Online research in philosophy

Kant’s and Hegel’s transcendental argument for mental-content externalism breaks the deadlock between ‘internal’ and genuine realists. This argument shows that human beings can only be self-conscious in a world that provides a humanly recognizable regularity and variety among the things (or events) we sense. This feature of the world cannot result from human thought or language. Hence semantic arguments against realism can only be developed if realism about the world is true. Some of Putnam’s arguments for internal realism are taken (...) as cases in point, and criticized accordingly. Pragmatic realists can use this transcendental argument, because its strong modal claims are consistent with falliblist accounts of justification. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to (...) believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Igal Kvart RATIONAL ASSERTIBILITY, THE STEERING ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE, AND PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT Abstract In the past couple of decades, there were a few major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic encroachment – that there is a significant pragmatic ingredient in the truth-conditions for knowledge-ascriptions. Epistemic contextualism has flaunted the notion of a conversational standard, and Stanley's subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI) promoted stakes, each of which, according to their proponents, play a major role as pragmatic components in (...) the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions. These conceptions were propelled first and foremost by examples of knowledge ascriptions with obvious pragmatic aspects that seemed to require a pragmatic component in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions in order to be accounted for. However, if such examples can be adequately explained not by pragmatic encroachment purely pragmatically, the central role that such examples play in supporting these accounts will be undermined. I lay out here a new pragmatic account, offering a different, purely pragmatic picture that explains such examples, and much more. If such an account and its associated explanations are adequate, then much of a need or a motivation for pragmatic encroachment is undermined. Specifically, I will develop the notion of rational assertibility, appealing to rational norms (which are not Gricean) as interfacing with semantic and epistemic (and other) norms to yield assertibility simpliciter. More importantly, I will argue for a well-entrenched pragmatic profile of knowledge, the so-called steering role of knowledge. Knowledge ascriptions, or simple assertions (that don't invoke the notion of knowledge), it will be argued, play a pragmatic role of steering audiences in joint deliberational setups to the speaker's preferred action by invoking an impending practical inference leading to that preferred action, and of ignoring incompatible alternatives. The recognition of rational forces as affecting, sometimes strongly and predominantly, intuitions associated with knowledge ascriptions, has important implications to philosophical methodology regarding what count as evidence for semantic features. One such lesson calls for securing examples with no significant rational forces at play in order to establish semantic features. Another calls attention to the ill-suitability of employing assertibility by figures in examples featuring deliberational setups for such a purpose in view of the role that such assertibility plays in reflecting rational aspects of such figures, in addition to their epistemic and semantic characteristics. Still another lesson points to a specific role that audiences play in such deliberational setups. (shrink)

Watkins proposes a neo-Popperian solution to the pragmatic problem of induction. He asserts that evidence can be used non-Inductively to prefer the principle that corroboration is more successful over all human history than that, Say, Counter-Corroboration is more successful either over this same period or in the future. Watkins's argument for rejecting the first counter-Corroborationist alternative is beside the point, However, As whatever is the best strategy over all human history is irrelevant to the pragmatic problem of induction (...) since we are not required to act in the past, And his argument for rejecting the second presupposes induction. (shrink)

Kant's theory of human nature is explicated in detail. First book with systematic interpretation of Kant's pragmatic anthropology.

According to a recent view, known as the 'pragmatic encroachment' thesis, an agent’s non-truth-related factors are relevant to the epistemic status of her beliefs. In particular, in addition to truth-related factors, practical factors are said to be relevant to the question whether or not true belief amounts to knowledge. Despite the intuitive appeal of the thesis, however, it is puzzling how practical factors can impact the truth-related factors that ground the epistemic status of one's beliefs. In this paper, I (...) will distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of the way in which practical factors are said to be thus relevant. Their differences are explicated in terms of the nature and the extent to which practical factors are said to impact the epistemic status of one's beliefs. I begin by considering a strong version of the thesis that suggests principles according to which the practical rationality of one's actions is a necessary condition on knowledge and justification. Having noted an inadequacy in the formulation of such principles, the arguments in their support are subsequently stated and criticized. Finally, I identify two modest versions of the thesis of pragmatic encroachment and argue that they, too, fail to explain how practical factors can bear on the epistemic status of one's beliefs. (shrink)

Astroparticle physics is a recent sub-discipline of physics that emerged from early cosmic ray studies, astrophysics, and particle physics. Its theoretical foundations range from quantum field theory to general relativity, but the underlying “standard models” of cosmology and particle physics are far from being unified. The paper explores the pragmatic strategies employed in astroparticle physics in order to unify a disunified research field, the concept of observation involved in these strategies, and their relations to scientific realism.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2008v12n1p73 This paper aims at discussing from the point of view of a pragmatic stance the concept of model as an abstract replica. According to this view, scientific models are abstract structures different from set-theoretic models. The view of models argued for here stems from the conceptions of some important philosophers of science who elaborated on the notion of model, such as Suppe, Cartwright, Hempel, and Nagel. Differently from all those authors, however, the conception of model argued for here (...) is typically pragmatic, not semantic, i.e. it has not to do with the interpretation of scientific theories, but with the explanation and construction of given circumstances (both abstract and concrete), from the point of view of the theory. (shrink)

This article defends a pragmatic conception of objectivity for the moral domain. I begin contextualizing pragmatic approaches to objectivity and discuss at some length one of the most interesting proposals in this area, Cheryl Misak’s conception of pragmatic objectivity. My general argument is that in order to defend a pragmatic approach to objectivity the pragmatic stance should be interpreted in more radical terms than most contemporary proposals do. I propose notably to disentangle the connection between (...) objectivity and truth, claiming that moral inquiry is in most of the cases responsive to a discursive norm that is closer to warranted assertibility than to truth. Using an argument that relies partly on Huw Price's account of forms of normative assertion, I will show that a practice-based account of warranted assertibility does the epistemic work required to defend objectivity while not being exposed to the criticisms that are usually addressed against this notion. The first section sets the general argument within its pragmatic context. The second section outlines Misak's conception of pragmatic objectivity, and highlights the sense in which she makes moral objectivity depend upon truth. The third and the fourth sections provide two critical arguments against Misak's thesis. Finally, with the critical work done, in the last section I present my constructive account of pragmatic objectivity for the moral domain. (shrink)

Recently a number of variously motivated epistemologists have argued that knowledge is closely tied to practical matters. On the one hand, radical pragmatic encroachment is the view that facts about whether an agent has knowledge depend on practical factors and this is coupled to the view that there is an important connection between knowledge and action. On the other hand, one can argue for the less radical thesis only that there is an important connection between knowledge and practical reasoning. (...) So, defenders of both of these views endorse the view that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. This thesis has recently come under heavy fire and a number of weaker proposals have been defended. In this paper counter-examples to the knowledge norm of reasoning will be presented and it will be argued that this viewand a number of related but weaker viewscannot be sustained in the face of these counter-examples. The paper concludes with a novel proposal concerning the norm of practical reasoning that is immune to the counter-examples introduced here. (shrink)

