People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's judgments about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone else's land. We test psychological hypotheses motivated directly by three major principles that govern these cases in the law. The results show that people are more likely to favor the finder when the object is in a public space compared to a (...) private space. We find mixed support for the hypothesis that people are less likely to favor a finder who is employed by the landowner. Last, we find no support for the hypothesis that people are more likely to favor finders for objects located above ground compared to below ground. We discuss implications for psychological theories of ownership and potential applications to property law. (shrink)

‘An honest religious thinker’, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it’.

Over the last fifty years, traditional farming has been replaced by industrial farming. Unlike traditional farming, industrial farming is abhorrently cruel to animals, environmentally destructive, awful for rural America, and wretched for human health. In this essay, I document those facts, explain why the industrial system has become dominant, and argue that we should boycott industrially produced meat. Also, I argue that we should not even kill animals humanely for food, given our uncertainty about which creatures possess a right to (...) life. In practice, then, we should be vegetarians. To underscore the importance of these issues, I use statistics to show that industrial farming has caused more pain and suffering than the Holocaust. (shrink)

Kneeling down or grovelling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.

We propose a construct, the Trust Triangle, that highlights three primary mechanisms that provide ex post accountability for opportunistic behavior and motivate ex ante trust in economic relationships. The mechanisms are a society’s legal and regulatory framework, market-based discipline and reputational capital, and culture, including individual ethics and social norms. The Trust Triangle provides a framework to conceptualize the relationships between trust, corporate accountability, legal liability, reputation, and culture. We use the Trust Triangle to summarize recent developments in the empirical (...) finance literature that examine how trust is formed and how trust, or its absence, affects financial markets, firm performance, and the incidence of financial fraud. To date, most studies examine only one leg of the Trust Triangle in isolation. The evidence, however, indicates that all three legs of the Trust Triangle have first-order effects on a wide range of financial outcomes and that they are interrelated. Attempts to model trust and trustworthiness that do not incorporate all three aspects of the Trust Triangle will therefore miss essential aspects of the basic economic problem of how counterparties overcome the risks of moral hazard, asymmetric information, and opportunism to engage in mutually beneficial exchange and production activities. We focus especially on culture-related mechanisms, a recently developed area in empirical finance research that has potential to influence the more established research on laws and reputation. (shrink)

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas.

In this volume, Rachel Giora explores how the salient meanings of words - the meanings that stand out as most prominent and accessible in our minds - shape how we think and how we speak. For Giora, salient meanings display interesting effects in both figurative and literal language. In both domains, speakers and writers creatively exploit the possibilities inherent in the fact that, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Of the various meanings weencode (...) in our mental lexicon for a given word or expression, we ascribe greater cognitive priority to some over others. Interestingly, the most salient meaning is not always the literal meaning. Giora argues that it is cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, that play the most important role in the comprehension and production of language. She shows that even though context begins to affect comprehension immediately, it does so without obstructing the early accessing of salient meanings. Thus, the meaning we first attend to is the salient word meaning, regardless of contextual bias. Knowledge of salient meanings turns out to play a major role, perhaps the most important role, in the process of using and understanding of language. Going beyond the familiar effects of literal meaning and context, the Graded Salience Hypothesis presents the most comprehensive explanation for how we use language for meaning. In this volume, Giora presents her new model for the first time in a book-length treatment, with original and illuminating perspectives that will be of interest to linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and all who want to know more about just how we understand what we mean. (shrink)

Why do we have a moral duty to fulfill promises? Hume offers what today is called a practice theory of the obligation of promises: he explains it by appeal to a social convention. His view has inspired more recent practice theories. All practice theories, including Hume’s, are assumed by contemporary philosophers to have a certain normative structure, in which the obligation to fulfill a promise is warranted or justified by a more fundamental moral purpose that is served by the social (...) practice of promising or adherence to it. Recent practice theories do have this structure, but, I argue, Hume’s own does not. Hume’s account, while it does trace the origin of promises to convention, is instead a causal explanation of the moral sentiments we have toward fulfillment and violation of promises, sentiments he regards as normative in themselves and not susceptible of further warrant. He explains how a collectively-invented social practice becomes morally obligatory for us to conform to, without deriving its moral authority from a more basic principle. I discuss one objection often made to practice theories that, in its application to Hume, presupposes the incorrect interpretation, and show that while it is telling for Hume’s descendants, for Hume it misses the mark. Instead I make a different challenge to Hume, and suggest how he might meet it. (shrink)

