Since Saul Kripke’s influential work in the 1970s, the revisionary approach to semantic paradox—the idea that semantic paradoxes must be solved by weakening classical logic—has been increasingly popular. In this paper, we present a new revenge argument to the effect that the main revisionary approaches breed new paradoxes that they are unable to block.

One puzzle concerning highly idealized models is whether they explain. Some suggest they provide so-called ‘how-possibly explanations’. However, this raises an important question about the nature of how-possibly explanations, namely what distinguishes them from ‘normal’, or how-actually, explanations? I provide an account of how-possibly explanations that clarifies their nature in the context of solving the puzzle of model-based explanation. I argue that the modal notions of actuality and possibility provide the relevant dividing lines between how-possibly and how-actually explanations. Whereas how-possibly (...) explanations establish claims of possible explanations, how-actually explanations establish claims of actual ones. Models, in turn, simply provide evidence for these claims. (shrink)

Dans la nouvelle Le Grand silence, l’écrivain Ted Chiang met en regard deux histoires qui semblent n’avoir en commun qu’une proximité géographique fortuite : d’un côté le radiotélescope d’Arecibo au nord de l’île de Porto Rico, destiné à l’écoute de quelque trace radio de vies extraterrestres ; de l’autre une espèce de perroquets qui n’existe nulle part ailleurs, l’Amazone de Porto Rico, dont le dernier refuge se trouve être la forêt bordant le radiotélescope… et qui est sur le point de (...) disparaître. (shrink)

The emotions are at the centre of our lives and, for better or worse, imbue them with much of their significance. The philosophical problems stirred up by the existence of the emotions, over which many great philosophers of the past have laboured, revolve around attempts to understand what this significance amounts to. Are emotions feelings, thoughts, or experiences? If they are experiences, what are they experiences of? Are emotions rational? In what sense do emotions give meaning to what surrounds us? (...) -/- The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explores these questions in a clear and accessible way. The authors discuss the following key topics: -/- the diversity and unity of the emotions the relations between emotion, belief and desire the nature of values the relations between emotions and perceptions emotions viewed as evaluative attitudes the link between emotions and evaluative knowledge the nature of moods, sentiments, and character traits. -/- Including chapter summaries and guides to further reading, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal starting point for any philosopher or student studying the emotions. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences. (shrink)

For the past two decades, philosophers of religion have paid close attention to the debates on public reason taking place within the context of political philosophy. Some thinkers claim that religious arguments should play a very limited role in political discourse, as this would amount to a politically sanctioned imposition of religious beliefs on people with different religious or non-religious worldviews. Others claim that excluding religious reasons would lead to an unfair exclusion of religious citizens from democratic processes. Underlying these (...) positions is a highly problematic idea of what it means to be a religious citizen. On the one hand, religious citizens are conceptualized as highly self-reflective theologians. Others instead imagine religious citizens to be wholly incapable of such self-reflection and of distinguishing between public and non-public spheres. In my article I attempt to criticize these underlying assumptions and point towards a more nuanced conception of the religious citizen. (shrink)

Knowledge-first evidentialism combines the view that it is rational to believe what is supported by one's evidence with the view that one's evidence is what one knows. While there is much to be said for the view, it is widely perceived to fail in the face of cases of reasonable error—particularly extreme ones like new Evil Demon scenarios (Wedgwood, 2002). One reply has been to say that even in such cases what one knows supports the target rational belief (Lord, 201x, (...) this volume). I spell out two versions of the strategy. The direct one uses what one knows as the input to principles of rationality such as conditionalization, dominance avoidance, etc. I argue that it fails in hybrid cases that are Good with respect to one belief and Bad with respect to another. The indirect strategy uses what one knows to determine a body of supported propositions that is in turn the input to principles of rationality. I sketch a simple formal implementation of the indirect strategy and show that it avoids the difficulty. I conclude that the indirect strategy offers the most promising way for knowledge-first evidentialists to deal with the New Evil Demon problem. (shrink)

Ne serait-ce que par son titre, dont l’oxymore est d’emblée assumée (p.11) et dont les protagonistes sont associés d’une manière qui ne laisse de surprendre, l’ouvrage de Julien Boudon publié dans la collection « Les sens du droit » des éditions Dalloz, mériterait de retenir l’attention.Dans ce court opus, l’auteur entend, à travers un examen qui puise tout à la fois aux sources de l’histoire, de la philosophie, du droit, de la science politique, et qui emprunte à la fois (...) au style de la monog.. (shrink)

