Upon introspection, we judge that suffering feels bad. I argue there is no appearance-reality gap when it comes to introspective judgments about simple, intrinsic, nonrepresentational phenomenal states like itches, tingling, and suffering's feeling bad. On constitutivism about phenomenal introspection, there is no appearance-reality gap here because these judgments are literally constituted by the phenomenal states they are about. As a result, we are directly acquainted with the intrinsic properties of experience in having these judgments. Reflecting on our direct acquaintance with (...) intrinsic badness, we can know that our suffering instantiates this judgment-independent evaluative property. (shrink)

Robert Sinclair’s *Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction* persuasively argues that Quine’s epistemology was deeply influenced by C. I. Lewis’s pragmatism. Sinclair’s account raises the question why Quine himself frequently downplayed Lewis’s influence. Looking back, Quine has always said that Rudolf Carnap was his “greatest teacher” and that his 1933 meeting with the German philosopher was his “first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation” (1970, 41; 1985, 97-8, my emphasis). Quine’s autobiographies contain only a (...) handful of biographical references to Lewis and he regularly soft-pedaled the latter’s influence in private correspondence. In this note, I discuss some archival evidence that helps us better understand Quine’s reluctance to acknowledge Lewis’s influence. I contextualize the relation between Lewis and Quine and argue that the latter viewed his teacher as a retrograde force in modern epistemology, impeding the more rigorous approach that Carnap had been developing in Europe. Next, I briefly discuss Lewis’s contribution to the development of scientific philosophy in the United States and argue that Quine underestimated his teacher’s role in this process. In doing so, I hope to show that Quine’s zealous commitment to Carnap’s approach negatively affected his assessment of Lewis’s influence, thereby supplementing Sinclair’s praiseworthy reconstruction with an explanation of why Quine himself underestimated Lewis’s role. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Once upon a time, logical conventionalism was the most popular philosophical theory of logic. It was heavily favored by empiricists, logical positivists, and naturalists. According to logical conventionalism, linguistic conventions explain logical truth, validity, and modality. And conventions themselves are merely syntactic rules of language use, including inference rules. Logical conventionalism promised to eliminate mystery from the philosophy of logic by showing that both the metaphysics and epistemology of logic fit into a scientific picture of reality. For naturalists of all (...) stripes, this was paradise. Alas, paradise was lost. By the end of the twentieth century, logical conventionalism had been almost universally abandoned. But more recently, it has been revitalized. This chapter provides an overview of logical conventionalism and its history, clears away misunderstandings, and briefly responds to both the canonical objections to conventionalism (from Quine, Dummett, Boghossian, and many others) as well as new objections (from Field and Golan). From paradise lost, to paradise regained: logical conventionalism is back. (shrink)

Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...) (Lee, 2020; Worsnip, 2018a). It has also been suggested that, in the course of good first-personal deliberation, agents should treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits (Worsnip, 2021). In this paper, I raise a worry for these two theses concerning structural rationality. Roughly, I argue that some imperfect epistemic agents (like us) can be disposed to have structurally irrational combinations of attitudes. Also, when these imperfect agents deliberate, they should not treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits. Given our imperfections, being structurally irrational can very well be the best option we have. More generally, these observations reveal that structural rationality should not always be theorized independently from more “substantive” norms, like responsiveness to reasons or expected value optimization. (shrink)

Ivan Boh affirms and Robert Pasnau denies that William Heytesbury holds merely true belief to be sufficient for knowledge in the broad sense. I argue that Boh is correct and Pasnau is mistaken, and that there is a long-running orthodox medieval tradition agreeing with Heytesbury about the conditions for knowledge. I offer a hypothesis about the origins, continuance and demise of that medieval tradition, and some remarks about the tradition's significance.

The positivists defined analyticity as truth in virtue of meaning alone and advocated the view that the notion of analyticity so defined is co-extensive with both the notion of an a priori truth an...

