The traditional point of view on analyticity implies that truth in virtue only of meaning entails a priori acceptability and vice versa. The argument for this claim is based on the idea that meaning as it concerns truth and meaning as it concerns competence are one and the same thing. In this paper I argue that the extensions of these notions do not coincide. I hold that truth in virtue of meaning— truth for semantic reasons—doesn't imply a priori acceptability, and (...) that a priori reflection based only on knowledge of meaning—in the sense of competence—doesn't necessitate true conclusions.The main consequence of this view concerns conceptual analysis, as it presupposes we have a privileged—incorrigible in the face of empirical evidence—access to non-trivial truths about the world on the basis of mere a priori reflection founded on meaning. If, as I argue, such access is not incorrigible the project of conceptual analysis loses its special epistemological status. (shrink)
SENSATIONALISM 1 1. Introductory 1 2. Mach's Sensationalism 4 3. Developments of Sensationalism 22 II. THE INHERENT WEAKNESS OF SEN- SATIONALISM 25 1. The Point of Sensationalism 25 2. The Ambiguity of 'Sensation' 27 3. The Fundamental Conflict 35 4. Mistakes, Incorrigibility and Simplicity 40 III. DESCRIPTION 51 1. Describing and Descriptions 51 2. Describing in Terms of Sensations 67 IV. THE POSSIBILITY OF 'PURE' DES- CRIPTIONS 79 V. SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS 99 VI. DESCRIPTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY 142 INDEX (...) 145 -/- -v- . (shrink)
In this paper, I consider a particular amoralist challenge against those who would morally criticize our single-player video play, viz., “come on, it’s only a game!” The amoralist challenge with which I engage gains strength from two facts: the activities to which the amoralist lays claim are only those that do not involve interactions with other rational or sentient creatures, and the amoralist concedes that there may be extrinsic, consequentialist considerations that support legitimate moral criticisms. I argue that the amoralist (...) is mistaken and that there are non-consequentialist resources for morally evaluating our single-player game play. On my view, some video games contain details that anyone who has a proper understanding of and is properly sensitive to features of a shared moral reality will see as having an incorrigible social meaning that targets groups of individuals, e.g., women and minorities. I offer arguments to support the claim that there are such incorrigible social meanings and that they constrain the imaginative world so that challenges like “it’s only a game” lose their credibility. I also argue that our responses to such meanings bear on evaluations of our character, and in light of this fact video game designers have a duty to understand and work against the meanings of such imagery. (shrink)
What makes a norm a genuinely authoritative guide to action? For many theorists, the answer takes a foundationalist form, analogous to foundationalism in epistemology. They say that there is at least one norm that is justified in itself. On most versions, the norm is said to be incorrigibly authoritative. All other norms are justified in virtue of their connection with it. This essay argues that all such foundationalist theories of normative authority fail because they cannot give an account of the (...) privileged status of an allegedly foundational norm. (shrink)
Introduction -- Phenomenal consciousness -- Phenomenal consciousness and self-representation -- The connection between phenomenal consciousness and creature consciousness -- Consciousness of things -- Real world puzzle cases -- Why consciousness cannot be physical and why it must be -- What is the thesis of physicalism? -- Why consciousness cannot be physical -- Why consciousness must be physical -- Physicalism and the appeal to phenomenal concepts -- Some terminological points -- Why physicalists appeal to phenomenal concepts -- Various accounts of phenomenal (...) concepts -- My own earlier view on phenomenal concepts -- Are there any phenomenal concepts? -- Phenomenal concepts and burgean intuitions -- Consequences for a priori physicalism -- The admissible contents of visual experience : the existential thesis -- The singular (when filled) thesis -- Kaplanianism -- The multiple contents thesis -- The existential thesis revisited -- Still more on existential contents -- Consciousness, seeing and knowing -- Knowing things and knowing facts -- Nonconceptual content -- Why the phenomenal character of an experience is not one of its nonrepresentational properties -- Phenomenal character and representational content, part I -- Phenomenal character and representational content, part II -- Phenomenal character and our knowledge of it -- Solving the puzzles -- Mary, Mary, how does your knowledge grow? -- The explanatory gap -- The hard problem -- The possibility of zombies -- Change blindness and the refrigerator light illusion -- A closer look at the change blindness hypotheses -- The no-seeum view -- Sperling and the refrigerator light -- Phenomenology and cognitive accessibility -- A further change blindness experiment -- Another brick in the wall -- Privileged access, phenomenal character, and externalism -- The threat to privileged access -- A Burgean thought experiment -- Social externalism for phenomenal character? -- A closer look at privileged access and incorrigibility -- How do I know that I am not a zombie? -- Phenomenal externalism. (shrink)