This critical editorial introduction summarizes and explicates Frederick Will’s pragmatic realism and his account of the nature, assessment, and revision of cognitive and practical norms in connection with: the development of Will’s pragmatic realism, Hume’s problem of induction, the oscillations between foundationalism and coherentism, the nature of philosophical reflection, Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, the open texture of empirical concepts, the correspondence conception of truth, Putnam’s ‘internal realism’, the redundancy theory of truth, sociology of knowledge, the governance of practice (...) by norms and the assessment and revision of norms in practice, scientific realism, the alleged independence of reason and tradition, rule-following, legal realism, ethical intuitionism and moral relativism, the regress problem (both in epistemology and in moral theory), the paradox of analysis, and culminating in Will’s account of the philosophical governance of norms. These issues are discussed in close consideration of the views of: William Alston, John Dewey, Descartes, Leibniz, Waismann, Austin, Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Richard Rorty, Michael Williams, Hempel, Carnap, Simon Blackburn, Ramsey, Strawson, Kuhn, Wilfrid Sellars, Wittgenstein, Nozick, Dretske, Quine, Barbara Herman, Hardy Jones, Marcus Singer, and Gerd Buchdahl. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce (...) a proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent. (shrink)

Recently a number of philosophers have argued for a kind of encroachment of the practical into the epistemic. Fantl and McGrath, for example, argue that if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. (Fantl and McGrath 2007) In this paper I make a preliminary case for what we might call encroachment in, not knowledge or justification, but epistemic excellence, recent accounts of which include those of Roberts and Wood (2007), Bishop and Trout (2005), (...) and Baehr (2011). I believe that practical considerations bear on whether a disposition is an epistemic excellence, and I propose a practical condition on epistemic excellence that is roughly analogous to the practical condition on knowledge proposed by Fantl and McGrath. Since the view is also an epistemic analogue to a kind of moral rationalism in ethics, we might also call it a variety of ‘epistemic rationalism’. (shrink)

By deepening Austin’s reflections on the ‘open texture’ of empirical concepts, Frederick L. Will defends an ‘externalist’ account of mental content: as human beings we could not think, were we not in fact cognizant of a natural world structured by events and objects with identifiable and repeatable similarities and differences. I explicate and defend Will’s insight by developing a parallel critique of Kant’s and Carnap’s rejections of realism, both of whom cannot account properly for the content of experience. This critique (...) shows that Will has identified a genuinely transcendental basis for defending common-sense realism, without appeal to any high-level theory of knowledge. I then show how Will’s realism undercuts Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism, Michael Williams’ partial defense of skepticism, John Haldane’s attempt to rehabilitate Aquinas’ account of concepts, and how it augments Crispin Wright’s defense of realism. (shrink)

A new kind of defense of the Millian theory of names is given, which explains intuitive counter-examples as depending on pragmatic effects of the relevant sentences, by direct application of Grice’s and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and uncontroversial assumptions. I begin by arguing that synonyms are always intersubstitutable, despite Mates’ considerations, and then apply the method to names. Then, a fairly large sample of cases concerning names are dealt with in related ways. It is argued that the method, (...) as applied to the various cases, satisfies the criterion of success: that for every sentence in context, it is a counter-example to Millianism to the extent that it has pragmatic effects (matching speakers’ intuitions). (shrink)

Gary Ostertag (Philos Stud 146:249–267, 2009) has presented a new puzzle for Russellianism about belief reports. He argues that Russellians do not have the resources to solve this puzzle in terms of pragmatic phenomena. I argue to the contrary that the puzzle can be solved according to Nathan Salmon’s (Frege’s puzzle, 1986) pragmatic account of belief reports, provided that the account is properly understood. Specifically, the puzzle can be solved so long as Salmon’s guises are not identified with (...) sentences. (shrink)

Speakers often judge the sentence "Lois Lane believes that Superman flies" to be true and the sentence "Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies" to be false. If Millianism is true, however, these sentences express the very same proposition and must therefore have same truth value. "Pragmatic" Millians like Salmon and Soames have tried to explain speakers' "anti-substitution intuitions" by claiming that the two sentences are routinely used to pragmatically convey different propositions which do have different truth values. "Non- (...) class='Hi'>Pragmatic" Millians like Braun, on the other hand, have argued that the Millian should not appeal to pragmatics and opt instead for a purely psychological explanation. I will present two objections against Non-Pragmatic Millianism. The first one is that the view cannot account for the intuitions of speakers who accept the identity sentence "Superman is Clark Kent": applying a psychological account in this case, I will argue, would yield wrong predictions about speakers who resist substitution with simple sentences. I will then consider a possible response from the non-pragmatic Millian and show that the response in question would in fact require an appeal to pragmatics. My conclusion will be that Braun's psychological explanation of anti-substitution intuitions is untenable, and that the Millian is therefore forced to adopt a pragmatic account. My second objection is that Non-Pragmatic Millianism cannot account for the role that certain commonsense intentional generalizations play in the explanation of behavior. I will consider a reply offered by Braun and argue that it still leaves out a large class of important generalizations. My conclusion will be that Braun’s non-pragmatic strategy fails and that, again, the Millian must go for a pragmatic account in order to deal with intentional generalizations. In light of my two objections, my general conclusion will be that non-pragmatic versions of Millianism should be rejected. This has an important consequence: if Millianism is true, then some pragmatic Millian account must be correct. It follows that, if standard objections against pragmatic accounts succeed, then Millianism must be rejected altogether. (shrink)

Among the readings available for NL sentences, those where two or more sets of entities are independent of one another are particularly challenging from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Those readings are termed here as ‘Independent Set (IS) readings'. Standard examples of such readings are the well-known Collective and Cumulative Readings. (Robaldo, 2011) proposes a logical framework that can properly represent the meaning of IS readings in terms of a set-Skolemization of the witness sets. One of (...) the main assumptions of Robaldo's logical framework, drawn from (Schwarzschild, 1996), is that pragmatics plays a crucial role in the identification of such witness sets. Those are firstly identified on pragmatic grounds, then logical clauses are asserted on them in order to trigger the appropriate inferences. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental analysis that appears to confirm Robaldo's hypotheses concerning the pragmatic identification of the witness sets. (shrink)

This paper proposes an alternative view of the connection between knowledge and truth. Truth is traditionally seen as a semantic notion, i.e. a relation between what we say about the world and the world itself. Epistemologists and philosophers of science are therefore apt to resort to correspondence theories of truth in order to deal with the question whether our theories and beliefs are true. Correspondence theories try to define truth, but, in order to do so, they must choose a truth (...) bearer, i.e. something capable of being true, for instance, propositions, sentences or statements. According to the analysis here proposed, none of these truth bearers can be defined without reference to the others. The pragmatic, alternative view here presented, in its turn, is unaffected by this kind of conceptual difficulty. According to this view, one must focus on the use of truth terms – such as ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘correct’, ‘appropriate’, etc. – and the methodological role such terms play in the investigative practices and research programs to be found both in the sciences and in other, everyday investigative activities, such as forensic and journalistic investigations. (shrink)

Solves what is sometimes, but not always, referred to as the third paradox of material implication. Readers downloading this piece should please also download the corrigendum. Note that "pragmatic" is here used in its original sense of context-sensitive, that is, adjacency. (This comment is made in response to an article in a student journal published in the western U.S. which claimed that I said that because something involves translation it must be pragmatic; that is so, in the original (...) sense; only grammaticality can ever be context-free; all meaning is context-sensitive, as "lawful" cannot meaningfully modify "whale."). (shrink)