Abstract: One of the institutional highlights of the encounter between Austrian “wissen¬schaftliche Philosophie” and French “philosophie scientifique” in the first half of the 20th century was the “First International Congress for Unity of Science” that took place 1935 in Paris. In my contribution I deal with an episode of the philosophical mega-event whose protagonist was the American philosopher and semiotician Charles William Morris. At the Paris congress he presented his programme of a comprehensive, practice-oriented scientific philosophy and, in a more (...) elaborated version he published it two years later in Logical Positivism, Pragmatism and Scientific Empiricism (Morris 1937). Morris aimed at a synthesis of formalism, pragmatism, and traditional empiricism that combined the virtues of these accounts while avoided their shortocmings. The core of approach was a comprehensive theory of the concept of meaning. Through an analysis of the concept of meaning he sought to sort out the existing differences and the options for a possible future rapprochment between logical empiricism and pragmatism. Against the overly narrow logical empiricist understanding of philosophy as the syntax of the language of science Morris argued for a “scientific pragmatism” that comprised four levels: (1) Philosophy as Logic of Science, (2) Philosophy as Clarification of Meaning (Peirce), (3) Philosophy as Empirical Axiology (Dewey), and (4) Philosophy as Empirical Cosmology (Whitehead). (shrink)

I argue that we can achieve certainty about some empirical propositions. When someone is having a migraine and attending to it, she can be certain that she is in pain. I show that examples intended to undermine claims of certainty or to raise doubts about the reliability of introspection do not touch such cases. Traditional foundationalists have held that epistemically certain beliefs can serve as the basis for all one’s other justified beliefs. This is not so, because those beliefs that (...) are certain are spread too thinly to serve as broad justificatory foundations. Certainty has a different role. The best explanation for the existence of epistemically certain empirical beliefs is experientialism, the view that nondoxastic sensory experiences can justify beliefs. Experientialism then offers a framework for showing how the stream of sensory experiences can provide an adequate basis for the justification of our ordinary beliefs about the external world. (shrink)

In recent years, some authors have proposed quantitative measures of the coherence of sets of propositions. Such probabilistic measures of coherence (PMCs) are, in general terms, functions that take as their argument a set of propositions (along with some probability distribution) and yield as their value a number that is supposed to represent the degree of coherence of the set. In this paper, I introduce a minimal constraint on PMC theories, the weak stability principle, and show that any correct, coherent, (...) and complete PMC cannot satisfy it. As a matter of fact, the argument offered in this paper can be applied to any coherence theory that uses a priori procedures. I briefly explore some consequences of this fact. (shrink)

Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have not answered. Here I argue that all of these objections fail. I develop a new form of experientialism that (...) is immune to them. It also has an independent rationale. It incorporates an account of the value of art appreciation that is plausible in its own right. And it endorses many of the core insights of anti-experientialists, especially concerning the final value of good art. Those of us unconvinced by experientialism need to take this form of it seriously. I conclude by identifying some genuine problems it faces. Even these aren’t clearly insoluble. (shrink)

What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. It (...) argues that our conventions, in the form of syntactic rules of language use, are perfectly suited to explain the truth, necessity, and a priority of logical and mathematical claims, as well as our logical and mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is original about EPM (...) is that it criticizes empiricist positions like Lewis’s not because of their foundationalism, but because of their psychologism about meaning. Since psychologism turns out to be unacceptable by Lewis’s own lights, EPM has a compelling (if implicit) critique of Lewis to offer after all, one that strikes at the heart of his philosophical system. (shrink)

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – (...) its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

According to internalist theories of testimony, beliefs based on what others say are justified by the reasons a listener uses in forming her belief. I identify a distinctive type of testimonial situation, which I call circular testimony and argue that a certain type of circular testimony establishes the incompleteness of internalist theories of testimony.

What distinguishes preference utilitarianism from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences being satisfied.