Assertions about appearances license inferences about the speaker's perceptual experience. For instance, if I assert, 'Tom looks like he's cooking', you will infer both that I am visually acquainted with Tom (what I call the "individual acquaintance inference"), and that I am visually acquainted with evidence that Tom is cooking (what I call the "evidential acquaintance inference"). By contrast, if I assert, 'It looks like Tom is cooking', only the latter inference is licensed. I develop an account of the acquaintance (...) inferences of appearance assertions building on two main previous lines of research: first, the copy raising literature, which has aimed to account for individual acquaintance inferences through the "perceptual source" semantic role; second, the subjectivity literature, which has focused on the status of acquaintance inferences with predicates of personal taste, but hasn't given much attention to the added complexities introduced by appearance language. I begin by developing what I take to be the most empirically-sound version of a perceptual source analysis. I then show how its insights can be maintained, while however taking anything about perception out of the truth conditions of appearance sentences. This, together with the assumption that appearance assertions express experiential attitudes, allows us to capture the acquaintance inferences of bare appearance assertions without making incorrect predictions about the behavior of appearance verbs in embedded environments. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant's view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for (...) human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally (...) varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought. (shrink)

This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.

The bioethical principle of autonomy is problematic regarding the future of the embryo who lacks the ability to self-advocate but will develop this defining human capacity in time. Recent experiments explore the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats /Cas9 for germline engineering in the embryo, which alters future generations. The embryo’s inability to express an autonomous decision is an obvious bioethical challenge of germline engineering. The philosopher Joel Feinberg acknowledged that autonomy is developing in children. He advocated that (...) to reserve this future autonomy, parents should be guided to make ethical decisions that provide children with open futures. Here, Feinberg’s 1980 open future theory is extended to the human embryo in the context of CRISPR germline engineering. Although the embryo does not possess the autonomous decision-making capacity at the time of germline engineering, the parental decision to permanently change the unique genetic fabric of the embryo and subsequent generations disregards future autonomy. Therefore, germline engineering in many instances is objectionable considering Feinberg’s open future theory. (shrink)

Rachel Zuckert - The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 599-622 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism Rachel Zuckert In the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his (...) least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics . Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's.. (shrink)

Rachel Zuckert - The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 599-622 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism Rachel Zuckert In the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his (...) least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics. Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's... (shrink)

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

I am immensely grateful to these thoughtful readers of Herder’s Naturalistic Aesthetics (Zuckert 2019) for their probing and insightful comments, of a depth and.

We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...) statement, the ‘file’-theory makes reference to a certain kind of relational representational feature, and a certain kind of mental activity. Mental files need not come into it. In short, we posit mental filing without mental files. Our interpretation avoids awkward problems that arise on the standard interpretation and clarifies the explanatory commitments of the theory. (shrink)

The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a (...) brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives. (shrink)

In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy them). This kind of two-faced behavior (...) systematically arises with complex sensory-evaluative predicates, including those with other appearance verbs, such as 'look splendid' and 'sound nice'. I examine two strategies for capturing these different uses: one that posits an ambiguity in appearance verbs, and one that does not. The former is in line with an approach to 'look'-statements prominent in work in philosophy of perception, and I consider how the motivation given in that tradition carries over to the present context. I then show how the data used to support the verbal ambiguity approach can equally be captured on the second strategy, which appeals only to independently-motivated flexibility in adjective meaning. I close by discussing some considerations that are relevant for choosing between the two options. (shrink)

