Discussions of what is sometimes called 'Moore's paradox' are often vitiated by a failure to notice that there are two paradoxes; not merely one in two sets of linguistic clothing. The two paradoxes are absurd, but in different ways, and accordingly require different explanations.

This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411–444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first part is that know-how sometimes does and sometimes (...) does not consist in propositional knowledge. The second part defends an analysis of know-how inspired by Katherine Hawley’ (2003). Success and knowledge-how. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40, pp. 19–31, insightful proposal that know-how requires counterfactual success. I conclude by showing how this analysis helps to explain why know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

John N Andrews; General Thinking Skills: are there such things?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 71–79, https://doi.o.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I argue that Moore's propositions, for example, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' cannot be rationally believed. Their assertors either cannot be rationally believed or cannot be believed to be rational. This analysis is extended to Moorean propositions such as God knows that I am an atheist and I believe that this proposition is false. I then defend the following definition of assertion: anyone asserts that p iff that person expresses a belief (...) that p with the intention of causing relevant epistemic change in the cognition of an actual or potential audience. (shrink)

I supply an argument for Evans's principle that whatever justifies me in believing that p also justifies me in believing that I believe that p. I show how this principle helps explain how I come to know my own beliefs in a way that normally makes me the best authority on them. Then I show how the principle helps to solve Moore's paradoxes.

(A) I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did (1942, p. 543) or (B) I believe that he has gone out. But he has not (1944, p. 204) would be “absurd” (1942, p. 543; 1944, p. 204). Wittgenstein’s letters to Moore show that he was intensely interested in this discovery of a class of possibly true yet absurd assertions. Wittgenstein thought that the absurdity is important because it is “something similar to a contradiction, thought (...) it isn’t one” (1974, p. 177). What is the explanation of the absurdity of saying or believing something about myself that might be true? Wittgenstein thought that although the explanation will say “something about the logic of assertion” it will also show that “logic isn’t as simple as logicians think it is”. So although the explanation should.. (shrink)

In (2004) I gave an argument for Evans’s principle -/- Whatever justifies me in believing that p also justifies me in believing that I believe that p -/- Hamid Vahid (2005) raises two objections against this argument. I show that the first is harmless and that the second is a non sequitur.

We present Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge, which works differently from other putative counterexamples and avoids objections to which they are vulnerable. We then argue that four ways of analysing knowledge in terms of safety, including Duncan Pritchard’s, cannot withstand Backward Clock either.

Mitchell's formulation of the chemiosmotic theory of oxidative phosphorylation in 1961 lacked any experimental support for its three central postulates. The path by which Mitchell reached this theory is explored. A major factor was the role of Mitchell's philosophical system conceived in his student days at Cambridge. This system appears to have become a tacit influence on his work in the sense that Polanyi understood all knowledge to be generated by an interaction between tacit and explicit knowing. Early in his (...) life Mitchell had evolved a simple philosophy based on fluctoids, fluctids and statids which was developed in a thesis submitted for the Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, England. This aspect of his work was rejected by the examiners and became a tacit element in his intellectual development. It is argued from his various publications that this philosophy can be traced as an underlying theme behind much of Mitchell's theoretical writing in the 50's leading, through his notion of vectorial metabolism, to the formulation and amplification of the chemiosmotic theory in the sixties. This philosophy formed the basis for Mitchell of his understanding of biological systems and gave him his unique approach to cell biology. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox is the fact that assertions or beliefs such asBangkok is the capital of Thailand but I do not believe that Bangkok is the capital of Thailand or Bangkok is the capital of Thailand but I believe that Bangkok is not the capital of Thailand are ‘absurd’ yet possibly true. The current orthodoxy is that an explanation of the absurdity should first start with belief, on the assumption that once the absurdity in belief has been explained then this will (...) translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. This assumption gives explanatory priority to belief over assertion. I show that the translation involved is much trickier than might at first appear. It is simplistic to think that Moorean absurdity in assertion is always a subsidiary product of the absurdity in belief, even when the absurdity is conceived as irrationality. Instead we should aim for explanations of Moorean absurdity in assertion and in belief that are independent even if related, while bearing in mind that some forms of irrationality may be forms of absurdity even if not conversely. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, “ I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did” would be “absurd”. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore’s discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates “the (...) logic of assertion”. Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation of assertion to belief in terms of the idea that one “expresses belief” that is consistent with the spirit of Moore’s failed attempt to explain the absurdity. Wittgenstein also observes that “under unusual circumstances”, the sentence, “It’s raining but I don’t believe it” could be given “a clear sense”. Why does the absurdity disappear from speech in such cases? Wittgenstein further suggests that analogous absurdity may be found in terms of desire, rather than belief. In what follows I develop an account of Moorean absurdity that, with the exception of Wittgenstein’s last suggestion, is broadly consistent with both Moore’s approach and Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

