The paper addresses two fundamental issues in epistemic axiology. It argues primarily that curiosity, in particular its intrinsic variety, is the foundational epistemic virtue since it is the value-bestowing epistemic virtue. A response-dependentist framework is proposed, according to which a cognitive state is epistemically valuable if a normally or ideally curious or inquisitive cognizer would be motivated to reach it. Curiosity is the foundational epistemic virtue, since it bestows epistemic value. It also motivates and organizes other epistemic virtues, so it (...) is foundational and central for epistemology. The second issue is the one of the fundamental bearer of epistemic value. I shall argue that truth is the primary goal, but that mere true belief is not the fundamental bearer. Rather, the bearer is a relatively minimalist kind of knowledge. Mere true belief cannot be rationally accepted in isolation from a supporting structure. However, any efficient supporting structure introduces further epistemic goods, thus upgrading the original true belief. Mere true belief can be neither defended, nor rationally sustained through time, due to isolation. Mere true belief cannot be rationally sustained in the face of a slightest bit of contrary evidence. Therefore, mere true belief is not rationally stable. Minimal knowledge is, and this accounts for the primary and secondary value problem, and for a relatively undemanding kind of tertiary value. (shrink)

Mark Richard in his book offers a new and challenging expressivist theory of the use and semantics of slurs (pejoratives). The paper argues that in contrast, the central and standard uses of slurs are cognitive. It does so from the role of stereotypes in slurring, from fi gurative slurs and from the need for cognitive effort (or simple of knowledge of relevant presumed properties of the target). Since cognition has to do with truth and falsity, and since the cognitive task (...) is a good indicator of semantic structure, it seems that the ascription of negative properties etc. indicates that they belong to the meaning of the slur, and that this meaning therefore confers truth-aptness. The (nasty) richness of meaning might vary with pejoratives: all of them involve “contemptible because G” at the very least. The most typical once carry more information. Some of it is given in the form of conceptual links roughly delineating the core stereotype associated with the pejorative, some in the form of fi gurative transfer of properties from some vehicle to the target member of G. So, slurs are not purely performative and expressive, but semantic in thetraditional, truth-directed sense. The truth-gap that might characterize the resulting sentences does not point to pejoratives not having ambition to say true and nasty things, but only to their failure in the attempt. The ambition defi nes the true-directed meanings of the assumptions, the failure just records that these assumptions are false about their targets. The paper leaves it open how central the truth-directed meanings are. The argument suggests that they are pretty central, either part of the core meaning, or of conventional implicature. (shrink)

The paper places the work of G. Gaus into the tradition of political thought experimenting. In particular, his strategy of modeling moral decision by the heuristic device of idealized Members of the Public is presented as an iterated thought experiment, which stands in marked contrast with more traditional devices like the veil of ignorance. The consequences are drawn, and issues of utopianism and realism briefly discussed.

In Devitt’s view, linguistic intuitions are opinions about linguistic production of products, most often one’s own. They result frorn ordinary empirical investigation, so “they are immediate and fairly unreflectiveernpirical central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena”, which reactions are, moreover, theory-laden, where the ‘theory’ encompasses all sorts of speaker’s beliefs. The paper reconstructs his arguments, places his view on a map of alternative approaches to intuitions, and offers a defense of a minimalistic “voice-of-competence” view. First, intuitions are to be identified with the (...) data, the minimal “products” of tentative linguistic production of naïve speaker-listeners, and not with their opinions about the data. Second, the data involve no theory and very little prototheory. Third, although there might be admixtures of guesswork in the conscious production of data, these are routinely weaned out by linguists. Finally, mere acceptance of the “voice of competence” does not land us in any objectionable Cartesianism: it is cornpatible with naturalism and with distrust of a priori philosophy. (shrink)