I argue that there are living and everyday case in which rationality requires you, as a non-idealized human thinker, to have inconsistent beliefs while recognizing the inconsistency. I defend my argument against classical and insightful objections by Doris Olin, as well as others. I consider three versions of the preface paradox as candidate cases, including Makinson’s original version. None is free from objection. However, there is a fourth version, Modesty, that supposes that you believe that at least one of your (...) beliefs is false. I argue that this version escapes all the objections that could trouble the other versions, including the objection that given certain closure principles for justified belief, justified inconsistent beliefs saddle you with a pair of justified beliefs that are in explicit contradiction. I also argue more tentatively for the same verdict for Modesty*, a version that supposes that you believe that at least one of your beliefs is false. In that case, your belief guarantees that its content is true, in which case your beliefs are inconsistent, because at least one of them must be false. Once you think you’re wrong, you must be right! Crucial to my argument is a distinction between explicitly contradictory beliefs and three forms of inconsistency in belief. In the first of these, you believe contingent propositions each of which is logically independent of the others, yet you also believe the syntactic negation of their conjunction. In the second, your beliefs are inconsistent because of the rigid designation of demonstratives such as ‘this’ embedded in their contents. In the third, as in Modesty and Modesty* your beliefs are inconsistent because of self-reference. (shrink)

:A normative Bayesian theory of deliberation and judgement requires a procedure for merging the evidence of a collection of agents. In order to provide such a procedure, one needs to ask what the evidence is that grounds Bayesian probabilities. After finding fault with several views on the nature of evidence, it is argued that evidence is whatever is rationally taken for granted. This view is shown to have consequences for an account of merging evidence, and it is argued that standard (...) axioms for merging need to be altered somewhat. (shrink)

This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...) is untenable. The tension in Carnap’s semantics together with Quine’s exposure of the severe limits of radical empiricism illuminate central features of Sellars’s philosophy: the fully general form of the myth of givenness, together with Sellars’s alternative Kantian characterisation of understanding; the full significance of Carnap’s distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, and its important methodological implications; the specifically pragmatic character of Sellars’s realism; and Sellars’s methodological reasons for holding that philosophy must be systematic and that systematic philosophy must be deeply historically and textually informed. This paper thus re-examines this recent episode of philosophical history for its philosophical benefits and systematic insights. (shrink)

Why should coherence be an epistemic desideratum? One response is that coherence is truth-conducive: mutually coherent propositions are more likely to be true, ceteris paribus, than mutually incoherent ones. But some sets of propositions are more coherent, while others are less so. How could coherence be measured? Probabilistic measures of coherence exist; some are identical to probabilistic measures of confirmation, while others are extensions of such measures. Probabilistic measures of coherence are fine when applicable, but many situations are so information-poor (...) that the requisite probabilities cannot be determined. To measure coherence in these cognitively impoverished situations, this article proposes that the discussion be broadened to include plausibilistic measures of coherence. It shows how plausibilistic measures of coherence can be defined using plausibilistic measures of confirmation. It then illustrates how plausibilisic coherence can be measured in situations where probabilistic coherence cannot be determined. The coherence values obtained through the use of plausibilistic measures are often, though not always, comparable. The article also shows that coherence can be instantiated on different levels, one of which permits connections to inductive strength and deductive validity. (shrink)

In this paper, we bring into focus the level of thought or content in the elucidation of disagreement. We set out the view that disagreement at this level involves a specific form of noncotenability, namely, noncotenability as captured by sense or intension as opposed to reference. We present the challenge that nourishes the alternative referential view and suggest, through examples, that (i) only intensional disagreement is apt to adequately accommodate basic rationality constraints on disagreement, and (ii) it can meet the (...) aforementioned challenge insofar as we discriminate between noncotenability affecting one's concepts, intensionally conceived, and noncotenability affecting merely one's particular understanding of those concepts. We conclude that intensional disagreement is our best choice for an account of disagreement at the level of thought. (shrink)

Most foundationalists allow that relations of coherence among antecedently justified beliefs can enhance their overall level of justification or warrant. In light of this, some coherentists ask the following question: if coherence can elevate the epistemic status of a set of beliefs, what prevents it from generating warrant entirely on its own? Why do we need the foundationalist’s basic beliefs? I address that question here, drawing lessons from an instructive series of attempts to reconstruct within the probability calculus the classical (...) problem of independent witnesses who corroborate each other’s testimony. Starred section headings indicate sections omitted here, but available on the author’s USC website. (shrink)

