and (...) (b) the meaning effect is as if a complement were present. This contrasts on the one hand with structures that lack complements, but are ill-formed as a result – e.g., (2a-c) – and, on the other hand, with structures that lack overt complements, are well-formed, but do not exhibit the meaning effect of a complement – e.g., sentences (3a-b). 2. Contrast with Ill-formed Structures.. (shrink)

For those who think the statue and the piece of copper that compose it are distinct objects that coincide, there is a burden of explanation. After all, common sense says that different ordinary objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. A common argument in favor of fourdimensionalism (or ‘perdurantism’ or ‘temporal parts theory’) is that it provides the resources for a superior explanation of this coincidence. This, however, is mistaken. Any explanatory work done by the four-dimensionalist notion (...) of absolute parthood rests ultimately on notions equally available to the three-dimensionalist. Thus, a neutral explanation of coincidence is at least as good while avoiding commitment to temporal parts. (shrink)

losopher David Hume wrote: ‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’ Some people find this claim shocking and absurd, while others think that it is obviously true. I want to consider how it should be interpreted, and whether it is plausible. But I shall begin by examining another view about beauty, which Hume deliberately rejected when he wrote these words. It is attributed by tradition to the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, who (...) lived in the second half of the sixth century BC, and it has influenced artists, poets and philosophers ever since. The Pythagorean view is that beauty consists in mathematical perfection. (shrink)

1. A new wave of subjectivism in the theory of pictorial art began around forty years ago; and since then it has gathered pace in tandem with changing fashions in the philosophy of mind. The initial impetus was provided by the publication of Ernst Gombrich’s 1956 Mellon Lectures, Art and Illusion.1 In this book, and in many subsequent articles and lectures which elaborate its theme, Gombrich argues that the development of Western art – essentially the art of ancient Greece and (...) the art of Western Europe from Giotto to Cezanne – consists in a series of discoveries about the nature of visual perception, and the means by which the effect of visible objects on our senses can be simulated. ‘What may make a painting like a distant view through a window’ he writes, ‘is not the fact that the two can be as indistinguishable as is a facsimile from the original: it is the similarity between the mental activities both can arouse.’ And in another place: ‘The goal which the artist seeks with such self-critical persistence is … a psychological effect.’2 These remarks are concerned with a specific artistic tradition, and with specific pictorial devices, such as foreshortening and shading, which I shall not write about here. But Gombrich’s work launched a search for a general theory of depiction based on the same approach. The search intensified in the wake of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, which persuaded most of its readers that the resemblance theory of depiction could not be made to work, but did not provide a plausible alternative to it. Today there is broad agreement among philosophers that the nature of pictorial art cannot be explained by analysing the relationship between the marks on the surface of a picture and the kinds of objects that they represent. The consensus is that it can only be explained by defining the psychological effect that these marks produce.3 Today, the two most influential theories of depiction that are guided by this general idea are Richard Wollheim’s and Christopher Peacocke’s.. (shrink)

Traditionally, the story that opens chapter three of Genesis is called The Fall. David Daube, who was the greatest authority on ancient law in his generation, and a biblical scholar of exceptional brilliance, said that it should be called The Rise. I shall explain why shortly, but first let me remind you of the orthodox interpretation of the story.