The paper defends causal explanationism concerning our modal intuitions and judgments, and, in particular, the following claims. If a causally explainable mirroring or “pre-established harmony” between our mind and modal reality obtains, we are justified in believing it does. We do not hold our modal beliefs compulsively and blindly but with full subjective and objective justification. Therefore, causal explanation of our modal beliefs does not undermine rational trust in them. Explanation and trust support each other. In contrast, anti-explanationists, claim that (...) causal explanation of intuitions and judgments undermines rational trust in them. They especially target causal explanation in terms of pre-established harmony between our mind, shaped by causal processes, and the underlying modal structure of reality. The paper argues against them. The argument builds upon the claim that the appeal to modal facts is indispensable for systematization and explanation of non-modal ones. Therefore, we should assume that modal facts exist and are not disjoint and isolated from actual facts. The modal structure of the universe intervenes in the non-modal reality. Causal processes indirectly carry information about deep modal structure. Any causal explanation of our intuitional modal beliefs should start from this indirect contact with and information about modal facts. Therefore, if our intuitional modal beliefs are true and causally explainable, they are true in virtue of the deep underlying modal structure. They are sensitive to modal reality and track it. We can come to know this fact, and thus strengthen our spontaneous trust in our modal intuitions. (shrink)

The paper challenges the entrenched equation of conceptual with apriori. It develops the idea of at least dual justification of a single piece of belief, at a deep, ultimate level and at the surface, immediately accessible to the thinker. Apriori justification then also admits of different degrees of depth. A proposition is deeply apriori for a cognizer if its ultimate ground is apriori, otherwise it is only superficially apriori . In the case of empirically applicable concepts, some of their concept-analyzing (...) propositions are justified apriori only at the surface. Deeply, they are aposteriori, being originally straightforward empirical propositions. It is argued that there is no reason to suppose that they change their epistemic status once build into a concept. (shrink)

Explaining intuitions in terms of "facts of our natural history" is compatible with rationally trusting them. This compatibilist view is defended in the present paper, focusing upon nomic and essentialist modal intuitions. The opposite, incompatibilist view alleges the following: If basic modal intuitions are due to our cognitive make-up or "imaginative habits" then the epistemologists are left with a mere non-rational feeling of compulsion on the side of the thinker. Intuitions then cannot inform us about modal reality. In contrast, the (...) paper argues that there are several independent sources of justification which make the feeling of compulsion rational: the prima-facie and a priori ones come from the obviousness of our basic modal intuitions and our not being able to imagine things otherwise, others, a posteriori, from the epistemic success of these intuitions. Further, the general scheme of evolutionary learning is reliable, reliability is preserved in the resulting individual's cognitive make-up, and we can come to know this a posteriori. The a posteriori appeal to evolution thus plays a subsidiary role in justification, filling the remaining gap and removing the residual doubt. Explaining modal intuitions is compatible with moderate realism about modality itself. (shrink)

The first, critical part of the paper summarizes J. R. Brown’s Platonic view of thought experiments (TEs) and raises several questions. One of them concerns the initial, particular judgments in a TE. Since they seem to precede the general insight, Brown’s Platonic intuition, and not to derive from it, the question arises as to the nature of the initial particular judgment. The other question concerns the explanatory status of Brown’s epistemic Platonism. The second, constructive descriptive-explanatory part argues for an alternative, (...) i.e. the view of TE as reasoning in, or with help of, mental models which can accommodate all the relevant data within a non-aprioristic framework (or, at worst, within a minimally “aprioristic”, nativist one). The last part turns to issues of justification and argues that the mental model proposal can account for justification of intuitional judgments and can also support the view of properly functioning intuition as an epistemic virtue, all within a more naturalist framework than the one endorsed by Brown. (shrink)

