This book examines in detail two of the fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics. First, is the world indeterministic? Second, are there connections between spatially separated objects? In the first part, the author examines several interpretations, focusing on how each proposes to solve the measurement problem and on how each treats probability. In the second part, the relationship between probability (specifically determinism and indeterminism) and non-locality is examined, and it is argued that there is a non-trivial relationship between probability and (...) non-locality. The author then re-examines some of the interpretations of part one of the book in the light of this argument, and considers how they fare with regard to locality and Lorentz invariance. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, including researchers in the philosophy of physics and theoretical physics, as well as graduate students in those fields. (shrink)

It is time to transcend the arid debate between rationality and ir-, a-, or non-rationality as our basic assumption about human agency.1 There are powerful arguments and extensive evidence both for and against the rationality assumption, with heavily defended entrenchments on both sides. Managers and management scholars continually make at least tacit assumptions about how they expect others to behave. If only we could have in both theory and practice the coherence and precision of rational models as well as the (...) descriptive richness of ‘behavioural’ approaches. The message of this paper is that perhaps we can. The advent of consciousness studies and, more recently, neuroeconomics would seem to indicate the way forward to transcend the opposition in some kind of synthesis. This paper investigates rationality in the light of Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it is at the core of all intentionality that is the defining characteristic of mental phenomena. Neuroeconomics seeks to enhance understanding of agency by investigating new insights on the materialist basis of mental phenomenology in the neurophysiology of the brain and nervous system. Experimental evidence mapping intentional states onto neurophysiological states is emerging, some researchers even claiming to have found a ‘neurophysiological utility function’. Dennett closes the circuit by locating the existence of brain-hardware supporting satisficing intentional choice and action as the output of evolutionary ‘design’. The dichotomy is transcended: satisficing models (of which normative optimising rational choice models are a reasonable abstraction) are a good basis both for statistical prediction of the behaviour of large numbers, and as the first base on which to construct and refine a model of expectation-formation about particular types of agent and then of individual agents. Using both the old (‘external’) and the new (sub-individual) behaviourism as well as work on unpacking the abstract notion of rationality, we can concretise optimising rational choice both generally, for epistemic theory-building purposes, and specifically for understanding and deploying models of managerial agency. Such models will need to incorporate emotion with cognition in an integrated approach. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.

The last decade has witnessed a particularly intensive debate over methodological issues in legal theory. The publication of Julie Dickson's Evaluation and Legal Theory (2001) was significant, as were collective returns to H.L.A. Hart's 'Postscript' to The Concept of Law. While influential articles have been written in disparate journals, no single collection of the most important papers exists. This volume - the first in a three volume series - aims not only to fill that gap but also propose a (...) systematic agenda for future work. The editors have selected articles written by leading legal theorists, including, among others, Leslie Green, Brian Leiter, Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, and William Twining, and organized under four broad categories: 1) problems and purposes of legal theory; 2) the role of epistemology and semantics in theorising about the nature of law; 3) the relation between morality and legal theory; and 4) the scope of phenomena a general jurisprudence ought to address. (shrink)

‘Responsibilist' approaches to epistemology link knowledge and justification with epistemically responsible belief management, where responsible management is understood to involve an essential element of guidance by recognized epistemic norms. By contrast, reliabilist approaches stress the de facto reliability of cognitive processes, rendering epistemic self-consciousness as inessential. I argue that, although an adequate understanding of human knowledge must make room for both responsibility and reliability, philosophers have had a hard time putting them together, largely owing to a tendency, on the part (...) of responsibilists, to adopt an overly demanding, hyperintellectualized conception of what epistemic responsibility demands. I trace this tendency towards hyper-intellectualism to a wish to meet scepticism head on, a wish that enforces adherence to a particular model of the structure of epistemic justification. I argue that a more humanly reasonable conception of epistemic justification suggests an alternative model. With this model in hand, we can both deflect sceptical problems and combine responsibility with reliability in a satisfying way. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 1-26. (shrink)

In this exciting and original introduction to epistemology, Michael Williams explains and criticizes traditional philosophical theories of the nature, limits, methods, possibility, and value of knowing. All the main contemporary perspectives are explored and questioned, and the author's own theories put forward, making this new book essential reading for anyone, beginner or specialist, concerned with the philosophy of knowledge.