It is raining but you don’t believe that it is raining. Imagine accepting this claim. Then you are committed to saying ‘It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining’. This would be an ‘absurd’ thing to claim or assert, yet what you say might be true. It might be raining, while at the same time, you are completely ignorant of the state of the weather. But how can it be absurd of you to assert something about yourself (...) that might be true of you? This is Moore’s paradox as it occurs in speech. What is the source of the absurdity? And why does it strike us that a contradiction is somehow at work when there is no contradiction in the content of what is asserted? In Section 2, I describe Moore’s formulation of the paradox and evaluate his own solutions. In Section 3, I discuss Wittgenstein’s inf luence in solving the paradox. In Section 4, I discuss Shoemaker’s priority thesis that once the absurdity in belief has been explained, then this will translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. In Section 5, I discuss work on omissive and commissive Moore-paradoxical assertions, i.e. those of the forms p & I don’t believe that p and p & I believe that not-p. In Section 6, I discuss work on assertions of the form p & I don’t know that p. (shrink)

Inconsistency and contradiction are important concepts. Unfortunately, they are easily confused. A proposition or belief which is inconsistent is one which is self- contradictory and vice-versa. Moreover two propositions or beliefs which are contradictories are inconsistent with each other. Nonetheless it is a mistake to suppose that inconsistency is the same as contradiction.

This book shows otherwise. John Martin rehabilitates Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine.

While Saint Augustine has been a household name for centuries, the same cannot be said of long-overlooked philosopher John Poinsot. But in _Augustine and Poinsot_, John Deely contends that the history of semiotics cannot be conceived of without Poinsot’s landmark contribution. According to Deely, even though Augustine was the first to describe _what_ the sign does, Poinsot was the first to show _how_ the sign mediates between nature and culture. This revolutionary volume demonstrates how Poinsot’s account of semiotics (...) allows us to produce human knowledge and experience. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Krista Lawlor and John Perry have proposed an explanation of the absurdity that confines itself to semantic notions while eschewing pragmatic ones. We argue that this explanation faces four objections. We give a (...) better explanation of the absurdity both in assertion and in belief that avoids our four objections. (shrink)

In “The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety”, Neil Sinhababu and I gave Backward Clock, a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of knowledge. In “Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True Belief”, Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke propose that a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. They argue that their analysis evades Backward (...) Clock. Here I show that it doesn’t. Backward Clock likewise shows their analysis to be too weak. The broader lesson seems to be that Backward Clock tells us the time is up for purely modal analyses of knowledge. (shrink)

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective (...) being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory. (shrink)

Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely's development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”.

The background to this paper is the question of how rational belief is possible in the light of the commonly presented infinite regress in reasons. The paper investigates the neglected question of whether this regress is vicious. I argue that given the genuine requirements of rational belief, The regress would require the rational believer to hold an infinity of beliefs, Which is impossible. The regress would not entail the rational believer holding an infinitely complex belief, Which, Admittedly, Would be logically (...) impossible. (shrink)

The mediaeval logic of Aristotelian privation, represented by Ockham's expositionof All A is non-P as All S is of a type T that is naturally P and no S is P, iscritically evaluated as an account of privative negation. It is argued that there aretwo senses of privative negation: (1) an intensifier (as in subhuman), the dualof Neoplatonic hypernegation (superhuman), which is studied in linguistics asan operator on scalar adjectives, and (2) a (often lexicalized) Boolean complementrelative to the extension of (...) a privative negation in sense (1) (e.g., Brute). Thissecond sense, which is the privative negation discussed in modern linguistics, isshown to be Aristotle's. It is argued that Ockham's exposition fails to capture muchof the logic of Aristotelian privation due to limitations in the expressive power of thesyllogistic. (shrink)