I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission from events to memory as an (...) alternative to causal theories of memory. I derive from information theory a concept of reliability of memories as the ratio of retrieved information to transmitted information. I distinguish the generation of knowledge from reliable memories from its generation from unreliable memories. Reliable memories can generate new knowledge by forming together narratives and via colligation. Coherent, even unreliable, memories can generate knowledge if they are epistemically independent of each other and the prior probability of the knowledge they generate is sufficiently low or high. Ascertaining the epistemic independence of memories and eliminating possible confounders may be achieved through the generation of knowledge from independent memories in different minds, when memories are primary basic sources of knowledge and the testimonies that report them are trivial. (shrink)

Rorty's critique concentrates on one aspect of foundationalism: the claim that nonpropositional sensory awareness serves as the basis for propositional justification. This claim is an essential component of classical foundationalism, though not necessarily of the more moderate versions of foundationalism that have been proposed. Thus even if it were a successful critique it would tell against only one type of foundationalism. But nothing in Rorty's argument provides any reason to doubt the plausibility of a classical foundationalist explanation of why sensory (...) awareness justifies ordinary nonbasic propositions. Even classical foundationalism, then, remains untouched by Rorty's critique. (shrink)

Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is true—and (...) so whether the sentence that expresses it is true—is a matter of what the world is like, which means it isn’t a matter of convention alone. The consensus is that this argument is decisive against truth by convention. Strikingly, though, it has rarely been formulated with much precision. Here I provide a new rendering of the argument, one that reveals its structure and makes transparent just what assumptions it requires, and then I assess conventionalists’ prospects for resisting each of those assumptions. I conclude that the consensus is mistaken: contrary to what is almost universally thought, there remains a promising way forward for the conventionalist project. Along the way, I clarify conventionalists’ commitments by thinking about what truth by convention would need to be like in order for conventionalism to do the epistemological work it’s intended to do. (shrink)

The original publication of the article contains two formatting errors, the second of which significantly inhibits readability.

This paper aims to clarify a debate on philosophical method, and to give a probabilistic argument vindicating armchair philosophy under a wide range of plausible assumptions. The use of intuitions by so-called armchair philosophers has been criticized on empirical grounds. The debate between armchair philosophers and their empirical critics would benefit from greater clarity and precision in our understanding of what it takes for intuition-based approaches to philosophy to make sense. This paper discusses a set of rigorous, probability-based tools for (...) determining what we can and cannot learn from intuitions in various conditions. These tools can tell us whether beliefs can be justified by armchair practices, and what empirical findings would have to show to undermine the use of intuitions in philosophy. Using these tools, the paper shows that armchair philosophy makes sense in a broad range of situations, and that it is quite plausible that we are in those situations at the moment. (shrink)

Current orthodoxy in the philosophy of perception views indirect realism as misguided, wrongheaded or simply outdated. The reasons for its pariah status are variegated. Although it is surely not unreasonable to speculate that philosophical fashion is one factor that contributes to this situation, there are also solid philosophical arguments which put pressure on the indirect realist position. In this paper, I will discuss one such main objection and show how the indirect realist can face it. The upshot will be a (...) defence of a new structural account of indirect realism which is immune to a number of objections that have been traditionally levelled at such theories of perceptual consciousness. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta um exame da crítica proposta por Morton White em seu artigo “Valor e obrigação em Dewey e Lewis”, em particular, a aquela voltada para o conceito de normatividade e valoração de C.I. Lewis. A crítica afirma que Lewis, ao oferecer um caráter normativo dos juízos éticos, malogra ao articular consistentemente a sua concepção ética com a sua teoria do conhecimento. Isso leva White a concluir que o pragmatista não possui uma solução para o problema fundamental da ética. (...) Argumentarei que tal conclusão é equivocada. O núcleo da minha argumentação repousa na tese de que a crítica de White se origina de uma interpretação incorreta do pragmatismo conceitualista de Lewis, falhando em reconhecer que o apriorismo pragmático é a chave para o entendimento adequado de teoria do conhecimento e para uma explicação da conexão e articulação entre valoração e normatividade no interior da abordagem de Lewis. Nesta linha, mostrarei que, muito pelo contrário, a epistemologia de Lewis destaca os desenvolvimentos éticos e normativos, revelando uma teoria naturalística de valoração que é a base na qual a normatividade emerge pragmaticamente. Sustentarei, também, que essa perspectiva oferece uma concepção profícua de valores e normas que não têm sido suficientemente exploradas; algo que confronta o ceticismo ético, podendo levar em conta o status cognitivo de valores e normas, e que recupera o caráter racional da valoração não apenas para a ética, mas, também, para o conhecimento e a ciência. (shrink)