Is shame social? Is it superficial? Is it a morally problematic emotion? Researchers in disciplines as different as psychology, philosophy, and anthropology have thought so. But what is the nature of shame and why are claims regarding its social nature and moral standing interesting and important? Do they tell us anything worthwhile about the value of shame and its potential legal and political applications? -/- In this book, Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni propose an original philosophical account (...) of shame aimed at answering these questions. The book begins with a detailed examination of the evidence and arguments that are taken to support what they call the two dogmas about shame: its alleged social nature and its morally dubious character. Their analysis is conducted against the backdrop of a novel account of shame and ultimately leads to the rejection of these two dogmas. On this account, shame involves a specific form of negative evaluation that the subject takes towards herself: a verdict of incapacity with regard to values to which she is attached. One central virtue of the account resides in the subtle manner it clarifies the ways in which the subject's identity is at stake in shame, thus shedding light on many aspects of this complex emotion and allowing for a sophisticated understanding of its moral significance. -/- This philosophical account of shame engages with all the current debates on shame as they are conducted within disciplines as varied as ethics, moral, experimental, developmental and evolutionary psychology, anthropology, legal studies, feminist studies, politics and public polic. (shrink)

Contextualist approaches to the Liar Paradox postulate the occurrence of a context shift in the course of the Liar reasoning. In particular, according to the contextualist proposal advanced by Charles Parsons and Michael Glanzberg, the Liar sentence L doesn’t express a true proposition in the initial context of reasoning c, but expresses a true one in a new, richer context c', where more propositions are available for expression. On the further assumption that Liar sentences involve propositional quantifiers whose domains may (...) vary with context, the Liar reasoning is blocked. But why should context shift? We argue that the paradox involves principles of contextualist reflection that explain, by analogy with well-known reflection principles for arithmetic, why context must shift from c to c' in the course of the Liar reasoning. This provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox—one that equally applies to two revenge arguments against contextualist approaches, one recently advanced by Andrew Bacon, the other mentioned by Charles Parsons and more recently revived by Cory Juhl. (shrink)

According to logical inferentialists, the meanings of logical expressions are fully determined by the rules for their correct use. Two key proof-theoretic requirements on admissible logical rules, harmony and separability, directly stem from this thesis—requirements, however, that standard single-conclusion and assertion-based formalizations of classical logic provably fail to satisfy :1035–1051, 2011). On the plausible assumption that our logical practice is both single-conclusion and assertion-based, it seemingly follows that classical logic, unlike intuitionistic logic, can’t be accounted for in inferentialist terms. In (...) this paper, I challenge orthodoxy and introduce an assertion-based and single-conclusion formalization of classical propositional logic that is both harmonious and separable. In the framework I propose, classicality emerges as a structural feature of the logic. (shrink)

There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it (...) has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance shows how a strongly internalist conception of justification can be derived from a strongly externalist conception of knowledge, given an identification of justification with second-order ignorance and a set of structural principles concerning knowing and being in a position to know. Among these principles is an epistemic analogue of the Geach modal schema which states that one is always in a position to know that one doesn’t know p or in a position to know that (...) one doesn’t know not-p. Even suitably refined, the principle faces a range of counterexamples in which it misleadingly and persistently seems to one that one knows whether p without it seeming to one that one knows p nor that one knows not-p. These cases also threaten the book’s case for the luminosity of second-order ignorance, which is in turn central to its derivation of strongly internalist principles of justification. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson (1992, 224–5) and Ernest Sosa (1996) have ar- gued that knowledge requires one to be safe from error. Something is said to be safe from happening iff it does not happen at “close” worlds. I expand here on a puzzle noted by John Hawthorne (2004, 56n) that suggests the need for two notions of closeness. Counterfac- tual closeness is a matter of what could in fact have happened, given the specific circumstances at hand. The notion is involved in (...) the semantics for counterfactuals and is the one epistemologists have typically assumed. Normalized closeness is rather a matter of what could typically have happened, that is, what would go on in a class of normal alternatives to actuality, irrespectively of whether or not they could have happened in the circumstances at hand. (shrink)