Beliefs can be evaluated from a number of perspectives. Epistemic evaluation involves epistemic standards and appropriate epistemic goals. On a truth-conducive account of epistemic justification, a justified belief is one that serves the goal of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Beliefs are also prompted by non-epistemic reasons. This raises the question of whether, say, the pragmatic benefits of a belief are able to rationalize it. In this paper, after criticizing certain responses to this question, I shall argue that, as (...) far as beliefs are concerned, justification has an essentially epistemic character. This conclusion is then qualified by considering the conditions under which pragmatic consequences of a belief can be epistemically relevant. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the stronger of the two views concerning the right and wrong kind of reasons for belief, i.e. the view that the only genuine normative reasons for belief are evidential. The project in this paper is primarily negative, but with an ultimately positive aim. That aim is to leave room for the possibility that there are genuine pragmatic reasons for belief. Work is required to make room for this view, because evidentialism of a strict (...) variety remains the default view in much of the debate concerning normative reasons for belief. Strict versions of evidentialism are inconsistent with the view that there are genuine pragmatic reasons for belief. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the view that facts about whether or not an agent is justified in having a particular belief are entirely determined by facts about the agent’s evidence; the agent’s practical needs and interests are irrelevant. I examine an array of arguments against evidentialism (by Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, David Owens, and others), and demonstrate how their force is affected when we take into account the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief. Once we are sensitive to one of (...) the factors that secure thresholds for outright believing (namely, outright believing that p in a given circumstance requires, at the minimum, that one’s degree of belief that p is high enough for one to be willing to act as if p in the circumstances), we see how pragmatic considerations can be relevant to facts about whether or not an agent is justified in believing that p—but largely as a consequence of the pragmatic constraints on outright believing. (shrink)

One version of Moore’s Paradox is the challenge to account for the absurdity of beliefs purportedly expressed by someone who asserts sentences of the form ‘p & I do not believe that p’ (‘Moorean sentences’). The absurdity of these beliefs is philosophically puzzling, given that Moorean sentences (i) are contingent and often true; and (ii) express contents that are unproblematic when presented in the third-person. In this paper I critically examine the most popular proposed solution to these two puzzles, according (...) to which Moorean beliefs are absurd because Moorean sentences are instances of pragmatic paradox; that is to say, the propositions they express are necessarily false-when-believed. My conclusion is that while a Moorean belief is a pragmatic paradox, it is not just another pragmatic paradox, because this diagnosis does not explain all the puzzling features of Moorean beliefs. In particularly, while this analysis is plausible in relation to the puzzle posed by characteristic (i) of Moorean sentences, I argue that it fails to account for (ii). I do so in the course of an attempt to formulate the definition of a pragmatic paradox in more precise formal terms, in order to see whether the definition is satisfied by Moorean sentences, but not by their third-person transpositions. For only an account which can do so could address (ii) adequately. After rejecting a number of attempted formalizations, I arrive at a definition which delivers the right results. The problem with this definition, however, is that it has to be couched in first-person terms, making an essential use of ‘I’. Thus the problem of accounting for first-/third-person asymmetry recurs at a higher order, which shows that the Pragmatic Paradox Resolution fails to identify the source of such asymmetry highlighted by Moore’s Paradox. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is make a contribution to the ongoing search for an adequate concept of the a priori element in scientific knowledge. The point of departure is C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic a priori put forward in his "Mind and the World Order" (1929). Recently, Hasok Chang in "Contingent Transcendental Arguments for Metaphysical Principles" (2008) reconsidered Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and proposed to conceive it as the basic ingredient of the dynamics of an embodied (...) scientific reason. The present paper intends to further elaborate Chang’s account by relating it with some conceptual tools from cognitive semantics and certain ideas that first emerged in the context of the category-theoretical foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

Is it reasonable to believe in God even in the absence of strong evidence that God exists? Pragmatic arguments for theism are designed to support belief even if one lacks evidence that theism is more likely than not. Jeff Jordan proposes that there is a sound version of the most well-known argument of this kind, Pascal's Wager, and explores the issues involved - in epistemology, the ethics of belief, decision theory, and theology.

In this paper I argue that we can give a plausible account of how to compare pragmatic and evidential normative reasons for belief. The account I offer is given in the form of a ‘defeasing function’. This function allows for a sophisticated comparison of the two types of reasons without assigning complex features to the logical structures of either type of reason.

We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic -- that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing tothe role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by (...) giving a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our ease for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver. (shrink)

Abstract Several authors have recently endorsed the thesis that there is what has been called pragmatic encroachment on knowledge—in other words, that two people who are in the same situation with respect to truth-related factors may differ in whether they know something, due to a difference in their practical circumstances. This paper aims not to defend this thesis, but to explore how it could be true. What I aim to do, is to show how practical factors could play a (...) role in defeating knowledge by defeating epistemic rationality—the very kind of rationality that is entailed by knowledge, and in which Pascalian considerations do not play any role—even though epistemic rationality consists in having adequate evidence. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9718-1 Authors Mark Schroeder, Mudd Hall of Philosophy, University of Southern California, 3709 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Beatty, Brandon, and Sober agree that biological generalizations, when contingent, do not qualify as laws. Their conclusion follows from a normative definition of law inherited from the Logical Empiricists. I suggest two additional approaches: paradigmatic and pragmatic. Only the pragmatic represents varying kinds and degrees of contingency and exposes the multiple relationships found among scientific generalizations. It emphasizes the function of laws in grounding expectation and promotes the evaluation of generalizations along continua of ontological and representational parameters. Stability (...) of conditions and strength of determination in nature govern projectibility. Accuracy, ontological level, simplicity, and manageability provide additional measures of usefulness. (shrink)

Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as Churchland's epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland 1) cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in (...) any significant sense 2) cannot claim that the concepts of Folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference. 3) cannot sustain Churchland's criticism of Dennett's "intentional stance" . 4) cannot claim to be a form of scientific realism, in the sense of believing that what science describes is somehow realer that what other conceptual systems describe. (shrink)

I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but (...) it is being applied to a pragmatically defined concept, i.e. belief. (shrink)

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of (...) humanity's place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures. (shrink)

In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces (...) forceful objections. In particular, we argue, proponents of these strategies face a dilemma: either concedes that their theory is revisionary, or adopt an implausible account of speaker-meaning whereby the content of certain types of utterance is opaque to their speakers. In this paper we introduce a new type of antirealist strategy, which is thoroughly non-revisionary, and leaves speaker-meaning transparent to speakers. We draw on work on pragmatics in the philosophy of language to develop a theory we call ‘pragmatic antirealism’. The pragmatic antirealist holds that while the sentences of the discourses in question have metaphysically contentious truth conditions, ordinary utterances of them are pragmatically modified in context in such a way that speakers do not incur commitment to those truth conditions. After setting out the theory, we show how it might be developed for both mathematical and ethical discourse, before responding to some likely objections. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence (...) of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