A questão do relacionamento entre a normatividade e valoração e sua incorporação no discurso racional é um dos problemas mais relevantes na filosofia contemporânea e é claramente desdobrada em todas as suas complexidades no debate paradigmático mantido entre Hilary Putnam e Jürgen Habermas durante a primeira década do século XXI. A partir dessas posições que reivindicam a tradição do pragmatismo americano, os filósofos discutem a objetividade dos juízos de valor e normativos defendendo, com diferenças significativas, uma posição cognitivista. A presente (...) contribuição aborda essa discussão com o propósito de apresentar o pragmatismo conceitualista de Clarence Irving Lewis como uma alternativa e posição profícua com os recursos para interagir com algumas das principais questões discutidas por Putnam e Habermas. Meu propósito é mostrar o modo como Lewis explica o caráter cognitivo das normas e valores enquanto sustenta, simultaneamente, uma demarcação significativa entre ambos os conceitos. Argumentarei que essa distinção é pragmática – não epistêmica –, e que isso permite ao pragmatista defender um cognitivismo que pode articular um naturalismo não reducionista referente aos valores com um conceito racionalista de normas, uma posição que pode evitar algumas das objeções que enfrentam Putnam e Habermas. (shrink)

The question of diachronic coherence, coherence of degrees of belief across time, is investigated within the context of Richard Jeffrey’s radical probabilism. Diachronic coherence is taken as fundamental, and coherence results for degrees of belief at a single time, such as additivity, are recovered only with additional assumptions. Additivity of probabilities of probabilities is seen to be less problematic than additivity of first-order probabilities. Without any assumed model of belief change, diachronic coherence applied to higher-order degrees of belief yields the (...) martingale property. (shrink)

In these replies, I respond to critics in the book symposium on my Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction, Lexington Books, 2022.

Quine’s references to his “pragmatism” have often been seen as indicating a possible link to the American pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. In Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction, I argue that the influence of pragmatism on Quine’s philosophy is more accurately traced to C.I. Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism. Quine’s epistemology shares many affinities with Lewis’s view, which depicts knowledge as a conceptual system pragmatically revised in light of future experience. This claim is defended through an examination of several (...) key episodes in Quine’s philosophical development, including his graduate work for Lewis, critical transition in the 1940s, midcentury criticisms of analyticity, and later turn to naturalized epistemology. This historical account highlights an underappreciated element of the epistemological background to Quine’s criticism of the analytic–synthetic distinction. It is further argued that Lewis’s view provides the central epistemological framework for understanding the form and content of Quine’s later naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information”. Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds. More recently, cumulative cultural evolution has taken on this distinguishing role. CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of (...) cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual. Mesoudi and Thornton define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time, but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

The story of the rise and fall of pragmatism is sometimes called the eclipse narrative. This paper addresses a specific version of this narrative that the logical empiricists arrived in North America in the 1930s and within 30 years had supplanted the pragmatists as the dominant philosophy there. Philosophers such as Alan Richardson and Cheryl Misak have challenged this view by emphasizing the similarities between these two movements. While both seem to admit that there is a distinction between the two (...) when it comes to values, I point out that the issue of values feeds into all aspects of pragmatist thinking, and so despite what seems on the surface to be agreements between the two movements, they were still quite different in all areas of their thinking. I challenge the degree of similarities by arguing that there were some sharp distinctions between the two movements, with the most important being the fact-value distinction and its impact on how each conceived of the term “practical.” I close by addressing how these distinctions should affect how we conceive of the eclipse narrative. (shrink)