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism," according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. Williams's target is not phenomenalism in its (...) classical sense-datum and reductionist form but empiricism generally. Williams examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a "given" element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible. Groundless Belief was first published in 1977. This second edition contains a new afterword in which Williams places his arguments in the context of some current discussions of coherentism versus the Myth of the Given and explains their relation to subsequent developments in his own epistemological views. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

[Michael Williams] A response to Sosa's criticisms of Sellars's account of the relation between knowledge and experience, noting that Sellars excludes merely animal knowledge, and hopes to bypass epistemology by an adequate philosophy of mind and language. /// [Ernest Sosa] I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars's Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his earlier critique of (...) givenist mythology. In response to Michael Williams, it is argued that these issues are importantly independent of philosophy of language or mind, and that my own take on them does not commit me to any absurd radical foundationalism on language or mind. My own take is in line with Descartes' two-level epistemology of cognitio and scientia, a bifurcation that protects him from vicious circularity, and is adaptable for an epistemology naturalized, whether in the way of Quine, or Moore, or Davidson. (shrink)

This article distinguishes Wittgensteinian contextualism from epistemic relativism. The latter involves the view that a belief ’s status as justified depends on the believer’s epistemic system, as well as the view that no system is superior to another. It emerges from the thought that we must rely, circularly, on our epistemic system to determine whether any belief is justified. Contextualism, by contrast, emerges from the thought that we need not answer a skeptical challenge to a belief unless there is good (...) reason to doubt the belief; so we need not rely on our epistemic system to determine whether a belief is justified. Accordingly contextualism is not committed to the view that a belief ’s status depends on the believer’s epistemic system, nor to the view that no system is superior to another. The contextualist is not committed to epistemic relativism. (shrink)

In 1997 the Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that school officials at West High School did not violate Rachel Bauchman's constitutional rights by including Christian religious music as part of its curriculum, or by staging school performances at religious sites. Three philosophical questions are investigated in this paper: whether the performance of religious text constitutes a religious practice, the ways in which instructional and performance context can affect the performance of sacred music, and how music teachers can avoid (...) coercion when teaching religious music. Conclusions suggest that music educators must carefully consider the historical and cultural context of texts utilized in choral music. Certain contemporary devotional texts intended primarily for worship may prove problematic in a classroom setting. In addition, the instructional context in which religious music is presented can greatly impact how students understand the music's significance. Music educators should carefully articulate clear pedagogical reasons for staging performances in houses of worship to avoid the appearance of endorsement, and should refrain from asking students to participate in organized worship services. Finally, music educators should be sensitive to the problems religious texts present to individual students, taking responsibility for facilitating a classroom environment that respects a diversity of viewpoints. (shrink)

Skepticism has been (and remains) a central concern of the theory of knowledge. Indeed, some philosophers think that, without the problem of skepticism, we would not know what to make of the idea of distinctively philosophical theories of knowledge. However, a philosopher who thinks along these lines is likely to have in mind a rather special form of skepticism. Let us call it philosophical skepticism. Philosophical skepticism has a long history. Indeed, it is almost coeval with systematic philosophy itself.