Given the potential dangers of unethical decisions in the workplace, it has become increasingly important for managers to hire, and promote into leadership positions, those who are morally inclined. Behavioral ethics research has contributed to this effort by examining an array of individual difference variables that play a role in morality. However, past research has focused mostly on direct causal effects and not so much on the processes through which different factors, especially those that are morality based, decrease unethical choices. (...) The purpose of the current research is to examine the process, which includes both subconscious and conscious decision pathways, through which moral attentiveness curbs unethical decision making at the individual level. The findings of a study employing about 200 participants and a cheating task reveal that both accurate ethical prototypes and moral awareness of the situation decreased unethical decisions, and moral attentiveness was found to be positively related to both of these constructs. In addition, having accurate ethical prototypes was found to be a partial mediator between perceptual moral attentiveness and less cheating, while moral awareness was found to be a partial mediator between reflective moral attentiveness and less cheating. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Global production networks connect multiple producers involved in fragmented manufacturing processes. Major brands and retailers, considered as lead firms, are under increasing pressure to ensure products made through GPNs are produced sustainably. Theories of governance developed to understand dynamics in outsourced production can provide insight into this issue. However, these theories and related empirical research have often focused on relationships between lead firms and upper-tier suppliers. When manufacturing involves multiple fragmented stages, understanding the role of lead firms becomes more difficult. (...) This article considers new governance roles that lead firms, as buyers, are playing when attempting to promote sustainable practices across all stages of production for buyer-driven industries. The focus is exploring the nature of new governance approaches which lead firms have developed in order to address diverse sustainability challenges found within GPNs, particularly related to lower-tier suppliers. These approaches can involve lead firms working through vertical buyer–seller links or developing new horizontal relationships, which link lead firms with lower-tier suppliers and governance processes in these suppliers’ local productive systems. The findings draw from field research examining how top UK garment retailers provide governance to producers involved in creating cotton garments in India and a review of publicised policies and practices of these retailers related to promoting sustainable production. Five types of governance mechanisms that can involve vertical or horizontal links are identified. Considering the growth of new governance relationships expands previous conceptions of the roles of lead firm governance. (shrink)

"Psychiatry and Philosophy of Science" explores conceptual issues in psychiatry from the perspective of analytic philosophy of science. Through an examination of those features of psychiatry that distinguish it from other sciences - for example, its contested subject matter, its particular modes of explanation, its multiple different theoretical frameworks, and its research links with big business - Rachel Cooper explores some of the many conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological issues that arise in psychiatry. She shows how these pose interesting challenges (...) for the philosopher of science while also showing how ideas from the philosophy of science can help to solve conceptual problems within psychiatry. Cooper's discussion ranges over such topics as the nature of mental illnesses, the treatment decisions and diagnostic categories of psychiatry, the case-history as a form of explanation, how psychiatry might be value-laden, the claim that psychiatry is a multi-paradigm science, the distortion of psychiatric research by pharmaceutical industries, as well as engaging with the fundamental question whether the mind is reducible to something at the physical level. "Psychiatry and Philosophy of Science" demonstrates that cross-disciplinary contact between philosophy of science and psychiatry can be immensely productive for both subjects and it will be required reading for mental health professionals and philosophers alike. (shrink)

The standard view amongst philosophers of language and linguists is that the logical form of generics is quantificational and contains a covert, unpronounced quantifier expression Gen. Recently, some theorists have begun to question the standard view and rekindle the competing proposal, that generics are a species of kind-predication. These theorists offer some forceful objections to the standard view, and new strategies for dealing with the abundance of linguistic evidence in favour of the standard view. I respond to these objections and (...) show that their strategies fail. I offer a novel argument in favour of the standard view that I call the binder argument. The upshot of this argument is that if one rejects the existence of Gen, then one is committed to rejecting the existence of covert structure in general. (shrink)

We have structured our response according to five questions arising from the commentaries: (i) What is sentience? (ii) Is sentience a necessary or sufficient condition for moral standing? (iii) What methods should guide comparative cognitive research in general, and specifically in studying invertebrates? (iv) How should we balance scientific uncertainty and moral risk? (v) What practical strategies can help reduce biases and morally dismissive attitudes toward invertebrates?

