Following Kit Fine (2007), we can say that the de jure pair represent the referent as the same while the second one does not do so. There are roughly three ways of capturing this difference. One could say that de jure coreference between two expression occurrences happen because (a) the occurrences have identical meanings, (b) they have identical syntactic properties, or (c) they enter into a semantic relation not grounded in identity of meaning or syntax. In what follows, I give (...) some reason to think that de jure coreference is not a transitive relation. As a consequence, we can rule out (a) and (b) just on these grounds alone (since identity is a transitive relation). (c) then looks promising. I argue that this gives further support for a relationist semantics along the lines of what Kit Fine has proposed. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...) the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the (...) philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect. (shrink)

This book, the first of its kind, puts forward a novel, unified cognitive account of skeptical doubt. Historically, most philosophers have tried to tackle this difficult topic by directly arguing that skeptical doubt is false. But N. Ángel Pinillos does something different. He begins by trying to uncover the hidden mental rule which, for better or worse, motivates our skeptical inclinations. He then gives an account of the broader cognitive purpose of having and applying this rule. Based on these (...) ideas, he shows how we can give a new response to the traditional problem of global skepticism. He also argues that philosophical skepticism is not just something that comes up during philosophical reflection, as David Hume, Charles Sanders Peirce and other philosophers have urged. Instead, it is of great practical significance. The rule which produces skepticism may itself be operative in certain pathologies such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, in creative endeavors, and in conspiratorial thinking. The rule can also explain some of our reluctance to trust statistical evidence, especially in legal settings. More broadly, this volume aims to breathe new life into a classic problem in philosophy by tackling it from a new perspective and exploring new areas of application. The book will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists and anyone interested in the human capacity to doubt and to question our beliefs. (shrink)

Sensitivity-type principles are prominent in epistemology. They have the promise to explain our intuitive and considered reactions to a wide range of important cases in everyday life, science and philosophy. Despite this promise, philosophers have raised a number of very serious objections to the principles. Accordingly, I propose a different type of sensitivity account which, I believe, gets around these serious objections. An important feature of the new approach is that the principle I propose need not be true. Rather, it (...) should be understood as a cognitive heuristic that tells us when something is not known—a type of doubt. A second feature is that the principle does not care about what one’s belief would be like in counter-factual situations. Instead, it cares about what the bases or causes for the belief would be like in those situations. (shrink)

One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist (...) reading. The meaning will shift depending on the conversational setting. The theoretical view has roots in work by Kitcher. We present some original experiments that support the thesis. (shrink)

I consider here the issue of whether and to what extent moral truths are absolute. My aim is to raise some new considerations in favor of moral relativism: the thesis that some moral statements can vary in truth-value depending on the moral standards at issue.1 2 This paper has three major components. First, I describe a new puzzle concerning the possibility of moral knowledge in light of expert disagreement. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle requires moral relativism. (...) Second, I develop a notion of a moral standard that incorporates recent developments in moral psychology, including work by.. (shrink)

Suppose that we repair a wooden ship by replacing its planks one by one with new ones while at the same time reconstructing it using the discarded planks. Some defenders of vague or indeterminate identity claim that: (1) although the reconstructed ship is distinct from the repaired ship, it is indeterminate whether the original ship is the reconstructed ship and indeterminate whether it is the repaired ship, and (2) the indeterminacy is due to the world and not just an imprecision (...) in the language used to describe the situation. I argue that such a description is incoherent. The argument has two features. First, it differs in spirit from Gareth Evans's more general famous proof against the possibility of indeterminate identity. This is because I rely on facts regarding counting and sets. Second, I focus on Terence Parsons's recent defence of indeterminate identity. I argue that his attempts at making sense of counting objects involving indeterminate identities fail on technical and philosophical grounds. (shrink)

I develop a cognitive account of how humans make skeptical judgments (of the form “X does not know p”). In my view, these judgments are produced by a special purpose metacognitive "skeptical" mechanism which monitors our reasoning for hasty or overly risky assumptions. I argue that this mechanism is modular and shaped by natural selection. The explanation for why the mechanism is adaptive essentially relies on an internalized principle connecting knowledge and action, a principle central to pragmatic encroachment theories. I (...) end the paper by sketching how we can use the account I develop here to respond to the skeptic. (shrink)

Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, (...) it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge. (shrink)

I argue in favor of a certain connection between knowledge and the permissibility of action. On this approach, we do not think of the relation between those notions as reflecting a universal epistemic principle. Instead, we think of it as something resembling a platitude from folk psychology. With the help of some elementary tools from the logic of normativity and counterfactuals, I attempt to establish the connection by deriving it from more elementary principles. The new formulation involves a ceteris paribus (...) clause. Though it is often difficult to specify the exact content of a ceteris paribus clause, we will see that our clause is derived from a descriptive generalization with independent motivation. (shrink)

Philosophers have been talking about skepticism for a long time. Some of those insights can shed light on our public discourse regarding climate change.

I consider two possible sources of vagueness. The first is indeterminacy about which intension is expressed by a word. The second is indeterminacy about which referent (extension) is determined by an intension. Focusing on a Fregean account of intensions, I argue that whichever account is right will matter to whether vagueness turns out to be a representational phenomenon (as opposed to being “in the world”). In addition, it will also matter to whether supervaluationism is a viable semantic framework. Based on (...) these considerations, I end by developing an argument against supervaluational semantics that depends, instead, on anti-Fregean (Millian) assumptions. (shrink)

A passenger boards a fast train. It takes her some distance, makes a u-turn, and returns to the starting platform. She reports that according to her clock, the trip took n seconds. An observer on the platform, using his own clock, gets a different reading. He records a longer time interval m. These claims are compatible with the clocks being in perfect order. Modern Physics tells us that time is a relativistic notion. The duration of the trip, understood as the (...) temporal distance between the departure and the return event, will depend on the chosen frame of reference. The passenger and the observer belong to different frames. This is the source of the discrepancy. Suppose that the passenger and the observer speak a language that is like ours with possible differences arising from the assumption that no one in their community knows about modern physics. Let us call this language '19th Century English'. Imagine that the agents, in different conversations, utter sentences (1) and (2) respectively. (shrink)

A passenger boards a fast train. It takes her some distance, makes a u-turn, and returns to the starting platform. She reports that according to her clock, the trip took n seconds. An observer who remained behind on the platform gets a different reading. Using his clock, he records a longer time interval m. These claims are compatible with the clocks being in perfect order. Modern Physics tells us that time is relative. The duration of the trip, understood as the (...) temporal distance between the departure and the return events, will depend on the chosen frame of reference. The passenger and the observer belong to different frames. This is the source of the discrepancy. Suppose that the passenger and the observer speak a language that is like ours with possible differences arising from the assumption that no one in their community knows about modern physics. Let us call this language '19th Century English'. Imagine that the agents, in different conversations, utter sentences (1) and (2) respectively. (shrink)

People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b confirms a novel prediction of the new explanation, the reverse (...) action effect, in which people judge inactions to be more causal than actions in overdetermination cases. Experiment 2 directly compares the two effects in joint-causation and overdetermination scenarios and conceptually replicates them with new scenarios. Taken together, these studies provide support for the new counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgment. (shrink)

Classical work on Hindu cosmology by Huccaṇṇa, 16th century Kannada author.

I develop and test a multilevel trust-based model of ethical public leadership, which links ethical leadership, trust and leadership outcomes both within and across organizational levels. I examine how both ethical leadership and trust relate to employee well-being and satisfaction, group organizational citizenship behaviour and perceived organizational performance. The findings, based on data collected from an online quantitative survey conducted in three local councils of the north east of England, provide evidence in support of positive relationships between ethical leadership and (...) employees’ trust in leaders at multiple levels. This trust is in turn shown to influence employees’ attitudes, behaviours and cognitions. (shrink)

Author's answers to questions on Buddhist philosophy, posed to him by some foreign scholars.

Philosophical aspects of belief and ancestor worship in Southern Vietnam.

History of civilization and human nature of Vietnam.