The question of how to distinguish between science and non-science, the so-called 'demarcation problem', is one of the most high-profile, perennial, and intractable issues in the philosophy of science. It is not merely a philosophical issue, however, since it has a significant bearing on practical policy questions and practical decisions. This essay develops a pragmatic approach to the demarcation problem: it argues that while there are some core principles (or criteria) that we can use in distinguishing between (...) science and non-science, particular judgments and decisions about something's scientific status depend, in part, on practical goals and concerns. (shrink)

Numerous studies have documented the demand for information regarding corporations’ relationships to society. Much recent research has demonstrated why stakeholders need this information, and how it benefits both companies and the public. These studies suggest numerous methods by which companies can effectively disclose corporate social responsibility (CSR) information to the public, but in practice, reporting this type of information is fraught with legal and ethical uncertainty often unexplored in most literature. This article represents a fresh analysis of the numerous (...) class='Hi'>pragmatic consequences and legal and ethical complications inherent in CSR reporting, using Nike Corporation as a case example. The article discusses the theoretical viewpoints surrounding the ethics of CSR disclosure, and presents the case of Nike and the complications it encountered while advertising CSR information. The article ends with an analysis of CSR auditing as a possible solution to companies seeking to improve the method and transparency of social responsibility reporting. (shrink)

In ‘Withdrawal and contextualism’, Jonathan Adler (2006) provides an argument which, if successful, undermines what contextualists take to be prime support for their view. Given the popularity of contextualist (and related) positions in epistemology, together with the fact that, thus far, no one has challenged Adler's argument, a critical assessment therefore presses. In this article, after briefly reviewing Adler's argument, I show that it fails. My reason for taking his argument to fail will then provide novel support for contextualism, one (...) that does not rely on raising the pragmatic stakes. (shrink)

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris - a real-time interactive video game - certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as using the world to improve cognition. These actions are not used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction; they are used to (...) change the world in order to simplify the problem-solving task. Thus, we distinguish pragmatic actions ñ actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal - from epistemic actions - actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally. To illustrate the need for epistemic actions, we first develop a standard information-processing model of Tetris-cognition, and show that it cannot explain performance data from human players of the game - even when we relax the assumption of fully sequential processing. Standard models disregard many actions taken by players because they appear unmotivated or superfluous. However, we describe many such actions that are actually taken by players that are far from superfluous, and that play valuable roles in improving human performance. We argue that traditional accounts are limited because they regard action as having a single function: to change the world. By recognizing a second function of action - an epistemic function - we can explain many of the actions that a traditional model cannot. Although, our argument is supported by numerous examples specifically from Tetris, we outline how the one category of epistemic action can be incorporated into theories of action more generally. (shrink)

This paper defends Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis , a proposed empirical methodology for explicating philosophical concepts. This methodology attributes to our shared concepts whatever application conditions they would need to have in order best to continue delivering benefits in the ways they have regularly delivered benefits in the past. In the first stage of my argument I argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has what I call normative authority : we have practical and epistemic reason to adopt the explications that (...) it delivers even if we think doing so requires stipulative revisions in the meanings of our concepts. I then use this normative authority to argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis also has what I call descriptive authority : when we understand concept-meaning in the way we ought to understand it (in the way licensed by the normative authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis) we see that, rather than being revisionary, Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis is a semantically conservative tool that uncovers (what we should think of as being) the meanings our concepts already have. (shrink)

The pragmatic theory of truth (PTT) seeks to illuminate the concept of truth by focusing on concepts like usefulness or adaptivity. However, contrary to common opinion, PTT does not merely face a narrow band of (perhaps) rather artificial counterexamples (as in a case of empirically unfounded but life-extending optimism in a cancer patient); instead, PTT is faced with a fast psychological research literature which suggests that inaccurate beliefs are both (1) pervasive in human beings and, nonetheless, (2) fully adaptive (...) in many cases. Call this the "pervasive adaptive illusions" (PAI) objection to PTT. According to PAI, the kind of connection drawn by PTT between the beliefs that we (intuitively or pretheoretically) regard as "true" and the beliefs we regard as useful is undercut by hard-nosed empirical work in psychology -- work that no empirically minded pragmatist can ignore. According to PAI, the connection drawn between truth and utility by PTT is subject to a simply overwhelming set of counterexamples (drawn from psychological research, and reviewed below). Thus, PTT is a theory any sensible theorist of truth must reject. (shrink)

Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the (...) notion that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic theories of knowledge (such as contextualism and sensitive invariantism) argue that these theories, unlike those that invoke a single standard for knowledge, comport with the intuitively compelling thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason. In this paper, I dispute this thesis, and argue that, therefore, the prospects for both “high standard” approach, and contend that if one abandons the thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason, the most serious (...) arguments against it lose force. (shrink)

In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant formulates the idea of the empirical investigation of the human being as a free agent. The notion is puzzling: Does Kant not often claim that, from an empirical point of view, human beings cannot be considered as free? What sense would it make anyway to include the notion of freedom in science? The answer to these questions lies in Kant’s notion of character. While probably all concepts of character are (...) involved in the description and explanation of human action, Kant develops a specific notion of character by distinguishing character as a “mode of thought” (Denkungsart) from character as a “mode of sensing” (Sinnesart). The former notion is distinctively Kantian. Only mode of thought reveals itself in human action such that actions can be seen as linked to an agent’s first-person perspective and the capacity to rationally reflect one’s own intentions and desires. By reference to this concept human actions can be empirically explained qua free actions. The point of this paper is not only to rule out the interpretation that Kant is an incompatibilist concerning the dilemma of freedom and causal determinism. It is also argued that Kant defends a version of soft determinism which is more sophisticated and more adequate for the human sciences than Hume’s. (shrink)

Classical Gricean pragmatics is usually conceived as dealing with far-side pragmatics, aimed at computing implicatures. It involves reasoning about why what was said, was said. Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is pragmatics in the service of determining, together with the semantical properties of the words used, what was said. But this raises the specter of ‘the pragmatic circle.’ If Gricean pragmatics seeks explanations for why someone said what they did, how can there be Gricean pragmatics on the near-side? (...) Gricean reasoning seems to require what is said to get started. But then if Gricean reasoning is needed to get to what is said, we have a circle. (shrink)

Central to Paul K. Feyerabend's philosophy of science are two theses: (1) there is no standard observation language available to science; instead, observability is to be viewed as a pragmatic matter; and (2) when considering questions of empirical significance and experimental test, the methodological unit of science is a set of inconsistent theories. I argue that the pragmatic theory of observation by itself decides neither for nor against any particular specification of meaning for an observation language; and that (...) Feyerabend's position provides no decision procedure when two contending theories share no terms having the same meaning, and thus cannot be said to be logically incompatible. Also, Feyerabend's insistence upon falsification will force him to admit that there are relatively permanent facts available to all theories, or to abandon the idea of test as falsification and to conclude that scientific theories can only be accepted or rejected on the basis of non-evidential considerations. (shrink)