When spelled out properly infallibilism is a viable and even attractive view. Because it has long been summary dismissed, however, we need a guide on how to properly spell it out. The guide has to fulfil four tasks. The first two concern the nature of knowledge: to argue that infallible belief is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for knowledge. The other two concern the norm of belief: to argue that knowledge is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for justified (...) certainty. With such a guide in hand infallibilism can be evaluated on its own merits. The most controversial parts are the first and fourth. The idea that knowledge requires infallible belief is thought to be excessively sceptical. The idea that knowledge warrants certainty is thought to be excessively dogmatic. The present paper addresses the first. It argues that knowledge requires infallible belief. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a fresh understanding of the sense in which emotions are evaluations. We argue that we should not follow mainstream accounts in locating the emotion–value connection at the level of content and that we should instead locate it at the level of attitudes or modes. We begin by explaining the contrast between content and attitude, a contrast in the light of which we review the leading contemporary accounts of the emotions. We next offer reasons to think (...) that these accounts face substantial problems since they locate the link emotions bear to values at the level of content. This provides the incentive to pursue an alternative approach according to which emotions qualify as evaluations because they are specific types of attitudes, an approach we substantiate by appealing to felt bodily stances. We conclude by considering two reasons why this approach may be resisted; they respectively pertain to the alleged impossibility of drawing the attitude–content contrast in the case of the emotions and to the suspicion that so doing raises qualia-related worries. (shrink)

We cast doubts on the suggestion, recently made by Graham Priest, that glut theorists may express disagreement with the assertion of A by denying A. We show that, if denial is to serve as a means to express disagreement, it must be exclusive, in the sense of being correct only if what is denied is false only. Hence, it can’t be expressed in the glut theorist’s language, essentially for the same reasons why Boolean negation can’t be expressed in such a (...) language either. We then turn to an alternative proposal, recently defended by Beall (in Analysis 73(3):438–445, 2013; Rev Symb Log, 2014), for expressing truth and falsity only, and hence disagreement. According to this, the exclusive semantic status of A, that A is either true or false only, can be conveyed by adding to one’s theory a shrieking rule of the form A & ~A |- \bot, where \bot entails triviality. We argue, however, that the proposal doesn’t work either. The upshot is that glut theorists face a dilemma: they can either express denial, or disagreement, but not both. Along the way, we offer a bilateral logic of exclusive denial for glut theorists—an extension of the logic commonly called LP. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a new way to understand the integration of facts and values in the concept of mental disorder that has the potential to avoid the flaws of previous hybrid approaches. I import conceptual tools from the account of procedural objectivity defended by Helen Longino to resolve the controversy over the definition of mental disorder. My argument is threefold: I first sketch the history of the debate opposing objectivists and constructivists and focus on the criticisms that (...) led to the emergence of the debate. Second, I offer a reconstruction of the “Natural Function Approach” argument to make explicit an unsound assumption underlying this approach. The reconstruction will allow me to show that the NFO’s argument depends on the ideal of value-free science that I will criticize. Then I propose an alternative ideal for psychiatry: social objectivity. I argue that the concept of mental health should be seen as “socially objective” rather than value-free, moving the debate towards the social procedures by which the definition is produced rather than the normative and factual content of its definition. (shrink)

Deflationists argue that ‘true’ is merely a logico-linguistic device for expressing blind ascriptions and infinite generalisations. For this reason, some authors have argued that deflationary truth must be conservative, i.e. that a deflationary theory of truth for a theory S must not entail sentences in S’s language that are not already entailed by S. However, it has been forcefully argued that any adequate theory of truth for S must be non-conservative and that, for this reason, truth cannot be deflationary :493–521, (...) 1998; Ketland in Mind 108:69–94, 1999). We consider two defences of conservative deflationism, respectively proposed by Waxman :429–463, 2017) and Tennant :551–582, 2002), and argue that they are both unsuccessful. In Waxman’s hands, deflationists are committed either to a non-purely expressive notion of truth, or to a conception of mathematics that does not allow them to justifiably exclude non-conservative theories of truth. Tennant’s conservative deflationism fares no better: if deflationist truth must be conservative over arithmetic, it can be shown to collapse into a non-conservative variety of deflationism. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

It is often argued that fully structural theories of truth and related notions are incapable of expressing a nonstratified notion of defectiveness. We argue that recently much-discussed non-contractive theories suffer from the same expressive limitation, provided they identify the defective sentences with the sentences that yield triviality if they are assumed to satisfy structural contraction.