In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

Realism is commonly portrayed as theory that reduces international relations to pure power politics. Michael Williams provides an important reexamination of the Realist tradition and its relevance for contemporary international relations. Examining three thinkers commonly invoked as Realism's foremost proponents - Hobbes, Rousseau, and Morgenthau - the book shows that, far from advocating a crude realpolitik, Realism's most famous classical proponents actually stressed the need for a restrained exercise of power and a politics with ethics at its core. These (...) ideas are more relevant than ever at a time when the nature of responsible responses to international problems are at the centre of contemporary political debate. This original interpretation of major thinkers will interest scholars of international relations and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Although contemporary pragmatists tend to be sympathetic to expressivist accounts of moral, modal and other problematic vocabularies, it is not clear that they have any right to be. The problem arises because contemporary pragmatists tend to favour deflationary accounts of truth and reference, thereby seeming to elide the distinction between expressive and repressentational uses of language. To address this problem, I develop a meta-theoretical framework for understanding what is involved in explanations of meaning in terms of use, and why some (...) but not all such explanations deflationary. Exploiting this framework, I argue that expressivist explanations of problematic vocabularies are really a particular kind of deflationary explanation. It follows that pragmatists can thus take such explanations on board without committing themselves to the distinction between expressive and robustly representational uses of language that articulations of expressivism typically invoke. (shrink)

I want to discuss an approach to knowledge that I shall call simple conversational contextualism or SCC for short. Proponents of SCC think that it offers an illuminating account of both why scepti- cism is wrong and why arguments for scepticism are so intuitively appealing. I have my doubts.

In this paper we argue that the protocols of subjects recalling the names of their high school classmates, as well as an army of traditional memory phenomena, can be understood from an information processing analysis which interprets retrieval as a problem‐solving process. This characterization of retrieval focuses on the reconstructive and recursive nature of the process of remembering. Retrieval is viewed as a process in which some information about a target item is used to construct a description of the item (...) and this description is used in attempts to recover new fragments of information. A new description i s formed and the process continues recursively. Three subprocesses are identified: FIND A CONTEXT, in which a proper environment for conducting a search i s established: SEARCH, in which bits and pieces of information appropriate to the context are recovered until an adequate description can be formed within the search context; and VERIFY, in which recovery information is checked for consistency.From the perspective this characterization, we examine the protocols of subjects asked to think aloud while recalling the names of their classmates. Subjects' retrievals continued for a surprisingly long period and were characterized by the phenomena of overshoot, systematic hypothesizing, fabrications, establishment of search contexts, self‐corrections, and the use of a number of basic search strategies. The view of memory as a problem‐solving process not only leads us to the identification of these phenomena but also to a framework for a coherent interpretation for them. (shrink)

According to Fred Dretske, the debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology is about “Whether there are epistemic rights without corresponding duties or obligations. Externalists believe and internalists deny that there are such unjustified justifiers. Dretske’s first fundamental thesis is: externalists are right. Unjustified justifiers can be thought of as “given,” not because they are certain or indubitable, but because they are “free of justificational encumbrances.” Even knowledge—the supreme entitlement—requires no justification.

Nuno Venturinha holds that the contextualist epistemology adumbrated in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty--the most powerful response to philosophical skepticism yet developed-- falls short of providing a complete answer to Cartesian radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. I argue that Venturinha underestimates the range and complexity of Wittgenstein’s epistemological. He does so because he reads Wittgenstein along the lines of so-called ‘hinge epistemology’. Hinge epistemology indeed fails as a diagnosis of skepticism. But it also fails as a reading of Wittgenstein. (...) A more adequate understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that Venturinha’s pessimistic conclusion can be avoided. (shrink)

In “The Ascription of Responsibilities and Rights,” H. L. A. Hart introduces two ideas, which he takes to be importantly related: ascriptive sentences and defeasible concepts. Hart's purpose is to dispel certain confusions that he nds in the philosophy of action; but I argue that Hart's ideas are equally pertinent to epistemology. Knowledge is a matter of epistemic authority; and authority is a matter of rights and responsibilities. But Hart's “ascriptivism” has attracted serious criticism and stands in need of clarification, (...) elaboration and even correction. The overall aim of the paper is to present a form of epistemic ascriptivism, in which justification emerges as a defeasible concept in Hart's sense. (shrink)

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech (...) by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements with a third that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context. (shrink)