Is there a Moore ’s paradox in desire? I give a normative explanation of the epistemic irrationality, and hence absurdity, of Moorean belief that builds on Green and Williams’ normative account of absurdity. This explains why Moorean beliefs are normally irrational and thus absurd, while some Moorean beliefs are absurd without being irrational. Then I defend constructing a Moorean desire as the syntactic counterpart of a Moorean belief and distinguish it from a ‘Frankfurt’ conjunction of desires. Next I discuss putative (...) examples of rational and irrational desires, suggesting that there are norms of rational desire. Then I examine David Wall’s groundbreaking argument that Moorean desires are always unreasonable. Next I show against this that there are rational as well as irrational Moorean desires. Those that are irrational are also absurd, although there seem to be absurd desires that are not irrational. I conclude that certain norms of rational desire should be rejected. (shrink)

The origins of oxidative phosphorylation, initially known as aerobic phosphorylation, grew out of three research areas of muscle metabolism, creatine phosphorylation, aerobic metabolism of lactic acid in muscle, and studies on the nature and role of adenosine triphosphate . Much of this work centred round the laboratory of Otto Meyerhof, and most of those contributing to the study of aerobic phosphorylation were influenced by that laboratory: particularly Lipmann and also Ochoa. The work of Engelhardt on ATP levels in blood also (...) appears to have been influenced by the studies of Meyerhof’s laboratory. However, with the work of Kalckar, influenced by Lipmann, biochemists began to realise the potential importance of the process. This was confirmed and extended by Belitzer and Ochoa and the theoretical contribution of Lipmann. Thus it is not easy to identify a single point that marked the initiation of studies in this field.The early work was based on the use of tissue homogenates and cells but ultimately this approach limited research possibilities. The development of techniques based on mitochondria opened up new possibilities and brought this first phase of the study of oxidative phorphorylation to a close. (shrink)

The paper shows that in the Art of Thinking (The Port Royal Logic) Arnauld and Nicole introduce a new way to state the truth-conditions for categorical propositions. The definition uses two new ideas: the notion of distributive or, as they call it, universal term, which they abstract from distributive supposition in medieval logic, and their own version of what is now called a conservative quantifier in general quantification theory. Contrary to the interpretation of Jean-Claude Parienté and others, the truth-conditions do (...) not require the introduction of a new concept of ‘indefinite’ term restriction because the notion of conservative quantifier is formulated in terms of the standard notion of term intersection. The discussion shows the following. Distributive supposition could not be used in an analysis of truth because it is explained in terms of entailment, and entailment in terms of truth. By abstracting from semantic identities that underlie distribution, the new concept of distributive term is definitionally prior to truth and can, therefore, be used in a non-circular way to state truth-conditions. Using only standard restriction, the Logic’s truth-conditions for the categorical propositions are stated solely in terms of (1) universal (distributive) term, (2) conservative quantifier, and (3) affirmative and negative proposition. It is explained why the Cartesian notion of extension as a set of ideas is in this context equivalent to medieval and modern notions of extension. (shrink)

Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, ...

In ‘Generalization and Induction: Misconceptions, Clarifications, and a Classification of Induction’, we comment on Lee and Baskerville’s paper ‘Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research’, which attempts to clarify the concept of generalization and classify it into four types. Our commentary discusses the misconceptions in their paper and proposes an alternative classification of induction. Their response ‘Conceptualizing Generalizability: New Contributions and a Reply’ perpetuates their misconceptions and create new ones. The purpose of this rejoinder is to highlight the major problems both (...) in their original paper and in their reply and to provide further clarifications. Lee and Baskerville’s so-called ‘new language’ of describing research activities based on their concept of generalization is confusing. Their classification abuses the term ‘generalize’ and is self-contradictory. Hence, contrary to their claim, their classification and ours are not compatible. Also contrary to their claim that we advocate paradigmatic domination, our commentary is just about the correct use of terms such as ‘generalize’, ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’. (shrink)

Sidney Shoemaker has given an influential explanation of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical belief in terms of conscious belief. Here I offer a novel account of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical assertion in terms of an interlocutor’s fully conscious beliefs. This account starts with an original argument for the principle that fully conscious belief collects over conjunction. The argument is premised on the synchronic unity of consciousness and the transparency of belief.

Adam Morton recently argued that the Ramsey test of whether we may accept a conditional as true embodies a misunderstanding of the function of indicative conditionals. I attack the Ramsey Test for different reasons; there are conditionals that we should accept as true that the Ramsey Test tells us to reject and there are conditionals that we should reject that the Ramsey Test tells us to accept.