It is a truism that people speak ‘loosely’——that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions. such as those including ‘exactly’, ‘all’ and ‘perfectly’, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms (...) of this formalism. Pragmatic loosencss of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a series of criticisms that have been levelled against Quine's naturalized epistemology, regarding its response to the problem of scepticism. Barry Stroud and Michael Williams, assuming that Quine wishes to refute scepticism, argue that Quine not only fails to undertake this refutation, but is also committed to theses (such as the inscrutability of reference and the underdetermination of theory by evidence) which imply versions of scepticism of their own. In Quine's defence, Roger Gibson argues that (...) Quine can succeed in showing sceptical doubts to be incoherent. But I contend that both parties of this dispute wrongly assume that Quine wishes to defeat the sceptic in a traditional way. Instead, Quine is happy to 'acquiesce' in scepticism about a certain kind of justification. No logical justification of our scientific beliefs is possible on his view. But Quine thinks that pragmatic justification is possible, and acknowledging that this is his view leads to the resolution of a number of interpretive quandaries. (shrink)

It is commonly held that epistemic standards for S ’s knowledge that p are affected by practical considerations, such as what is at stake in decisions that are guided by that p . I defend a particular view as to why this is, that is referred to as “pragmatic encroachment.” I then discuss a “new argument against miracles” that uses stakes considerations in order to explore the conditions under which stakes affect the level of epistemic support that is required (...) for knowledge. Finally, I generalize my results to include other religiously significant propositions such as “God exists” and “God does not exist.”. (shrink)

It has become something of a truism that people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties with pragmatics. Granting this, however, it is important to keep in mind that there are numerous kinds of pragmatic ability. One very important divide lies between those pragmatic competences which pertain to non-literal contents – as in, for instance, metaphor, irony and Gricean conversational implicatures – and those which pertain to the literal contents of speech acts. It is against this backdrop that (...) our question arises: Are certain pragmatic tasks more difficult than others for people with ASD? (shrink)

Abstract: In the 1980s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We argue that this move was misguided, and we offer an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics and a new pragmatic principle, which we call Be Articulate. This principle requires that a meaning pp’ (...) conceptualized as involving a pre-condition p (its ‘presupposition’) should be articulated as … (p and pp’) … (e.g. … it is raining and John knows it…) rather than as … pp’ …, unless the full conjunction is ruled out because the first or the second conjunct is semantically idle. In particular, … (p and pp’)… is infelicitous - and hence … pp’ … is acceptable - if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. An equivalence theorem guarantees that this condition suffices to derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Extensions of the condition lead to several new predictions, in particular concerning some ‘symmetric readings’ (e.g. If the bathroom is not hidden, this house has no bathroom), as well as presupposition projection in quantified structures, which displays a complex interaction between the nature of the trigger and the monotonicity of the quantifier. (shrink)

Many nonanthropocentric environmental ethicists subscribe to a ``principle-ist'''' approach to moral argument, whereby specific natural resource and environmental policy judgments are deduced from the prior articulation of a general moral principle. More often than not, this principle is one requiring the promotion of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. Yet there are several problems with this method of moral reasoning, including the short-circuiting of reflective inquiry and the disregard of the complex nature of specific environmental problems and policy arguments. In (...) the present paper, we advance an alternative, pragmatic contextualist approach to environmental ethics, one grounded in the moral theory of John Dewey. We present the results of an empirical study of public environmental ethics and natural resource management attitudes to support our position, and we conclude with a few recommendations for future inquiry in the field of environmental ethics. (shrink)

The mathematical concept of pragmatic truth, first introduced in Mikenberg, da Costa and Chuaqui (1986), has received in the last few years several applications in logic and the philosophy of science. In this paper, we study the logic of pragmatic truth, and show that there are important connections between this logic, modal logic and, in particular, Jaskowski's discussive logic. In order to do so, two systems are put forward so that the notions of pragmatic validity and (...) class='Hi'>pragmatic truth can be accommodated. One of the main results of this paper is that the logic of pragmatic truth is paraconsistent. The philosophical import of this result, which justifies the application of pragmatic truth to inconsistent settings, is also discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a business paradigm that allows and enables the integration of environmental ethics into business decisions while creating a competitive advantage through the use of an ethical framework based on classical American pragmatism. Environmental ethics could be useful as an alternative paradigm for business ethics by offering new perspectives and methodologies to grant consideration of the natural environment. An approach based on classical American pragmatism provides a superior framework for businesses by focusing on experimentation and innovation, (...) driving a long-term focus, and providing actionable clarity. Under a pragmatic approach to ethics, the choice for sustainability becomes self-evident for business performance and moral reasons. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the account Soames offers in Beyond Rigidity of the semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. I defend a particular constraint for identifying semantic content of phrases based on conditions for semantic competence, and argue that failure of substitutivity is an essential component of our competence conditions with propositional attitude predicates. Given that Soames's account makes no room for this, I conclude that he does not offer an adequate explanation of propositional attitude reports.

Theories of explanation are characterized as being either pragmatic or non-pragmatic, without a clear sense of what this is supposed to mean. The present paper offers a definition of a "pragmatic explanation-sentence", and in terms of this, of a "pragmatic theory of explanation". It is argued that van Fraassen's theory of explanation, despite claims to the contrary, is not genuinely pragmatic. By contrast, the author's own "illocutionary" theory is pragmatic. Attention is devoted particularly to (...) sentences of the form "E is a good explanation of q", which, it is urged, are pragmatic in a strong sense. In defense of this claim, and of the advantages of a pragmatic account generally, appeal is made to Rutherford's 1911 subatomic explanation of the results of his scattering experiments. Implications of a pragmatic theory are drawn for the debate between realists and anti-realists and absolutists and relativists. (shrink)

Herr Royce ist doch ein bedeutender Denker und darf nur als solcher behandelt werden.("Royce is an important thinker, and may only be treated as such.")Scholars of pragmatism and of phenomenology have observed striking similarities between Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl, foundational thinkers at the origins of two major philosophical movements whose effects are still strongly felt in the present day—Royce being considered a central founder of American pragmatic idealism, and Husserl of modern German phenomenology. Other scholars have noted striking (...) similarities between Royce's thought and that of the broader circle of phenomenology.2Can we discover in these relations definitive historical influences, rather than .. (shrink)

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's 'Context and Logical Form'. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a subsentential expression—where by 'subsentential expression' we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truthconditional (...) content of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of subsentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley's novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 (against 'shorthand') and Section 3 (against syntactic ellipsis, among other things). (shrink)

Russell famously argued that causation should be dispensed with. He gave two explicit arguments for this conclusion, both of which can be defused if we loosen the ties between causation and determinism. I show that we can define a concept of causation which meets Russell’s conditions but does not reduce to triviality. Unfortunately, a further serious problem is implicit beneath the details of Russell’s arguments, which I call the causal exclusion problem. Meeting this problem involves deploying a minimalist pragmatic (...) account of the nature and function of modal language. Russell’s scruples about causation can be accommodated, even as we partially legitimise the pervasive causal explanations in folk and scientific practice. (shrink)

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after (...) all. -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

Defence of conditions to withdraw an assertion that require evidence or epistemic reasons that the assertion is not true or warranted. (Adler, J. 2006. Withdrawal and contextualism. Analysis 66: 280–85) The defence replies to the claim that better methods justify withdrawal without meeting that requirement and without pragmatic encroachment.