The safety conception of knowledge holds that a belief constitutes knowledge iff relevantly similar beliefs—its epistemic counterparts—are true. It promises an instructive account of why certain general principles of knowledge hold. We focus on two such principles that anyone should endorse: the closure principle that knowledge is downward closed under competent conjunction elimination, and the counter-closure principle that knowledge is upward closed under competent conjunction introduction. We argue that anyone endorsing the former must also endorse the latter on pains of (...) an unacceptable form of bootstrapping. We devise new formal models to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for these principles to hold on conceptions that construe knowledge in terms of true counterparts. These conditions state that counterparts of premise and conclusion beliefs are coordinated in certain ways whenever these beliefs stand in the relevant inferential relations. We show that the safety conception faces insuperable problems vindicating these coordination principles, because its epistemic counterpart relation is symmetric. We conclude that it thus proves unable to account for minimal closure properties of knowledge. More generally, our formal results establish parameters within which any conception must operate that construes knowledge in terms of true counterparts. (shrink)

Objective Our study sought to (1) describe the practices and preferences of Colombian adolescents in accessing sexual and reproductive health services: accompanied versus alone; (2) compare actual practices with stated preferences; and (3) determine age and gender differences regarding the practice and these stated preferences. -/- Methods 812 participants aged 11–24 years old answered a survey in two Profamilia clinics in the cities of Medellin and Cali in Colombia. A cross-sectional analysis was performed to compare participants’ answers based on the (...) variables of gender and age. -/- Results A quarter of participants visited the clinic alone (25.4%). Females were more likely to go alone in comparison to males (26.3% vs 14.1%; p = 0.031), and older participants went alone more often than younger participants (p < 0.001). Most participants – 72.7% (95 %CI: 69.3–75.9) – expressed a preference in being accompanied to the clinic, and more than 90% had their preferences met. The preferences of older participants were, however, less likely to be met than those of younger participants (p < 0.001), notably, because they predominantly wanted to be accompanied. -/- Conclusion Contemporary public health and bioethics literature advocates in favor of developing health services that better meet the preferences of adolescents. The present research highlights an apparent blind spot related to the role that others (e.g., parents, friends, partners) can or should play in accompanying adolescent patients when they access sexual and reproductive health services. Respecting adolescents’ preferences, and hence their autonomy, is not simply a matter of ensuring freedom from constraints (e.g., their right and ability to go alone). Rather, it should also consider the liberty to choose whether to be accompanied when accessing SHRS and by whom. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a detailed characterization of being moved, which I claim is a distinct emotion. Being moved is the experience of being struck by the goodness of some specific positive value being exemplified. I start by expounding this account. Next, I discuss three issues that have emerged in the literature regarding it. These concern respectively the valence of being moved, the scope of the values that may constitute its particular objects, and the cognitive sophistication required for experiencing (...) it. My main contention is that when we understand that the presence of the specific positive value must be apprehended as finally, importantly, and impersonally good to trigger being moved, these issues do not arise. (shrink)

The ethics of safe sex in the gay community has, for many years, been focused on debates surrounding the responsibility regarding the use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission, once the only tool available. With the development of Truvada as a pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, for the first time in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic there is the potential to significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission during sex without the use of condoms. The introduction of PrEP necessitates a (...) renewed discussion about the politics and ethics of safe sex for men who have sex with men. We present the arguments of authors who hold radically opposite positions with regard to the ethics of condom use by gay men, but who currently both criticize the use of PrEP. We offer a critique of their arguments and advance the position that the use of PrEP, even without condoms, can be acceptable and part of a safe sex ethics framework for MSM. (shrink)

Argumentation has been an important topic in knowledge representation, reasoning and multi-agent systems during the last twenty years. In this paper, we propose a new abstract framework where arguments are associated with a strength, namely a quantitative information which is used to determine whether an attack between arguments succeeds or not. Our Strength-based Argumentation Framework combines ideas of Preference-based and Weighted Argumentation Frameworks in an original way, which permits to define acceptability semantics sensitive to the existence of accruals between arguments. (...) The question of accruals arises in situations where several arguments defending the same position against another argument are unable to individually defeat this argument, but could do it collectively if they combine their strengths. We investigate some of the theoretical and computational properties of our new framework and semantics, and present a reasoning algorithm that is based on a translation of the problem into pseudo-boolean constraint satisfaction. This paper proposes an intuitive framework which allows strength compensations in an argumentation context where attacks may not succeed, completed by an approach which detects accruals throughout the reasoning process without requiring the elicitation of all compensatory combinations of arguments as an input. (shrink)