This article examines the affordable housing market to develop a new way to understand the problem of co-optation in participatory urban governance. Through a case study of the Chicago metropolitan area, it uses data from 105 in-depth interviews—supplemented with ethnographic, archival, and secondary data—to shed light on the circumstances in which poverty-managing organizations compete for the resources necessary to house marginalized populations. Findings show how community-based groups, which have long housed the poorest neighborhoods and residents, are systematically excluded from access (...) to development capital in favor of other “grassroots for hire” organizations more amenable to the elite co-optation of grassroots empowerment—a process referred to as co-optation by cohort replacement. The article discusses implications of these findings for the study of urban development, participatory governance, and the changing social safety net. (shrink)

The paper explores the existential import of universal affirmative in Descartes, Arnauld and Malebranche. Descartes holds, inconsistently, that eternal truths are true even if the subject term is empty but that a proposition with a false idea as subject is false. Malebranche extends Descartes? truth-conditions for eternal truths, which lack existential import, to all knowledge, allowing only for non-propositional knowledge of contingent existence. Malebranche's rather implausible Neoplatonic semantics is detailed as consisting of three key semantic relations: illumination by which God's (...) ideas cause mental terms, creation by which God's ideas cause material substances by a kind of ?ontic privation?, and sensation in which brain events occasion states of mental awareness. In contrast, Arnauld distinguishes two types of propositions ? necessary and contingent ? with distinct truth-conditions, one with and one without existential import. Arnauld's more modern semantics is laid out as a theory of reference that substitutes earlier causal accounts with one that adapts the medieval notion of objective being. His version anticipates modern notions of intentional content and appeals in its ontology only to substances and their modes. (shrink)

An investigation of Proclus' logic of the syllogistic and of negations in the Elements of Theology, On the Parmenides, and Platonic Theology. It is shown that Proclus employs interpretations over a linear semantic structure with operators for scalar negations (hypemegationlalpha-intensivum and privative negation). A natural deduction system for scalar negations and the classical syllogistic (as reconstructed by Corcoran and Smiley) is shown to be sound and complete for the non-Boolean linear structures. It is explained how Proclus' syllogistic presupposes converting the (...) tree of genera and species from Plato's diairesis into the Neoplatonic linear hierarchy of Being by use of scalar hyper and privative negations. (shrink)

Quantifiers in Frege's Grundgesetze like are not well-defined because the part Fx & Gx stands for a concept but the yoking conjunction is horizontalised and must stand for a truth-value. This standard interpretation is rejected in favor of a substitutional reading that, it is argued, both conforms better to the text and is well-defined. The theory of the horizontal is investigated in detail and the composite reading of Frege's connectives as made up of horizontals is rejected. The sense in which (...) the Grundgesetze has a many-valued but classical logic is explained by proving that its propositional fragment (under the standard interpretation) and Bochvar's 3-valued logic are instances of the same metatheoretic methods. Historically, the paper argues for a more naive but well-defined reading of the text. Theoretically, it provides a formally adequate statement of that semantics, as well as developing the abstract metatheory which embraces Bochvar's language and the Fregean fragment. (shrink)

Cenoscopy and ideoscopy -- The turn to ideoscopy -- Nothing is certain -- The way of ideas -- Nominalism versus realism -- The interplay of objects in thought and things in the world -- Sensation cenoscopically considered -- The semiotics of sensation -- The semiosic structure of the sensory manifold -- Semiopsis beyond perception -- Descartes and Poinsot : retrospect and prospect.

I give an account of the absurdity of Moorean beliefs of the omissive form(om) p and I don’t believe that p,and the commissive form(com) p and I believe that not-p,from which I extract a definition of Moorean absurdity. I then argue for an account of the absurdity of Moorean assertion. After neutralizing two objections to my whole account, I show that Roy Sorensen’s own account of the absurdity of his ‘iterated cases’(om1) p and I don’t believe that I believe that (...) p,and(com1) p and I believe that I believe that not-p,is unsatisfactory. I explain why it is less absurd to believe or assert (om1) or (com1) than to believe or assert (om) or (com) and show that despite appearances, subsequent iterations of (om1) or (com1) do not decrease the absurdity of believing or asserting them. (shrink)