Plato’s Republic is a political thought experiment, claims the present paper. Thought-experimenting is announced in the story of the Ring of Gyges, and done in a thorough and systematic way through a series of political scenarios: community of goods, of women and children, educational system and the philosopher rule? The paper considers the longstanding issue of plausibility, putting it in the context of current debates about thought-experiments, and the issue of replaceability: can a given political thought experiment be replaced by (...) an argument which features only norms and empirical information? The paper also puts the Republic thought experiment into a broad historical context, presenting it as the point of origin of utopian literature on the one hand, and the thought-experimental tradition in political philosophy on the other hand, contrasting it with the social-contract thought-experiment, also adumbrated in the Republic but fully developed in modern thought. (shrink)

This article is a brief presentation and defense of response-dispositionalist intentionalism against a family of objections. The view claims that for a surface to have an objective stable color is to have a disposition to cause in normal observers a response, namely, intentional phenomenal-color experience. The objections, raised recently by M. Johnston, B. Stroud, and by Byrne and Hilbert, claim that any dispositionalist view is unfair to the naive perceiver-thinker, saddles her with massive error and represents her as maladaptated to (...) her environment. The paper reconstructs the main line of thought in favor of response-intentionalism and argues that it is in fact rather charitable and fair to naïve cognizers, and also avoids a cluster of related objections. (shrink)

The paper discusses Lehrer's pioneering approach to the topic of wisdom. His pithy proposal, that wisdom is preference of merit justified by an evaluation system and undefeated by error, fits well within the grand philosophical tradition of thinking about wisdom, offering a very clear and original formulation of its target. The first part of the paper puts it on a map of philosophical options concerning wisdom (anthropo-, theo- and cosmo-centric ones) and then raises questions about it: does preference have to (...) motivate, what is the relation between factual and evaluative knowledge in the evaluation system, and how is the objectivity of merit secured? The second part briefly develops an alternative proposal inspired by Lehrer's work. It is a two-level picture. Wisdom combines the virtues of the first-order production of decision and action (reliability and practical validity) with second-order reflective endorsement of the first-order picture. The first-order production yields phronesis-generated action-guiding desires which constitute practical wisdom in the narrow sense, and the second level the more refined and sophisticated wisdom of philosophers and their kin. (shrink)

The paper defends a neo-Lockean view of secondary qualities, in particular color, according to which the being of a given color amounts to having the disposition to produce in normal viewers under normal circumstances the response of seeing an objective manifest simple color. It also defends the view that the naïve color-concept, the simple color concept, so to speak, is a fully objective property. The defense of this view is carried against its nearest cousin , the view proposed and defended (...) by Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson, according to which the naive color concept is response dependent, whereas color itself is fully objective. It is argued that the neo-Lockean alternative better captures the phenomenology of color, and better predicts or accounts for the dramatic character of the historical scientific discoveries (of Newton and his followers). Against metaphysical response dependence, the paper proposes a brief positive argument from the unity of color properties, and a criticism of Jackson’s counter-argument against metaphysical response-dependence from the naïve intuitions about causal properties of color. (shrink)

The paper discusses Sosa’s view of intuitional knowledge and raises the question of the nature of reflective justification of intuitional beliefs. It is assumed, in agreement with Sosa, that pieces of belief of good researchers are typically reflectively justified, in addition to being immediately, first-level justified. Sosa has convincingly argued that reflective justification typically mobilizes and indeed should mobilize capacities distinct from the original capacity that has produced the belief-candidate for being justified, in order to assess the reliability of the (...) original capacity. It has to go beyond justifiers that are of the same-kind as first-level immediate ones, in order to enlarge the circle of justification, and is, therefore, holistic and coherentist. But if this holds, it seems that reflective justifi cation of armchair beliefs, presumably produced by intuition and some reasoning, should revert to empirical considerations testifying to the reliability of intuition and reasoning. Therefore, it typically combines, in an articulated way, a posteriori elements contributing to the thinker’s reflective trust in her armchair capacities. In short, the paper argues that Sosa’s own view of second-order justification goes better with a more aposteriorist view, if it does not even force such a view. (shrink)

