How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...) Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

Through careful analysis of a specific example, Parfit’s ‘fission argument’ for the unimportance of personal identity, I argue that our judgements concerning imaginary scenarios are likely to be unreliable when the scenarios involve disruptions of certain contingent correlations. Parfit’s argument depends on our hypothesizing away a number of facts which play a central role in our understanding and employment of the very concept under investigation; as a result, it fails to establish what Parfit claims, namely, that identity is not what (...) matters. I argue that Parfit’s conclusion can be blocked without denying that he has presented an imaginary case where prudential concern would be rational in the absence of identity. My analysis depends on the recognition that the features that explain or justify a relation may be distinct from the features that underpin it as necessary conditions. (shrink)

On one standard reading, Plato's works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behaviour in a way that not only produces right action, but also ‘silences’ inclinations to the contrary—at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them, reason, (...) normatively dominates the others, it may fail to do so descriptively: even in the face of full, explicit, well‐reasoned, conscious awareness of the truth of a claim, a person may continue to feel residual inclinations towards disavowed, inappropriate and misguided experiences and courses of action. In this paper, I will argue that even the second of these views does not fully capture the ways in which reflective commitment fails to guide human action. Whereas the traditional multi‐part soul view is well suited to explaining phenomena that involve a cognitive conflict between our reflective attitudes and our non‐reflective endorsements, it falls short when we turn to the full array of human patterns of response, because it neglects a further source of challenge to reason's rule, namely, the mediation of associative and heuristic processes. These processes introduce complications for which the simple faculty psychology view cannot adequately account. Because they produce challenges to reason's rule that are phenomenologically invisible, traditional strategies for self‐regulation cannot be straightforwardly applied to their management. (shrink)

To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...) to be the case. // -/- Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination’s role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination’s role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination’s role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination’s role in irony and metaphor. // -/- Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

Sententialism is the view that intensional positions in natural languages occur within clausal complements only. According to proponents of this view, intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek' or 'resemble' are actually propositional attitude verbs in disguise. I argue that 'conceive' cannot fit this mould: conceiving-of is not reducible to conceiving-that. I offer a new diagnosis of where Berkeley's 'master argument' goes astray, analysing what is odd about saying that Hylas conceives a tree which is not conceived. A sententialist semantics (...) cannot account for the absurdity in attitude ascriptions of this type: we need to acknowledge irreducibly non-propositional conceiving. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This will (...) be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

A brief "advertisement" in response to Roy Sorensen's "advertisement" "A Cure for Incontinence".

“Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke”. The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a question about (...) personal identity by providing a transcendental analysis of the conditions for personhood whose analysans turns out to be a commitment to agency. In situating the work within such an intellectual context, I do not mean to cast aspersions on its originality; there is no question that Rovane offers a tremendously innovative and sophisticated account of personal identity. But it may be helpful for readers approaching the book on the basis of its title to realize at the outset that it is neither a work of analytic metaphysics, nor a work concerned with the internal structure of agency. Rather, The Bounds of Agency offers a sustained exploration of the preconditions and implications of taking seriously a particular conception of personhood that uniquely satisfies a cluster of methodological constraints that should be accepted by all parties in the debate concerning the nature of persons and the conditions that govern their identity over time. According to such a conception, what distinguishes persons from other sorts of beings is their capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations. What underpins that capacity is a commitment to rational agency, that is, a commitment to achieving overall rational unity. So, argues Rovane, what it is to be a person is to be committed to acting upon all-things-considered judgments in rationally optimal ways. And what it is for a person to persist over time is for certain sorts of rational relations to hold among certain sorts of intentional episodes, in ways that allow the commitments of the person at one time to govern the intentional actions of a person at another. (shrink)

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics to do with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This (...) will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

BonJour’s intricately argued and provocative book raises a fundamental challenge for the empiricist: if we lack the capacity for direct apprehension of necessary truths, how do we know so much? How do we know about logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori subjects? How do we know about generalities, about the past and the future, about objects that are not present? How do we know about the relations that hold between premises and conclusions? If the first half of BonJour’s (...) book is right, the empiricist is unable to answer these questions, for she is unable to explain how our beliefs in such things are justified. Lacking such an explanation, the empiricist would be committed to an extreme and unacceptable form of skepticism—call this the indispensability argument. The rationalist, by contrast, has an answer to these questions, and if the second half of BonJour’s book is right, the answer is both epistemologically and metaphysically unobjectionable— call this the possibility argument. (shrink)