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars’s famous manifest-scientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers—including, arguably, Sellars—often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between different kinds of objects and events, but a pragmatic boundary between different ways in which we interact with objects and events. Put differently, I argue that the manifest-scientific distinction, in my view, can be (...) best understood, not as a metaphysical distinction between apparent and real objects and events, or an epistemological distinction between perceptible and imperceptible objects and events, but rather as a distinction, which is not necessarily rigid over time, between distinct ways in which we collectively deal, in practice, with objects and events. (shrink)

I argue that scientific explanation has a pragmatic dimension that is epistemically relevant. Philosophers with an objectivist approach to scientific explanation (e.g. Hempel, Trout) hold that the pragmatic aspects of explanation do not have any epistemic import. I argue against this view by focusing on the role of models in scientific explanation. Applying recent accounts of modelling (Cartwright, Morgan and Morrison) to a case-study of nineteenth-century physics, I analyse the pragmatic dimension of the process of model construction. (...) I highlight the crucial roles that conceptual tools, skills, and commitments play in this dimension, and show how they contribute to the epistemic aim of science. (shrink)

The pragmatic theory of explanation is an attempt to see explanation as a linguistic response to a cognitive problem where the content of the response depends on the context of the scientific inquiry. The present paper draws on the rhetorical situation, as it is defined by Loyld Bitzer, in order to understand how the context may influence the content as well as the acceptability of the response.

I argue that (a) the phenomenon characteristic of pragmatic presupposition, is distinct from (b) the phenomenon characteristic of semantic presupposition, and that there are sentences exhibiting (a) alone. I apply this to Stalnaker's defense of van Fraassen's theory of semantic presupposition against Karttunen. I show that, since Stalmaker fails to distinguish (a) from (b), this defense amounts to an unsuccessful attempt to explain pragmatically the supposed instances of (b) in Karttunen's counter-examples. I observe that, given the distinction between (a) (...) and (b), we can salvage from Stalnaker the strategy of discounting certain of Karttunen's counter-examples which exhibit not (b) but merely (a). (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of (...) philosophers. Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

The paper argues for a pragmatic account of genetic explanation. This is to say that when a disease or other trait is termed genetic, the reasons for singling out genes as causes over other, also necessary, genetic and nongenetic conditions are not wholly theoretical but include pragmatic dimensions. Whether the explanation is the presence of a trait in an individual or differences in a trait among individuals, genetic explanations are context-dependent in three ways: they are relative to a (...) causal background of genetic and nongenetic factors; they are relative to a population; and they are relative to the present state of knowledge. Criteria like causal priority, nonstandardness, and causal efficacy that purport to distinguish objectively between genetic causes and nongenetic conditions either incorporate pragmatic elements or fail for other reasons. When the pragmatic dimensions of genetic explanations are recognized, we come to understand the current phenomenon of geneticization to be a reflection of increased technological capacities to manipulate genes in the laboratory, and potentially the clinic, rather than theoretical progress in understanding how diseases and other traits arise. This calls into question the value of the search for theoretical definitions of designations like genetic disease or genetic susceptibility as directives for action. (shrink)

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature ( but not both ). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations (...) and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested. (shrink)

Recent research (e.g., Evans & Over, 2004) has provided support for the hypothesis that people evaluate the probability of conditional statements of the form if p then q as the conditional probability of q given p , P( q / p ). The present paper extends this approach to pragmatic conditionals in the form of inducements (i.e., promises and threats) and advice (i.e., tips and warnings). In so doing, we demonstrate a distinction between the truth status of these conditionals (...) and their effectiveness as speech acts. Specifically, while probability judgements of the truth of conditional inducements and advice are highly correlated with estimates of P( q / p ), their perceived effectiveness in changing behaviour instead varies as a function of the conditional probability of q given not-p , P( q / ∼p ). Finally, we show that the conditional probability approach can be extended to predicting inference rates on a conditional reasoning task. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make it clear how and why begging the question should be seen as a pragmatic fallacy which can only be properly evaluated in a context of dialogue. Included in the paper is a review of the contemporary literature on begging the question that shows the gradual emergence over the past twenty years or so of the dialectical conception of this fallacy. A second aim of the paper is to investigate a number of (...) general problems raised by the pragmatic framework. (shrink)

My interest in this essay is an advance in the use of pragmatics to explain what were considered to be syntactical or semantical phenomena. The case in question is the explanation of the licensing of Negative Polarity Items. The data are not sentence-types but rather utterance-types and utterance-tokens. The explanatory concepts are the distinctions between assertions and non-assertions, between sentence-meanings and speaker’s meanings. I shall examine the most ingenious example of such a pragmatic theory that I know and ask (...) whether the arguments that have so far been used in its support are adequate to their task. The doubts that I raise do not show that the pragmatic theory cannot succeed, but they suggest that other theoretical constructions will be necessary for the proper defense of a pragmatic theory. (shrink)

The reductionist/holist debate is highly polarised. I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism. It derives from two claims: firstly, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is utterly impractical to attempt such a reduction, and secondly, that regardless of whether irreducible 'wholes exist, it is vain to try and prove this. This position illuminates the debate along new pragmatic lines by refocussing attention on the underlying heuristics of learning about the (...) natural world. (shrink)

Pragmatic Scientific Realism (PSR) urges us to take up the realist aim or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. While Newton-Smith thinks that pursuing what we know we cannot achieve is clearly irrational, Rescher disagrees and contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds—if in pursuing the unreachable goal one can get indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing (...) a pragmatic justification for the realist aim of PSR on precisely the same pragmatic grounds—since there is a competing alternative to PSR, and the alternative can provide whatever indirect benefits PSR can offer while being less risky than it is, prudential reasoning favours the alternative to PSR. This undermines the pragmatic case for the realist aim of science since the instrumentalist alternative does not aim at the truth. (shrink)

This paper argues for the pragmatic construction of Confucian democracy by showing that Chinese philosophers who wish to see Confucianism flourish again as a positive dimension of Chinese civilization need to approach it pragmatically and democratically, otherwise their love of the past is at the expense of something else Confucius held in equal esteem, love of learning. Chinese philosophers who desire democracy for China would do well to learn from the earlier failures of the iconoclastic Westernizers, and realize that (...) a Chinese democracy cannot come about by ignoring or dismissing such an important part of China's history, its Confucian tradition. The best chances for democracy in China lie in transforming that tradition without destroying it. Eagerness to learn from others must be united with a proper appreciation of one's own past to nurture democracy as a way of life. (shrink)

This article reveals that explanatory practice in software engineering is in accordance with pragmatic explanatory pluralism, which states that explanations should at least partially be evaluated by their practical use. More specifically, I offer a defense of the idea that several explanation-types are legitimate in software engineering, and that the appropriateness of an explanation-type depends on (a) the engineer’s interests, and (b) the format of the explanation-seeking question he asks, with this format depending on his interests. This idea is (...) defended by considering examples that are representative for explanatory practice in software engineering. Different kinds of technological explanation are spelled out, and the dependence of their appropriateness on interests and question-formats is extensively illustrated. (shrink)