The paper considers a possible relevantist treatment, in the spirit of Wilson and Sperber’s work, of pejoratives and argues for three claims concerning them. On the level of synchronic issues it suggests that the negative content of pejoratives, at least in its minimal scope, is the normal part of their lexical meaning, and not a result of extra-semantic enrichment. It thus suggests an evaluative-content approach for the relevantist, in contrast to its neutral-content alternative. On the more general side, it suggests (...) that the relevance theorist owes us a clear story about what kind of material is normally encoded. Concerning the issues of diachronic behavior of pejoratives, the paper suggests primarily the application of relevantist theory of irony, and secondarily some links with theory of metaphor. A relevantist theory of echoic use, and proposed for irony, can be used to understand the appropriation of pejoratives by their original target group, and the reversal of valence that goes with it. There is an interesting parallel between the echoing-cum-reversal processes Wilson and Sperber propose for irony and the repeating-and-reversing process typicall of appropriation of pejoratives. Finally, a brief application of the relevantist understanding of metaphor is proposed as a tool for understanding the genealogy of pejoratives of fi gurative origin. The dynamics, history and development of pejoratives has not been systematically addressed by philosophical theories of pejoratives: a collaboration with relevance theory might prove a useful strategy. (shrink)

The paper argues that there is such a thing as luck in acquisition of candidate a priori beliefs and knowledge, and that the possibility of luck in this “armchair” domain shows that definitions of believing by luck that p offered in literature are inadequate, since they mostly rely on the possibility of it being the case that not- p. When p is necessary, such a definition should be supplemented by one pointing to variation in belief, not in the fact believed. (...) Thus the paper suggests a focus upon the agent and her epistemic virtue in the account of epistemic luck in general. (shrink)

A strong, strictly virtue- based , and at the same time truth-centered framework for virtue epistemology (VE) is proposed that bases VE upon a clearly motivating epistemic virtue, inquisitiveness or curiosity in a very wide sense, characterizes the purely executive capacities-virtues as a means for the truth-goal set by the former, and, finally, situates the remaining, partly motivating and partly executive virtues in relation to this central stock of virtues. Character-trait epistemic virtues are presented as hybrids, partly moral, partly purely (...) epistemic. In order to make the approach virtue- based , it is argued that the central virtue (inquisitiveness or curiosity) is responsible for the value of truth: truth is valuable to cognizers because they are inquisitive, and most other virtues are a means for satisfying inquisitiveness. On can usefully combine this virtue-based account of the motivation for acquiring knowledge with a Sosa-style analysis of the concept “knowledge”, which brings to the forefront virtues-capacities, in order to obtain a full-blooded, “strong” VE. (shrink)

Graham Priest has brilliantly analyzed Hegel's dialectics, as far as its logical and abstract ontological (metaphysical) structure goes, and has successfully related it to his own logically sophisticated dialethism. After briefly reminding the reader of his account, the paper turns to the other, not purely logical side of Hegel's dialectics, and points to his strategy of bringing together ontological, anthropological and historical matters together with the logical structure, in a manner quite foreign to analytic tradition. It concludes with the proposal (...) that Hegel's way of directly connecting logical ontological, anthropological and historical matters has played the crucial role in the birth of what later became known as specifically ``continental'' philosophy. The paper concludes by raising the question of the relation between the two, the abstract logico-ontological approach, favored by Priest, and the rich, anthropologically and historically informed one found in all major works of Hegel. (shrink)

Abstract Cognitive relativists?pragmatists (Stich, Churchland) claim that human cognitive strategies, lacking a common goal, are in addition divergent to the point of incommensurability. They appeal to the study of reasoning heuristics for evidence on cognitive diversity and incorrigibility. It is here argued that no such evidence is offered by the research, which, on the contrary (1) presents heuristics as uniform across great variations; (2) offers advice for correcting and improving human reasoning; and (3) very often postulates a uniformity of core (...) logical strategies, built into reasoning competence. Cognitive research thus supports a moderate rationalism rather than relativism?pragmatism. (shrink)