[Significantly updated in Chapter 7 of Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge] Many have found it plausible that knowledge is a constitutively normative state, i.e. a state that is grounded in the possession of reasons. Many have also found it plausible that certain cases of proprioceptive knowledge, memorial knowledge, and self-evident knowledge are cases of knowledge that are not grounded in the possession of reasons. I refer to these as cases of basic knowledge. The existence of basic knowledge forms a (...) primary objection to the idea that knowledge is a constitutively normative state. In what follows I offer a way through the apparent dilemma of having to choose between either basic knowledge or the normativity of knowledge. The solution involves homing in on a state of awareness (≈non-accidental true representation) that is distinct from knowledge and which in turn grounds the normativity of knowledge in a way that is fully consistent with the existence of basic knowledge. An upshot of this is that externalist theories of knowledge turn out to be fully compatible with the thesis that knowledgeable beliefs are always beliefs that are justified by the reasons one possesses. (shrink)

Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.

This paper examines the role of coherence of evidence in what I call the non-dynamic model of confirmation. It appears that other things being equal, a higher degree of coherence among pieces of evidence raises to a higher degree the probability of the proposition they support. I argue against this view on the basis of three related observations. First, we should be able to assess the impact of coherence on any hypothesis of interest the evidence supports. Second, the impact of (...) coherence among the pieces of evidence can be different on different hypotheses of interest they support. Third, when we assess the impact of coherence on a hypothesis of interest, other conditions that should be held equal for a fair assessment include the degrees of individual support which the propositions directly supported by the respective pieces of evidence provide for the hypothesis. Once we take these points into consideration, the impression that coherence of evidence plays a positive role in confirmation dissipates. In some cases it can be shown that other things being equal, a higher degree of coherence among the pieces of evidence reduces the degree of confirmation for the hypothesis they support. (shrink)

In this paper we make three points about justification of propositions by coherence “from scratch”, where pieces of evidence that are coherent have no individual credibility. First, we argue that no matter how many pieces of evidence are coherent, and no matter what relation we take coherence to be, coherence does not make independent pieces of evidence with no individual credibility credible. Second, we show that an intuitively plausible informal reasoning for justification by coherence from scratch is deficient since it (...) relies on an understanding of “individual credibility” inappropriate for justification from scratch. Third, we show that coherence, when it is recurrent, can make independent sources of evidence with no individual credibility credible. We describe specifically a case in which the same group of independent witnesses with no individual credibility repeatedly produce reports that are in agreement with each other, and their reports become credible as a result. (shrink)

In this paper we examine C. I. Lewis's view on the roleof coherence – what he calls ''congruence'' – in thejustification of beliefs based on memory ortestimony. Lewis has two main theses on the subject. His negativethesis states that coherence of independent items ofevidence has no impact on the probability of a conclusionunless each item has some credibility of its own. Thepositive thesis says, roughly speaking, that coherenceof independently obtained items of evidence – such asconverging memories or testimonies – raises (...) the probabilityof a conclusion to the extent sufficient for epistemicjustification, or, to use Lewis's expression, ''rationaland practical reliance''.It turns out that, while thenegative thesis is essentially correct, astrong positive connection between congruence andprobability – a connection of the kind Lewis ultimatelyneeds in his validation of memory – is contingent on thePrinciple of Indifference. In the final section we assess therepercussions of the latter fact for Lewis's theory in particularand for coherence justification in general. (shrink)

We propose a coherence account of the conjunction fallacy applicable to both of its two paradigms. We compare our account with a recent proposal by Tentori et al. : 235–255, 2013) that attempts to generalize earlier confirmation accounts. Their model works better than its predecessors in some respects, but it exhibits only a shallow form of generality and is unsatisfactory in other ways as well: it is strained, complex, and untestable as it stands. Our coherence account inherits the strength of (...) the confirmation account, but in addition to being applicable to both paradigms, it is natural, simple, and readily testable. It thus constitutes the next natural step for Bayesian theorizing about the conjunction fallacy. (shrink)

This paper contains an argument to the effect that possible worlds semantics renders semantic knowledge impossible, no matter what ontological interpretation is given to possible worlds. The essential contention made is that possible worlds semantic knowledge is unsafe and this is shown by a parallel with the preface paradox.