Contextualism is supposed to explain why the following argument for skepticism seems plausible: (1) I don’t know that I am not a bodiless brain-in-a-vat (BIV); (2) If I know I have hands, then I know I am not a bodiless BIV; (3) Therefore, I do not know I have hands. Keith DeRose claims that (1) and (2) are “initially plausible.” I claim that (1) is initially plausible only because of an implicit argument that stands behind it; it is not intuitively (...) plausible. The argument DeRose offers is based on the requirement of sensitivity, that is, on the idea that if you know something then you would not believe it if it were false. I criticize the sensitivity requirement thereby undercutting its support for (1) and the skeptical data that contextualism is meant to explain. While skepticism is not a plausible ground for contextualism, I argue that certain pragmatic considerations are. It’s plausible to think that to know something more evidence is required when more is at stake. The best way to handle skepticism is to criticize the arguments for it. We should not adopt contextualism as a means of accommodating skepticism even if there are other pragmatic reasons for being a contextualist about knowledge. (shrink)

Patrick Shade makes a strong argument for the necessity of hope in a cynical world that too often rejects it as foolish. While most accounts of hope situate it in a theological context, Shade presents a theory rooted in the pragmatic thought of such American philosophers as C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

In this paper I will defend a new account of scientific representation. I will begin by looking at the benefits and drawbacks of two recent accounts on scientific representation: Hughes’ DDI account and Suárez’ inferential account. Next I use some of Galileo’s models in the Discorsi as a heuristic tool for a better account of scientific representation. Next I will present my model. The main idea of my account, which I refer to as the pragmatic model of shared characteristics (...) (PMSC), is that a model represents, if and only if, (1) a person accepts that there is a set of shared characteristics between the model and its target; (2) this set has the inferential power to generate results which can be tested empirically; (3) and the corresponding test(s) of these results is/are in agreement with our data and the specific cognitive goals we have in mind. (shrink)

This paper answers the question how pragmatic argumentation which occurs in a legal context, can be analyzed and evaluated adequately. First, the author surveys various ideas taken from argumentation theory and legal theory on the analysis and evaluation of pragmatic argumentation. Then, on the basis of these ideas, she develops a pragma-dialectical instrument for analyzing and evaluating pragmatic argumentation in a legal context. Finally she demonstrates how this instrument can be used by giving an exemplary analysis and (...) evaluation of pragmatic argumentation in a decision of the Dutch Supreme Court. (shrink)

Ideology often has been regarded by sociologists as an elusive and muddy concept. We believe that the understanding of this core concept can be improved by the use of constructs drawn from a pragmatic, interactionist perspective. We argue specifically that 1) ideologies are based on a set of relatively simple metaphors and images to which people respond on the basis of their shared experience and expectations; 2) ideologies are not purely cognitive, but depend principally on emotional responses; 3) ideologies (...) are presented at such times and in such ways as to enhance the public impression (and justify the claims and resources) of presenters and/or adherents; ideological enactment is fundamentally dramaturgical and interactional; and 4) ideologies are linked to groups and to the relationships between groups, which in turn depend on a set of resources in order to enact ideologies effectively. Ideologies are symbolic, affective, behavioral, and relational. In focusing on these themes, we avoid some overabstract conceptions of ideology that are endemic in social scientific literature. Instead we emphasize how ideologies can be linked to lived experience and to social interaction-a microsociological grounding of ideology. To understand the dynamics of ideology we examine ideologies about the environment, drawing from an ethnographic investigation of amateur mushroom collectors. (shrink)

This paper analyzes some issues derived from the social turn in the philosophy of science. The point of departure is the transformation of science into technoscience. If technoscience is conceived of as a system of human actions, then it requires the consideration of both epistemological and methodological parameters and the analysis of ethical, political, economic, and social aspects. This involves the necessity of assessing these parameters as a whole, by using a broad notion of value, namely, a pragmatic notion (...) of value. Accordingly, value will henceforth be a "pattern-guideline of solving problems." It leads to considering the philosophy of science as an axiology of technoscience. The following issues are developed: i) science as a value-laden enterprise; ii) value assessment as a task in the philosophy of science, which means justifying some special methodologies of assessment; iii) the proposal of specific criteria for establishing social policies of science and technology. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of evidential considerations in relation to pragmatic concerns in statements of group belief, focusing on scientific collaborations that are constituted in part by the aim of evaluating the evidence for scientific claims (evidential collaborations). Drawing upon a case study in high energy particle physics, I seek to show how pragmatic factors that enter into the decision to issue a group statement contribute positively to the epistemic functioning of such groups, contrary to the implications (...) of much of the existing discussion of group belief. I conclude by suggesting that applying social epistemological considerations to scientific collaborations could be practically beneficial, but only if an appropriately broad range of epistemic values is considered. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of Harry Collins's investigation into a third form of knowledge, “interactional expertise.” We argue that although Collins makes a genuine contribution to the phenomenological literature on expertise, his account requires further critical evaluation and response due to pragmatic and ontological considerations. We contend that by refining (in some questionable ways) the category of interactional expertise so as to create epistemological equivalence between activists, sociologists, critics, journalists, and some science administrators, Collins potentially undermines the (...) value that a more rigorously construed concept of interactional expertise might have. We further show that Collins misunderstands the nature of embodiment in a way that is exacerbated by the sociological perspective that he adopts. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind.

In this paper I synthesize a unified system out of Peirce's life work, and name it Peirce's Evolutionary Pragmatic Idealism. Peirce developed this philosophy in four stages:(I) His 1868–69 theory that cognition is a continuous and infinite social semiotic process, in which Man is a sign. (II) His Popular Science Monthly pragmatism and frequency theory of probabilistic induction. (III) His 1891–93 cosmic evolutionism of Tychism, Synechism, and Agapism. (IV) Pragmaticism: The doctrine of real potentialities (would-be's), and Peirce's (...) class='Hi'>pragmatic program for developing concrete reasonableness. Peirce's evolutionary conception of the cosmos is pantheistic, and he constructed it to reconcile religion with Darwinian evolution. (shrink)

Roboethics is a recently developed field of applied ethics which deals with the ethical aspects of technologies such as robots, ambient intelligence, direct neural interfaces and invasive nano-devices and intelligent soft bots. In this article we look specifically at the issue of (moral) responsibility in artificial intelligent systems. We argue for a pragmatic approach, where responsibility is seen as a social regulatory mechanism. We claim that having a system which takes care of certain tasks intelligently, learning from experience and (...) making autonomous decisions gives us reasons to talk about a system (an artifact) as being “responsible” for a task. No doubt, technology is morally significant for humans, so the “responsibility for a task” with moral consequences could be seen as moral responsibility. Intelligent systems can be seen as parts of socio-technological systems with distributed responsibilities, where responsible (moral) agency is a matter of degree. Knowing that all possible abnormal conditions of a system operation can never be predicted, and no system can ever be tested for all possible situations of its use, the responsibility of a producer is to assure proper functioning of a system under reasonably foreseeable circumstances. Additional safety measures must however be in place in order to mitigate the consequences of an accident. The socio-technological system aimed at assuring a beneficial deployment of intelligent systems has several functional responsibility feedback loops which must function properly: the awareness and procedures for handling of risks and responsibilities on the side of designers, producers, implementers and maintenance personnel as well as the understanding of society at large of the values and dangers of intelligent technology. The basic precondition for developing of this socio-technological control system is education of engineers in ethics and keeping alive the democratic debate on the preferences about future society. (shrink)