Rey’s project of rescuing conceptual analysis within a naturalistic computationalist framework, equipped with a Putnamian account of reference, is an interesting and valuable project. However, his extremepessimism about fundamental philosophical concepts, according to which they mostly tended to be empty, amounts to sacrificing philosophical analysis after having it rescued from the Quineans. An alternative is proposed, which accepts most of the naturalistic computationalist Putnamian framework, rejects the traditional view of analyticity, but secures more space for a constructive, as opposed to (...) merely destructive, philosophical analysis. (shrink)

A naturalistic theory of modal intuitions and modal reasoning inspired by Hintikka's theorizing should start from the principle that advanced modal reasoning has its roots in commonsense intuitions. It is proposed that the naturalist can rely on the assumption of uniformity: the same set of basic principles is used in reasoning about actual and counterfactual dependencies - modal cognition is conservative. In the most primitive cases the difference between a model of an actual situation and of a merely possible one (...) lies in its functional and indicational roles, not in its internal make-up. This conjecture enables one to derive important aspects of modal reasoning from the non-modal one. In the final section of the paper a simplified account of such derivation is proposed, drawn partly from connection- ist literature. (shrink)

Natural kind terms don’t have descriptive meanings, Devitt claims. The paper argues that this claim is tantamount to denying the existence of natural kind concepts, in the usual sense of “concept”, since concepts are predicate meanings. The denial is counterintuitive, and has bad epistemological consequences, since natural kind concepts are among the building blocks of our understanding of the world. The paper ends with a positive proposal, featuring a bold claim: if the standard Kripke-Putnam, line on semantics of natural kind (...) terms is correct, and if there are natural kind concepts, then propositions analyzing these concepts are not apriori knowable. Analyticity does not entail apriority. (shrink)

Merely conceptual knowledge, not based on specific sensitivity to the referential domain, is not seriously a priori. It is argued here that it is either weakly and superficially a priori, or downright a posteriori. This is done starting from the fact that many of our definitions (or concepts) are recognizably empirically established, and pointing out that recognizably empirical grounding yields superficial apriority. Further, some (first-order) concept analyzing propositions are empirically false about their referents and thus empirically refutable. Therefore, our empirical (...) definitions (or concepts) are fallible and empirically revisable: they can turn out to be incorrect about the intended satisfiers of the concept defined, and their concept analyzing propositions to be false. Now, empirical revisability is incompatible with strong apriority (and entails at best a weak apriority or aposteriority). The result is quite shocking: analyticity does not entail apriority. (shrink)

The paper argues that the use of epistemic terms, prominently “… knows” and even “… knows a priori/a posteriori” is context-sensitive along several dimensions. Besides the best known dimension of quality of evidence (lower quality for less demanding context, and higher one for more demanding), there is a dimension of depth (shallow justification for superficial evaluation, and deeper justification for deeper probing evaluation contexts). This claim is illustrated by context-dependent ascription of apriority and aposteriority. The argument proposed here focuses upon (...) the status of propositions that are analytic in empirical concepts (like “Whales are animals”). It is a commonplace in epistemology that any analytic proposition (including e-analytic ones) is a priori. The paper claims that propositions analyzing empirical concepts are an interesting counterexample. It develops the following argument: Many such propositions have empirical counterparts that are expressed by the same form-of-words. (E.g., the form of words “Whales are mammals” can express both an e-analytic proposition and an empirical statement.) They normally derive from their empirical counterparts. Beliefs in such propositions, can be explicitly justified either a priori, by pointing out their conceptual, analytic status, or by reverting to their empirical counterparts. In contexts of very superficial evaluation, one may justify such an analytic belief in the first, conceptual way. In most contexts a belief in a proposition analyzing an empirical concept is being justified by appeal to its empirical counterparts. The empirical justification is normally taken as being ultimate. Empirical counterparts are derivationally deeper than the corresponding analytic propositions, and empirical justification is deeper than a priori one as well. Therefore, propositions analyzing empirical concepts are deeply a posteriori and superficially a priori. (shrink)