What follows are compressed versions of three lectures on the subject of "Mind and Modality", given at Princeton University the week of October 12-16, 1998. The first two form a series; the third stands alone to some extent. All are philosophically technical, and probably of interest mainly to philosophers. I hope that they make sense, at least to those familiar with my book _The Conscious Mind_ . Lecture 1 recapitulates some of the material in the book in a somewhat different (...) form, and adds some further material on conditionals and on Kripke. Note that section has a more or less definitive formalization of the anti-materialist argument from the book (lots of people have asked for this). Lecture 2 pushes deeper into the heart of modality, further investigating the conceivability/possibility relationship and the epistemology of modality (with some material on the scrutability of truth in general), and arguing for a sort of modal rationalism. Lecture 3 gives an analysis of the content of beliefs about experiences, and applies this to a number of epistemological issues, including incorrigibility and the dialectic on "The Myth of the Given". (shrink)
Foundationalism came under attack in two areas in the first half of this century. First, some doubted whether the foundations were adequate to support the entire structure of knowledge, and second, the doctrine of the Agiven@ came under serious attack. = However, many epistemologists were not convinced that foundationalism was to be abandoned even if the criticisms were granted. According to these epistemologist, far from having shown that foundationalism itself was at fault, the critics of foundationalism had only been attacking (...) one particular version of foundationalism--that version that included infallibility, incorrigibility,, or some appeal to a Agiven@ at the base of the structure of justification. The claim of these defenders was that there are other possible types of foundationalism than this version of foundationalism, which has come to be called Classical Foundationalism. And thus opened up a new area of philosophical lexicography: the attempt to say what foundationalism itself is, so that Classical Foundationalism turned out to be one instance of foundationalism but not the only possible one. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that a form of moral constructivism inspired by Hume's Enquiry yields a plausible response to the problem of relativity. Though this problem can be stated in many different ways, I argue that a Humean constructivism is far more universal in scope that Hume's positions are often taken to be. In addition, I argue that where Hume's position does imply a limited scope, this limitation is perfectly appropriate. I discuss four iterations of the relativity problem(s) here: (...) the incorrigibility of local practices (local practices relativism), the relativity of fundamental moral principles (local principles relativism), the contingency of moral principles (modal relativism), and, in a short postscript, the limited scope of moral normativity (normative relativism). Humean Constructivism, I argue, delivers the proper verdict for each of these purported problems. (shrink)
Heterophenomenology is a third-person methodology proposed by Daniel Dennett for using first-person reports as scientific evidence. I argue that heterophenomenology can be improved by making six changes: (i) setting aside consciousness, (ii) including other sources of first-person data besides first-person reports, (iii) abandoning agnosticism as to the truth value of the reports in favor of the most plausible assumptions we can make about what can be learned from the data, (iv) interpreting first-person reports (and other first-person behaviors) directly in terms (...) of target mental states rather than in terms of beliefs about them, (v) dropping any residual commitment to incorrigibility of first-person reports, and (vi) recognizing that thirdperson methodology does have positive effects on scientific practices. When these changes are made, heterophenomenology turns into the self-measurement methodology of firstperson data that I have defended in previous papers. (shrink)
What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—Independence and Epistemic Authority”, I review reasons (...) for being dissatisfied with materialist introspectionism as a way out of the dilemma. In section 3, “Constitutivism”, I outline two constitutivist alternatives to materialist introspectionism. In section 4, “A Neo-Expressivist View”, I offer my neo-expressivist view (defended in Bar-On, Speaking my mind: Expression and self-knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004 ), according to which the distinctive status of mental self-ascriptions is to be explained by appeal to the expressive character of acts of issuing them (in speech or in thought). This view, I argue, allows us to stay clear of eliminativism without committing to Cartesian substance dualism, thereby offering a viable way of slipping between the horns of Rorty’s dilemma. (shrink)
According to the proportionality objection to hell, infinite suffering is out of proportion to any wrong that finite human beings could commit and is hence unjust and inconsistent with God's moral perfection. The continuing-sin response concedes that eternal consignment to hell is out of proportion to the sins people commit during their earthly lives, but argues that people in hell continue to sin while in hell and, in this way, extend their consignment to hell ad infinitum. In this essay, I (...) evaluate the continuing-sin response. In particular, I argue that whether there is a proportionality problem to begin with and whether the continuing-sin response succeeds as a response depends on the character of the suffering that is experienced in hell. (shrink)
I argue that George Nakhnikian's analysis of the logic of cogito propositions (roughly, Descartes's 'cogito' and 'sum') is incomplete. The incompleteness is rectified by showing that disjunctions of cogito propositions with contingent, non-cogito propositions satisfy conditions of incorrigibility, self-certifyingness, and pragmatic consistency; hence, they belong to the class of propositions with whose help a complete characterization of cogito propositions is made possible.