From Bishop Wilberforce in the 1860s to the advocates of "creation science" today, defenders of traditional mores have condemned Darwin's theory of evolution as a threat to society's values. Darwin's defenders, like Stephen Jay Gould, have usually replied that there is no conflict between science and religion--that values and biological facts occupy separate realms. But as James Rachels points out in this thought-provoking study, Darwin himself would disagree with Gould. Darwin, who had once planned on being a clergyman, was convinced (...) that natural selection overthrew our age-old religious beliefs. Created from Animals offers a provocative look at how Darwinian evolution undermines many tenets of traditional philosophy and religion. James Rachels begins by examining Darwin's own life and work, presenting an astonishingly vivid and compressed biography. We see Darwin's studies of the psychological links in evolution (such as emotions in dogs, and the "mental powers" of worms), and how he addressed the moral implications of his work, especially in his concern for the welfare of animals. Rachels goes on to present a lively and accessible survey of the controversies that followed in Darwin's wake, ranging from Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism to Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology, and discusses how the work of such influential intellects as Descartes, Hume, Kant, T.H. Huxley, Henri Bergson, B.F. Skinner, and Stephen Jay Gould has contributed to--or been overthrown by--evolutionary science. Western philosophy and religion, Rachels argues, have been shaken by the implications of Darwin's work, most notably the controversial idea that humans are simply a more complex kind of animal. Rachels assesses a number of studies that suggest how closely humans are linked to other primates in behavior, and then goes on to show how this idea undercuts the work of many prominent philosophers. Kant's famous argument that suicide reduces one to the level of an animal, for instance, is meaningless if humans are, in fact, animals. Indeed, humanity's membership in the animal kingdom calls into question the classic notions of human dignity and the sacredness of human life. What we need now, Rachels contends, is a philosophy that does not discriminate between different species, one that addresses each being on an individual basis. With this sweeping survey of the arguments, the philosophers, and the deep implications surrounding Darwinism, Rachels lays the foundations for a new view of morality. Vibrantly written and provocatively argued, Created from Animals offers a new perspective on issues ranging from suicide to euthanasia to animal rights. (shrink)

According to “voluntarists,” voluntary control is a necessary precondition on being blameworthy. According to “non-voluntarists,” it isn’t. I argue here that we ought to take seriously a type of voluntary control that both camps have tended to overlook. In addition to “direct” control over our behavior, and “indirect” control over some of the consequences of our behavior, we also possess “constitutive” control: the capacity to govern some of our attitudes and character traits by making choices about what to do that (...) constitute those attitudes and traits. Taking this sort of control seriously, I argue, ultimately tips the scale towards voluntarism. First, I address a non-voluntarist case in which an agent is putatively made blameworthy by the reasons for which she acts, even though the particular reasons for which she acts aren’t up to her. I argue that this case looks compelling only if we overlook constitutive control, and thereby miss how the agent’s motivating reasons are under her voluntary control even though non-voluntarists think they are not. I then use the notion of constitutive control to diffuse some of the best putative counterexamples to voluntarism: cases in which subjects are blameworthy either for caring inadequately about others or for wishing them ill. (shrink)

If funding allocation is an indicator of a field’s priorities, then the priorities of the field of bioethics are misaligned because they perpetuate injustice. Social justice mandates priority for the factors that drive systematic disadvantage, which tend not to be the areas supported by funding within academic bioethics. Current funding priorities violate social justice by overemphasizing technologies that aim to enhance the human condition without addressing underlying structural inequalities grounded in racism, and by deemphasizing areas of inquiry most frequently pursued (...) by Scholars of Color. This lack of attention to upstream determinants of health in bioethics research perpetuates a gap in the resources needed to understand the experiences of communities disproportionately experiencing poor health, which is itself a form of epistemic injustice. Both social and epistemic injustices are apparent in the impact of these funding priorities on people of color, both in the public and in the bioethics community. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

What happens when we consider transformative experiences from the perspective of gender transitions? In this paper I suggest that at least two insights emerge. First, trans* persons’ experiences of gender transitions show some limitations to L.A. Paul’s (forthcoming) decision theoretic account of transformative decisions. This will involve exploring some of the phenomenology of coming to know that one is trans, and in coming to decide to transition. Second, what epistemological effects are there to undergoing a transformative experience? By connecting some (...) experiences of gender transitions to feminist standpoint epistemology, I argue that radical changes in one’s identity and social location also radically affects one’s access to knowledge in ways not widely appreciated in contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

Introduction: philosophy of science in practice Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Article Pages 303-307 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0036-4 Authors Rachel Ankeny, School of History & Politics, University of Adelaide, Napier Building, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia Hasok Chang, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH UK Marcel Boumans, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65-67, 1018 XE Amsterdam, The Netherlands Mieke Boon, Department of Philosophy, University (...) of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 3. (shrink)

In this paper I present my proposal for the central norm governing the practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm of Assertion (SRNA). The critical features of this norm are that it's highly sensitive to the context of assertion, such that the requirements for warrantedly asserting a proposition shift with changes in context, and that truth is not a necessary condition for warrantedly asserting. In fact, I argue that there are some cases where a speaker may warrantedly (...) assert something she knows to be false. Only SRNA seems able to account for such cases. (shrink)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)