The paper addresses Williamson’s original and challenging proposal for understanding of thought experiments . First, it puts it on the map of positions, describing it as “ordinarism”, the view that sees thinker’s reaction to the thought-experimental question as nothing extraordinary, let alone mysterious. Then, it passes to Williamson’s proposal to use counterfactuals in order to understand TEs, agrees with the main idea, but proposes a more structured view of capacities or “competences” active in the understanding and answering. Intuitions are important, (...) and they are voice of competencies, at least in the good case. Finally, on the normative level, it argues for the view of justification as being structured, containing both a priori and a posteriori elements. (shrink)

Secondary and tertiary qualities are plausibly explained along dispositionalist lines. Concepts of such qualities are response-dependent, denoting properties that are partly mind/ brain -dependent. Unfortunately, dispositionalism is hard to square with extant versions of naturalistic theories of representation. In particular the standard naturalistic semantics of representational content cannot handle the question from either the subjectivist or the dispositional viewpoint. The paper proposes a remedy: the problem can be solved in a smooth and natural way, provided that we revise and supplement (...) the standard semantics in a rather obvious fashion, by allowing the mind/ brain -involving properties to figure within it. (shrink)

In Devitt’s view, linguistic intuitions are opinions about linguistic production of products, most often one’s own. They result frorn ordinary empirical investigation, so “they are immediate and fairly unreflectiveernpirical central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena”, which reactions are, moreover, theory-laden, where the ‘theory’ encompasses all sorts of speaker’s beliefs. The paper reconstructs his arguments, places his view on a map of alternative approaches to intuitions, and offers a defense of a minimalistic “voice-of-competence” view. First, intuitions are to be identified with the (...) data, the minimal “products” of tentative linguistic production of naïve speaker-listeners, and not with their opinions about the data. Second, the data involve no theory and very little prototheory. Third, although there might be admixtures of guesswork in the conscious production of data, these are routinely weaned out by linguists. Finally, mere acceptance of the “voice of competence” does not land us in any objectionable Cartesianism: it is cornpatible with naturalism and with distrust of a priori philosophy. (shrink)

Reaching understanding is one of our central epistemic goals, dictated by our important motivational epistemic virtue, namely inquisitiveness about the way things hang together. Understanding of humanly important causal dependencies is also the basic factual-theoretic ingredient of wisdom on the anthropocentric view proposed in the article. It appears at two levels. At the first level of immediate, spontaneous wisdom, it is paired with practical knowledge and motivation ( phronesis ), and encompasses understanding of oneself (a distinct level of self-knowledge having (...) to do with one’s dispositions capacities, vulnerabilities, and ways of reacting), of other people, of possibilities of meaningful life, and of relevant courses of events. It is partly resistant to skeptical scenarios, but not completely. On the second and reflective level, understanding helps fuller holistic integration of one’s first order practical and factual-theoretic knowledge and motivation, thus minimizing potential and actual conflicts between all these components. It also participates in the reflective control whose exercise is needed for full reflective wisdom, the crucial epistemic-practical virtue or human excellence. (shrink)

How do we know what is metaphysically possible? Many philosophers agree that conceivability is our main, if not the only, guide to possibility. And attempts at conceiving various philosophically relevant scenarios lie at the heart of much of philosophical method. No wonder that the link between the epistemic and the modal has attracted a lot of attention. The present collection documents it on more than five hundred pages of densely argued text authored by some of the most creative philosophers in (...) the area and published here for the first time. Meanwhile, Philosophical Studies have also published a thematic issue on the topic that reads like continuation of the collection, carrying the debate a bit further. We stay here with the collection. (shrink)