Debates in animal ethics are largely characterized by ethical monism, the search for a single, timeless, and essential trait in which the moral standing of animals can be grounded. In this paper, we argue that a monistic approach towards animal ethics hampers and oversimplifies the moral debate. The value pluralism present in our contemporary societies requires a more open and flexible approach to moral inquiry. This paper advocates the turn to a pragmatic, pluralistic approach to animal ethics. It contributes (...) to the development of such an approach in two ways. It offers a pragmatist critique of ethical monism in animal ethics and presents the results of a qualitative study into the value diversity present in the different ways of thinking about animals in the Netherlands. Carefully arranged group discussions resulted in the reconstruction of four distinctive moral value frameworks that may serve as instruments in the future process of moral inquiry and deliberation in the reflection on animal use. (shrink)

In this paper it will be argued that Beauchamp and Childress' principle-based approach to bioethics has strongly pragmatic features. Drawing on the writings of William James, I first develop an understanding of methodological pragmatism as a method of justification. On the basis of Beauchamp's and Childress' most recent proposals concerning moral justification in the fifth edition of their Principles of Biomedical Ethics (2001), I then discuss different aspects that the principle-based approach and methodological pragmatism have in common.

Critical review of Glenn McGee, ed., Pragmatic Bioethics.

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley’s ‘Context and Logical Form’. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a subsentential expression—where by ‘sub-sentential expression’ we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truthconditional (...) content of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of sub-sentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley’s novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 (against ‘shorthand’) and Section 3 (against syntactic ellipsis, among other things). (shrink)

Pragmatic pluralism denotes a particular approach to problems of international human rights and protections that departs from conventional cosmopolitan approaches. Pragmatic pluralism argues for situated and localized forms of cooperation between state and non-state actors, particularly religious groups and organizations, that may not share the secular, juridical understandings of rights, persons, and obligations common to contemporary cosmopolitan theory. A resource for the development of such a model of pragmatic pluralism can be found in the work of Hannah (...) Arendt. Arendt's early dissertation "Love and Saint Augustine" affords a model of religious community and obligation that can be read productively alongside her later political writings. The possibilities inherent in a cooperative reading of these two parts of her work can be illustrated in relation to an issue of particular concern to cosmopolitan theorists: the international refugee crisis. (shrink)

In this book Gary Gutting offers a powerful account of the nature of human reason in modern times. The fundamental question addressed by the book is what authority human reason can still claim once it is acknowledged that our fundamental metaphysical and religious pictures of the world no longer command allegiance. If ethics and science remain sources of authority what is the basis of that authority? Gutting develops answers to these questions through critical analysis of the work of three dominant (...) philosophical voices in our time: Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. His own position is defined as 'pragmatic liberalism'. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce believed that his pragmatic philosophy could reconcile religion and science and that this reconciliation involves a religious ethics creating a real community with the cosmos and God. After some rival pragmatic approaches to God and religious belief inconsistent with Peirce's philosophy are set aside, his metaphysical plan for a reconciliation of religion and science is outlined. A panentheistic God makes the best match with his desired conclusions from the Neglected Argument for the reality of God, (...) and this God is also capable of fulfilling the pragmatic role demanded by Peirce's ethical expectations for the intelligent functioning of religion. The discussion proceeds to an elaboration of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Peirce's philosophical system, which indicate why Peirce's religious ethics is best categorized as akin to Stoicism, with some Christian elements. For Peirce, religious ethics proceeds from the (potentially universal) agapic community's cooperation with God's loving creativity of the universe. (shrink)

The disjunction effect (Tversky & Shafir, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage's (1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of clear reasons for accepting an (...) option (x) when subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction of non-relevant goals into the text problem, in both the well-known Gamble problem and the Hawaii problem. (shrink)

Nearly everyone shares the intuition that sarcasm or verbal irony1 is a use of language in which speaker meaning and sentence meaning come apart. Two millennia ago, Quintilian defined irony as speech in which “we understand something which is the opposite of what is actually said.”2 More recently, Josef Stern sharply distinguishes metaphor, which he argues is semantic, from irony: in the latter case, he says, we are not “even tempted to posit an ironic meaning in the utterance in addition (...) to the ordinary literal meanings of the words used.”3 Indeed, sarcasm is frequently cited as a paradigm case of pragmatic meaning. (shrink)

The reductionist/holist debate seems an impoverished one, with many participants appearing to adopt a position first and constructing rationalisations second. Here I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is completely impractical to attempt such a reduction, also that regardless if whether irreducible `wholes' exist, it is vain to try and prove this in absolute terms. This position thus illuminates the debate along new pragmatic (...) lines, and refocusses attention on the underlying heuristics of learning about the natural world. (shrink)

Weak Quantum Theory (WQT) and the Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) are two psychophysical concepts developed on the basis of quantum physics. The present study contributes to their empirical examination. The issue of the study is whether WQT and MPI can not only explain ‘psi’-phenomena theoretically but also prove to be consistent with the empirical phenomenology of extrasensory perception (ESP). From the main statements of both models, 33 deductions for psychic readings are derived. Psychic readings are defined as settings, (...) in which psychics support or counsel clients by using information not mediated through the five senses. A qualitative approach is chosen to explore how the psychics experience extrasensory perceptions. Eight psychics are interviewed with a half-structured method. The reports are examined regarding deductive and inductive aspects, using a multi-level structured content analysis. The vast majority of deductions is clearly confirmed by the reports. Even though the study has to be seen as an explorative attempt with many aspects to be specified, WQT and MPI prove to be coherent and helpful concepts to explain ESP in psychic readings. (shrink)

Neurath's proposal for the form of protocol statements explicates the multiple embedding of a singular sentence as specifying different conditions for the acceptance of such a sentence as a bona fide scientific datum. Before theories are accepted or rejected in the light of such evidence, however, a further condition must be met which Neurath did not formalize. The different conditions are discussed and shown to constitute a naturalistic theory of scientific data and a pragmatic theory of theory acceptance.

We construct an extension P of the standard language of classical propositional logic by adjoining to the alphabet of a new category of logical-pragmatic signs. The well formed formulas of are calledradical formulas (rfs) of P;rfs preceded by theassertion sign constituteelementary assertive formulas of P, which can be connected together by means of thepragmatic connectives N, K, A, C, E, so as to obtain the set of all theassertive formulas (afs). Everyrf of P is endowed with atruth value defined (...) classically, and everyaf is endowed with ajustification value, defined in terms of the intuitive notion of proof and depending on the truth values of its radical subformulas. In this framework, we define the notion ofpragmatic validity in P and yield a list of criteria of pragmatic validity which hold under the assumption that only classical metalinguistic procedures of proof be accepted. We translate the classical propositional calculus (CPC) and the intuitionistic propositional calculus (IPC) into the assertive part of P and show that this translation allows us to interpret Intuitionistic Logic as an axiomatic theory of the constructive proof concept rather than an alternative to Classical Logic. Finally, we show that our framework provides a suitable background for discussing classical problems in the philosophy of logic. (shrink)