It is argued that a second-order belief to the effect that I now have some particular propositional attitude is always true (Incorrigibility). This is not because we possess an infallible cognitive faculty of introspection, but because that x believes that he himself now has attitude A to proposition P entails that x has A to P. Incorrigibility applies only to second-order beliefs and not to mere linguistic avowals of attitudes. This view combines a necessary asymmetry between 1st and (...) 3rd person ascriptions with Objectivism about the propositional attitudes. The epistemic justification of second-order beliefs is shown to be a further question. (shrink)
This article analyzes Wittgenstein’s position on the grammatical incorrigibility of psychological self-ascriptions and shows how introspective statements can be of use to philosophers. In Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Kripke notes Wittgenstein’s puzzling ambivalence toward introspection. On the one hand Wittgenstein repudiates introspection and on the other he uses it in his own philosophical investigations. To resolve the paradox, this paper distinguishes between introspective methodology in psychological and philosophical investigations. Wittgenstein’s arguments against introspection are specifically directed at introspective (...) methodology in psychology. He argues that the use of introspection to discover “inner causes” commits one to a conception of “direct inner awareness”. On that conception, psychological self-ascriptions are considered highly reliable due to the superiority of the subjective vantage point in ascertaining one’s own mental contents. As an alternative, Wittgenstein maintains that this reliability stems from the grammar of the ascription. The paper places Wittgenstein’s alternative conception of incorrigibility into the context of his argument against the use of introspection in psychology. (shrink)
Abstract Cognitive relativists?pragmatists (Stich, Churchland) claim that human cognitive strategies, lacking a common goal, are in addition divergent to the point of incommensurability. They appeal to the study of reasoning heuristics for evidence on cognitive diversity and incorrigibility. It is here argued that no such evidence is offered by the research, which, on the contrary (1) presents heuristics as uniform across great variations; (2) offers advice for correcting and improving human reasoning; and (3) very often postulates a uniformity of (...) core logical strategies, built into reasoning competence. Cognitive research thus supports a moderate rationalism rather than relativism?pragmatism. (shrink)
Austin’s destructive contextualist criticism of the theory of knowledge, as grounded on foundationalism, is presented. It is claimed that incorrigibility is not a secondary issue for the foundationalist conception of knowledge and justification, even if the hallmark of foundationalism is not to be sought in the so-called ‘quest for certainty’, but rather in the idea of epistemological realism.
Is it possible to construct an alternative framework for the description of physical reality that is not based on space and time? According to Kant, because of the incorrigibility of the spatiotemporal scheme, the contents of any such alternative will be beyond our cognitive grasp. Nonetheless, the possibility of constructing such a descriptive scheme poses itself as an intriguing challenge. In this paper, we attempt to answer this challenge by exploiting an analytical tool extensively used by physicists and engineers: (...) the utilisation of multiple representations of the same data using integral transforms – for example, the Fourier transform. According to the spectral picture we propose, frequencies and wavelengths, related to time and space by the Fourier transform, form an adequate alternative basis for describing physical systems, and one that is of equal richness to the spatiotemporal picture. Furthermore, the routine use of Fourier analysis applied to familiar physical systems suggests ways in which sense organs might be constructed such that they naturally give rise to a spectral representation of the world. Although we might never be able to imagine perceiving the world in this way, we can nonetheless describe the contents of such a mode of perception and relate them precisely to our own world-view. Hence, we suggest in a Kantian spirit, that the spatiotemporal description of the world is not unique. (shrink)