A popular line in philosophy championed by Jackson and his followers analyses concepts as networks of propositions. It takes even network-propositions characterizing ordinary empirically applicable concepts to be a priori, in contrast to statements of empirical science. This is meant to guarantee both the autonomy of conceptual analysis, and its substantial and informative character. It is argued here, to the contrary, that empirically applicable and entrenched concepts owe the acceptability of their own network precisely to its empirical pedigree. Promoting an (...) empirical proposition into a network proposition does not make it ultimately a priori: no matter how entrenched the network is, it owes its ultimate justification to its empirical pedigree. Autonomy from experience and informativeness clash with each other: the stipulative "knowledge" is a priori in a weak sense, but not informative and substantial, the factual knowledge is substantial but not a priori. (shrink)

For Rousseau, social contract is a hypothetical one; the paper claims that it is, in contemporary terms, a political thought-experiment (TE). The abductive way of thinking, looking for the best normative pattern in the data, finds its counterpart in the historical abduction in the Second Discourse; the analogy between the two secures the methodological unity of Rousseau’s political philosophy. The proposed reading of the work as a TE shows that it fulfills the necessary requirements put by (hopefully) intuitively acceptable definition (...) of a TE, and fits in the contractarian tradition that has been experimenting with hypothetical arrangements since its start. The reading of The Social Contract as a TE has helped to systematize some of its shortcomings from the wider perspective of methodology of political philosophy. Finally, the political thought experiment (PTE) reading of Rousseau places his central work where it belongs: in the tradition started by Plato’s Republic, continuing with Renaissance and early modern philosophical utopias, culminating in the contractarian social contract TE, and going all the way to the work of Rawls and his present day continuators. We hope that this can contribute to a more positive picture of Rousseau’s work, despite criticism concerning his brusque manner of thought-experimenting. (shrink)

Philosophy should avoid isolation, and should return to being curious and enthusiastic about explanation: about why- and how possibly-questions. The analytic and continental philosophical cultures should establish a dialogue, where each side brings out the distinctive qualities of its work while widening the scope of its concerns.

The central goal of cognition is truth. This thesis is defended against the new wave relativist-pragmatists, notably Stephen Stich. First, the relativist-pragma-tist stance and its central line of argumentation is briefly presented, pivoting around the plurality of TRUTH-predicates. Against this, the following theses are argued for: various TRUTH-predicates are not in semantic, epistemic, and instrumental competition, and they will stand for the same higher-level epistemic goal — believing and saying "p" only if p; the choice among TRUTH-predicates for natural languages (...) is epistemically and instrumentally insignificant; whereas the choice among TRUTH-predicates for the language of thought is not available to thinkers, since they do not choose in what interpreted language they think and therefore are not to be blamed for not exercising a choice where there is none. (shrink)

The paper is a critical examination of Peacocke’s pioneering work on concepts as grounding the possibility of a priori knowledge. It focuses upon his more recent turn to reference and referential domain, and the two enlargements of the purely conceptual bases for apriority, namely appeal to conceptions and to direct referential sensitivity. I argue that the two are needed, but they produce more problem for the strategy as a whole than they solve. I conclude by suggesting that they point to (...) a possible Benacerraf-like dilemma for conceptualist accounts of armchair knowledge: if concepts are akin to representational contents and/or conceptions, they certainly do not metaphysically determine anything. At best, they fallibly guide our inquiry and get corrected almost by each new important discovery about the nature of their referents. If what is meant by “concept” is a Fregean, objectively correct and metaphysically potent entity, there is little doubt in its power to determine its referent(s), but there is a huge epistemic problem of how we grasp such Platonic concepts. Peacocke’s early metaphysics of concept, which offered beginnings of an answer, is put in jeopardy by the new referential turn, and his valiant attempts to pass between the multiple horns of this dilemma seem to face a lot of difficulties. (shrink)