The Elements of Philosophy: Readings from Past and Present offers an extensive collection of classic and contemporary readings, organized topically into five main sections: Religion and Belief, Moral and Political Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Language, and Life and Death. Within these broad areas, readings are arranged in clusters that address both traditional issues--such as the existence of God, justice and the state, knowledge and skepticism, and free will--and contemporary topics--including God and science, just war theory, vegetarianism, (...) and time travel. Carefully chosen selections from a wide range of pre-20th-century philosophers are paired with writings from more than fifty leading contemporary philosophers and thinkers. The traditional philosophers represented range from Plato and Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and A.J. Ayer; the contemporary philosophers include Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, Hilary Putnam, Robert Nozick, Judith Jarvis Thomson, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, and Susan Wolf. Also included are selections from linguist Noam Chomsky, physicist Albert Einstein, and psychologist William James. Edited by a team of scholars who are also highly esteemed instructors, The Elements of Philosophy is uniquely student-friendly. A team of undergraduate philosophy majors played a central role in helping to select topics, choose readings, and identify terms likely to require clarification. In response to their suggestions, the volume includes detailed introductions to each section, explanatory footnotes that define unfamiliar terms and concepts, an extensive glossary, and a guide to further resources. A companion Instructor's Manual, available on CD, offers article summaries, suggested essay questions, reading guides, model handouts, and sample syllabi. One of the most extensive and expansive anthologies available, The Elements of Philosophy is an ideal choice for both general and targeted introductory philosophy courses. (shrink)

Millikan contrasts her substance-based view of concepts with “descriptionism” according to which description determines what falls under a concept. Focusing on her discussion of the role of language in the acquisition of concepts, I argue that descriptions cannot be separated from perception in the ways Millikan's view requires.

Thought experiment is one of the most widely-used and least understood techniques in philosophy. A thought experiment is a process of reasoning carried out within the context of a well-articulated imaginary scenario in order to answer a specific question about a non-imaginary situation. The aim of my dissertation is to show that both the powers and the limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it (...) does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases. ;The dissertation has five chapters: an introduction, three case studies and a conclusion. My main contention is that certain patterns of features which coincide only fortuitously may nonetheless play a central role in the organization of our concepts, and that to the extent that imaginary scenarios involve disruptions of these patterns, our first-order judgments about them are often distorted or even inverted. ;In the introduction and conclusion, I discuss the role of imaginary exceptions in the acquisition of new knowledge. I argue that appeal to imaginary cases is unavoidable because the world is neither maximally replete nor effortlessly navigable, and that appeal to exceptional cases is indispensable if we wish to avoid mistaking accidental regularities for regularities that reflect deeper truths about the world. ;In the first case study, I discuss a famous thought experiment of Galileo's, and I try to show that the guided contemplation of an imaginary scenario can provide us with new scientific knowledge in a way that argument alone cannot. In the second case study, I try to show that standard interpretations of the puzzle of the Ship of Theseus founder because they ignore the importance of the background norms against which we can make sense of local instances of extrinsically-determined identity. And in the third case study, I try to show that thought experiments in the personal identity literature are inconclusive because they disregard the explanatory role played by contingent facts about the ways human beings come into existence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of others.

At the end of the last century, Ernst Mach coined a term to describe a particular technique of scientific investigation, a mental analogue to physical experiment which he dubbed "Gedunkenexperiment."I According to Mach, this method is central to the history of science; its greatest practitioners include Aristotle and Galileo, and its careful employment "led to enormous changes in our thinking and to an opening up of most important new paths of inquiry."2 In the century that followed, Mach's term showed up (...) occasionally in the philosophy of science literature, most notably, perhaps, in Karl Popper's "On the Use and Misuse of Imaginary Experiments, Especially in Quantum Theory,"s and in Thomas Kuhn's, "A Function for Thought Experiments."4 Discussions of the technique — in science and in philosophy — made sporadic appearances on the pages of philosophy journals, each year's Philosophers' Index sporting some dozen entries under "Thought Experiment." Then, in the mid-1980s, the Zeitgeist smiled upon thought experiments; they were explicitly recognized as a central technique in analytic philosophy, and self-conscious philosophical scrutiny was directed upon them.s In the Spring of 1986, Tamara Horowitz and Gerald Massey organized a conference at the University of Pittsburgh on "The Place of Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy." The papers given at that conference, along with several others inspired by it, are collected in Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, published in 1991. A year later, Roy Sorensen published his Thought Experiments, a detailed ten-chapter discussion of thought experiments in philosophy and science, in which he defends their continuity with physical experiment, and adduces numerous arguments in favor of their philosophical legitimacy. Sorensen's style is chatty and unpretensious, full of striking turns of phrase and colloquialisms: "I am bullish on the comparison;" "this protoype gives us a bum steer;" "Wittgenstein discourages fascination with mental freak shows;" "traditional metaphysicians scoffed at Meinong's... (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory 'Russellian' just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in 'On Denoting'. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of 'On Denoting' are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that 'The F is G' entails 'There is at most one F'; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