Abstract The content of an emotion, unlike the content of a perception, is directly dependent on the motivational set of the subject experiencing the emotion. Given the instability of this motivational set, it might be thought that there is no sense in which emotions can be said to pick up information about the environment in the same way that perception does. Whereas it is admitted that perception tracks for us what is the case in the environment, no such tracking relation, (...) it is argued, holds between one's emotions and what they are about. It is to this worry – that the construal of the emotions as perceptions inevitably raises – that this paper tries to respond. In this paper, I suggest that when it is realized that one dimension of perception itself is directly dependent on the perceiver's perspective on her environment, then emotion, which is also essentially perspectival in this sense, bears the comparison with perception very well. After having clarified the nature and the role that perspective plays in perception, I argue that, in the case of emotions, the same perspectival role can be played by agents’ long-standing evaluative tendencies and character traits. The resulting conception of emotion as perception is then tested against possible objections. (shrink)

While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interesting role (...) in our normative theories. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, a value that's notoriously difficult to understand if we think of justification as but a fallible means to a desired end. We will argue that these bridge-principles will be incredibly difficult to defend. While we do not think that normative facts necessarily stand in any interesting relationship to our justified beliefs about them, there might well be a way of defending the idea that our justified beliefs about what to do won't lead us astray. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, but this way of thinking about justification and its value comes with costs few would be willing to pay. (shrink)

Why does knowledge matter? Two answers have been influential in the recent literature. One is that it has value: knowledge is one of the goods. Another is that it plays a significant normative role: knowledge is the norm of action, belief, assertion, or the like. This paper discusses whether one can derive one of the claims from the other. That is, whether assuming the idea that knowledge has value — and some defensible general hypotheses about norms and values —, we (...) could derive the claim that it plays the alleged normative role. Or whether, assuming that knowledge does play that role — and some defensible general hypotheses —, we could derive the claim that it has value. It argues that the route from Value to Norms is unsuccessful. The main problem here is that the idea that knowledge has value does not seem enough to derive the idea that one should act on what one knows. It finds the route from Norms to Value more promising, though a complete path is missing. The main idea here is that knowledge is good because it is normatively required to do good things, such as believing the truth and acting in view of true propositions. But since not all normative conditions for doing something good is itself good, we still lack an explanation of why knowledge would be so. The paper finally suggests an alternative perspective, on which we do not try to derive the idea that knowledge has value from its normative role, but rather use its normative role to explain away the idea that it has value. (shrink)

The phenomenon of species extinction raises more and more concern among ecologists facing the actual crisis of biodiversity. Scientific investigations of the causes and effects of extinction must be completed by a philosophical analysis of the concept of extinction that aims to clarify the meanings of the term ‘extinction’ and to analyse modalities, criteria and degrees of extinction. We will focus our attention on the apparent paradox of the possible ‘resurrection’ of species in the near future with the help of (...) genetic biotechnology and cloning techniques. The ontological background of the extinction concept is analysed in relation to the idea of species as classes. We will also show that there is no simple analogy between death and species extinction, and develop a conceptualist and dualistic system of supra-individual entities , supported by an instrumentalist approach to genetic manipulations which transform species into interactive kinds, which can go extinct and be recreated. (shrink)