A fictionalist attitude towards an area of discourse encourages us to assent to certain sentences of that discourse without believing that they are true. Prima facie, this amounts to a suggestion that we should also assent to sentences of the form 'S but I don't believe that S'. Traditional versions of fictionalism have an answer to this challenge, but I argue that the answer is unavailable for a currently popular type of fictionalism. This is bad news for fictionalism in general (...) because the currently popular variety is the one that deals best with the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. (shrink)

“Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke”. The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a question about (...) personal identity by providing a transcendental analysis of the conditions for personhood whose analysans turns out to be a commitment to agency. In situating the work within such an intellectual context, I do not mean to cast aspersions on its originality; there is no question that Rovane offers a tremendously innovative and sophisticated account of personal identity. But it may be helpful for readers approaching the book on the basis of its title to realize at the outset that it is neither a work of analytic metaphysics, nor a work concerned with the internal structure of agency. Rather, The Bounds of Agency offers a sustained exploration of the preconditions and implications of taking seriously a particular conception of personhood that uniquely satisfies a cluster of methodological constraints that should be accepted by all parties in the debate concerning the nature of persons and the conditions that govern their identity over time. According to such a conception, what distinguishes persons from other sorts of beings is their capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations. What underpins that capacity is a commitment to rational agency, that is, a commitment to achieving overall rational unity. So, argues Rovane, what it is to be a person is to be committed to acting upon all-things-considered judgments in rationally optimal ways. And what it is for a person to persist over time is for certain sorts of rational relations to hold among certain sorts of intentional episodes, in ways that allow the commitments of the person at one time to govern the intentional actions of a person at another. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

BonJour’s intricately argued and provocative book raises a fundamental challenge for the empiricist: if we lack the capacity for direct apprehension of necessary truths, how do we know so much? How do we know about logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori subjects? How do we know about generalities, about the past and the future, about objects that are not present? How do we know about the relations that hold between premises and conclusions? If the first half of BonJour’s (...) book is right, the empiricist is unable to answer these questions, for she is unable to explain how our beliefs in such things are justified. Lacking such an explanation, the empiricist would be committed to an extreme and unacceptable form of skepticism—call this the indispensability argument. The rationalist, by contrast, has an answer to these questions, and if the second half of BonJour’s book is right, the answer is both epistemologically and metaphysically unobjectionable— call this the possibility argument. (shrink)

David Schmidtz’s Robert Nozick is a collection of nine specially commissioned papers on Nozick’s work by a wide range of distinguished philosophers. Nearly all of the papers are of high quality, and the volume is well conceptualized and well executed. The collection will certainly be useful to anyone with a comprehensive interest in Nozick’s corpus. In addition, many of its individual essays will be of independent interest to those concerned with particular aspects of Nozick’s work.

I had a structural worry about the relation of Gaita’s three chapters on truth, interesting though these chapters are, to the rest of Gaita’s project. And I had some residual questions left after reading the book: What are persons? How do we know when we are encountering one, and when are we justified (we must be sometimes: compare the various sorts of animal) in a decision that something we encounter is not a person? Do evil actions always involve a sort (...) of blindness to what is being done? If so, how easy is it to explain how agents who do evil can be held responsible for their cognitive deficiencies? These may of course be questions that Gaita was not trying to answer; but in any case, as I hope I have conveyed, I found A Common Humanity a striking and revelatory read, and I warmly recommend it. (shrink)

Yablo gives us an account of subject-matter - a characterization of what declarative sentences are about. I argue that this account can be seen as a way of adjusting Frege’s theory of meaning, so as it no longer carries the implausible commitment that declarative sentences refer to their truth-values. I also point out that Yablo’s approach faces an unpleasant choice: give up a uniform compositional semantics for interrogative sentences or abandon the idea that ordinary characterizations of subject matter are literally (...) and unambiguously true. (shrink)

Semantic and pragmatic theories tend to deal with context-change in two radically opposing ways. Some view it as theoretically irrelevant, interpreting each sentence relative to the context as it happens to be at the moment of its utterance. Others view it as theoretically fundamental, proposing to view context-change as the very subject-matter of the theory of interpretation. Robert Stalnaker’s book Context steers a middle course between the extremes–to keep the semantics mostly static while letting the pragmatics go mostly dynamic. Within (...) his framework, context-change matters because interpretation is sometimes prospective, relying not on the context as it is at the time of utterance but on the context as it is anticipated to be somewhat later. This paper critically examines how Stalnaker makes use of prospective interpretation in accounting for accommodation and in capturing the insights of expressivism. (shrink)

Wayne Davis’s Meaning, Expression and Thought argues that linguistic meaning is conventional use to express ideas. An obvious problem with this proposal is that complex expressions that have never been used are nonetheless meaningful. In response to this concern, Davis associates conventions of use not only with linguistic expressions but also with the modes in which such expressions can combine into larger expressions. I argue that such constructive conventions are in conflict with the principle of compositionality (as it is usually (...) understood) and that (at least in the cases Davis considers) they are unnecessary for semantic explanations. (shrink)

Gendler reformulated the so-called imaginability puzzle in terms of authorial breakdown. The main idea behind this move was to isolate the essential features displayed by the alleged problematic cases and to specify a puzzle general enough to be applied to a variety of different types of imaginative resistance. I offer various criticisms of Gendler’s approach to imaginative resistance that also raise some more general points on the recent literature on the topic.

This paper challenges T. S. Gendler's notion of aliefs, a novel kind of mental state which she introduces to explain a wide variety of belief-discordant behaviors. In particular, I argue that many of the cases which she uses to motivate such a mental state can be fully explained by accounts that make use only of commonplace attitudes such as beliefs and desires.

Contribution to a book symposium on Tamar Gendler's Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.

Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist. However, I argue that, although Gendler calls attention to a pitfall worthy of study, she fails to conclusively demonstrate that there are epistemic (or cognitive) costs of being racist. Gendler offers (...) three supporting phenomena. First, implicit racists expend cognitive energy repressing their implicit biases. I reply, citing Ellen Bialystok’s research, that constant use of executive functioning can be beneficial. Second, Gendler argues that awareness of a negative stereotype of one’s own race with regard to a given task negatively affects one’s performance of that task. This phenomenon, I argue, demonstrates that those against whom the stigma is directed suffer costs, but it fails to demonstrate that the stigmatizers suffer cognitively. Finally, Gendler argues that racists are less competent when recognizing faces of other races than when recognizing faces of their own race because, in the first instance, they encode the race of the face (taking up cognitive space that could have been used to encode fine-grained distinctions), whereas in the second instance they encode no race. I argue that in-group/out-group categorization rather than racism is the cognitive cost. I conclude that Gendler has failed to demonstrate that there are cognitive costs associated with being a racist. (shrink)

In cases of imaginative contagion, imagining something has doxastic or doxastic-like consequences. In this reply to Tamar Szabó Gendler's article in this collection, I investigate what the philosophical consequences of these cases could be. I argue (i) that imaginative contagion has consequences for how we should understand the nature of imagination and (ii) that imaginative contagion has consequences for our understanding of what belief-forming mechanisms there are. Along the way, I make some remarks about what the consequences of the (...) contagion cases are for the relation between knowledge and imagination. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophy [pdf manuscript].

I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate (...) control. (shrink)

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and modal epistemology.

The “paradox of fictional emotions” involves a trio of claims that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Resolution of the paradox thus requires that we deny at least one of these plausible claims. The paradox has been formulated in various ways, but for the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the following three claims, which we will refer to respectively as the Response Condition, the Belief Condition and the Coordination Condition.

The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.

Contribution to a symposium on Gendler's Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.