Repenser l'universalisme classique, ce n'est pas réveiller le démon du particularisme, de la pureté biologique et des passions fascistes, ni tomber dans le piège de l'identité comme fondement de toute légitimité, ou couper la République en deux. C'est, tout au contraire, chercher le chemin d'un humanisme à la mesure du monde. Partout, des plateaux de chaînes info aux tribunes des grands hebdomadaires, des interviews présidentielles aux phénomènes de librairies, on dresse le même constat: l'universalisme, indissociable de l'esprit français, pilier de (...) la République, ferait face à un péril mortel. Dans le récit qui structure le discours politico-médiatique en France, l'antiracisme présentable d'antan, validé par les partis de gauche pour son ambition universaliste -- lutter en même temps contre toutes les haines collectives en intégrant tout le monde -- se verrait supplanté par un antiracisme 'décolonial', 'indigéniste' et 'catégoriel', dont la grille de lecture serait 'racialisante.' Si ce nouvel antiracisme est perçu comme une menace pour l'universalisme, c'est parce que ses promoteurs joueraient avec le feu communautariste. L'antiracisme 2.0 serait ainsi un racisme déguisé, utilisant des concepts essentialisants qui ne valent guère mieux que les théories de la suprématie blanche. Idiots utiles du soft power américain ou apprentis-sorciers de la gauche radicale, ses idéologues formeraient avec l'extrême droite une 'tenaille identitaire' visant à renverser l'ordre républicain, en déclenchant rien moins qu'une guerre des races. Mais de quel universalisme parle-t-on? Dans quelle mesure le concept fait-il l'objet d'un monopole intellectuel? Pourquoi ceux qui se pensent et se disent universalistes sont-ils convaincus qu'il n'en existe qu'une seule forme -- celle qu'ils professent? Et comment expliquer l'équivalence morale entre racisme et antiracisme qui sous-tend leur 'modèle'? Telles sont les questions que pose cet essai qui se veut à la fois une critique de la raison pseudo-universaliste et une approche de l'universalisme postcolonial, ou créolisé. (shrink)

This article is concerned with a statistical proposal due to James R. Beebe for how to solve the generality problem for process reliabilism. The proposal is highlighted by Alvin I. Goldman as an interesting candidate solution. However, Goldman raises the worry that the proposal may not always yield a determinate result. We address this worry by proving a dilemma: either the statistical approach does not yield a determinate result or it leads to trivialization, i.e. reliability collapses into truth (and anti-reliability (...) into falsehood). Various strategies for avoiding this predicament are considered, including revising the statistical rule or restricting its application to natural kinds. All amendments are seen to have serious problems of their own. We conclude that reliabilists need to look elsewhere for a convincing solution to the generality problem. (shrink)

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain – how different are emotions from moods, sensations and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they provide reasons for evaluative judgements and, more generally, do they contribute to our knowledge of values? We then (...) address the question of the social dimension of emotions, explaining how the traditional nature vs. nurture contrast applies to the emotions. We finish by exploring the relations between emotions, motivation and action, concluding this overview with a more specific focus on how these relations bear on some central ethical issues. (shrink)

Julien Tricard criticizes the traditional formulation of the Problem of Induction, and offers to simplify it. Since Hume, he oughts to demonstrate that “the same causes always produce the same effects”, or that “the laws of nature cannot change over time” (uniformity of nature). First, an historical analysis shows, however, that the notion of causality is not needed to set the problem out. Second, the concept of “laws of nature” is analyzed, proving that laws cannot change over time: either (...) there are unchanging laws in nature, or there is none. Therefore, it is necessary and plainly sufficient, in order to solve the Problem of Induction, to prove that laws of nature, governing natural phenomena, do exist. (shrink)

On a widespread naturalist view, the meanings of mathematical terms are determined, and can only be determined, by the way we use mathematical language—in particular, by the basic mathematical principles we’re disposed to accept. But it’s mysterious how this can be so, since, as is well known, minimally strong first-order theories are non-categorical and so are compatible with countless non-isomorphic interpretations. As for second-order theories: though they typically enjoy categoricity results—for instance, Dedekind’s categoricity theorem for second-order PA and Zermelo’s quasi-categoricity (...) theorem for second-order ZFC—these results require full second-order logic. So appealing to these results seems only to push the problem back, since the principles of second-order logic are themselves non-categorical: those principles are compatible with restricted interpretations of the second-order quantifiers on which Dedekind’s and Zermelo’s results are no longer available. In this paper, we provide a naturalist-friendly, non-revisionary solution to an analogous but seemingly more basic problem—Carnap’s Categoricity Problem for propositional and first-order logic—and show that our solution generalizes, giving us full second-order logic and thereby securing the categoricity or quasi-categoricity of second-order mathematical theories. Briefly, the first-order quantifiers have their intended interpretation, we claim, because we’re disposed to follow the quantifier rules in an open-ended way. As we show, given this open-endedness, the interpretation of the quantifiers must be permutation-invariant and so, by a theorem recently proved by Bonnay and Westerståhl, must be the standard interpretation. Analogously for the second-order case: we prove, by generalizing Bonnay and Westerståhl’s theorem, that the permutation invariance of the interpretation of the second-order quantifiers, guaranteed once again by the open-endedness of our inferential dispositions, suffices to yield full second-order logic. (shrink)