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Displaying: 1-20 of 46 documents


1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 12
Miriam Schoenfield

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This paper is about the connection between rationality and accuracy. I show that one natural picture about how rationality and accuracy are connected emerges if we assume that rational agents are rationally omniscient (have credence 1 in all of the facts about rationality). I then develop an alternative picture that allows us to relax this assumption, in order to accommodate certain views about higher order evidence.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 12
Manolo Martínez

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It is widely held that it is unhelpful to model our epistemic access to modal facts on the basis of perception, and postulate the existence of a bodily mechanism attuned to modal features of the world. In this paper I defend modalizing mechanisms. I present and discuss a decision-theoretic model in which agents with severely limited cognitive abilities, at the end of an evolutionary process, have states which encode substantial information about the probabilities with which the outcomes of a certain Bernoulli process occur. Thus, in the model, a process driven by very simple, thoroughly naturalistic mechanisms eventuates in modal sensitivity.

book reviews

3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 12
Michael Kremer

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4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 12
Daniel Stoljar

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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 12

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6. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 11
Lina Jansson

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The problem of explanatory non-symmetries provides the strongest reason to abandon the view that laws can figure in explanations without causal underpinnings. I argue that this problem can be overcome. The solution that I propose starts from noticing the importance of conditions of application when laws do explanatory work, and I go on to develop a notion of nomological (non-causal) dependence that can tackle the non-symmetry problem. The strategy is to show how a strong notion of counterfactual dependence as guaranteed by the laws is a plausible account of what we aim towards when we give law-based explanations. The aim of this project is not to deny that causal relations can do explanatory work but to restore laws of nature as capable of being explanatory even in the absence of any knowledge of causal underpinnings.

7. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 11
Juan Comesaña

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I argue that normative requirements (like “If you believe that it is raining, you ought to believe that it is precipitating”) should be interpreted as the conditional obligations of dyadic deontic logic. Semantically, normative requirements are conditionals understood as restrictors, the prevailing view of conditionals in linguistics. This means that Modus Ponens is invalid, even when the premises are known.

book reviews

8. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 11
Ralf M. Bader

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9. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 11

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10. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 10
Nick Zangwill

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I defend logical realism. I begin by motivating the realist approach by underlining the difficulties for its main rival: inferentialism. I then focus on AND and OR, and delineate a realist view of these two logical constants. The realist view is developed in terms of Alexander’s Principleshowing that AND and OR have distinctive determining roles. After that, I say what logic is not. We should not take logic to be essentially about the mind, or language, or exclusively about an abstract realm, or about reasoning, truth, truth-tables, truth-functions, topic-neutrality or form. Lastly, I turn to consider NEGATION and argue that we cannot escape negative facts, and facts conjoining and disjoining negative facts with positive facts. I then give NEGATION a distinctive role, one that contrasts with AND and OR. I reflect on the notion of logic in the coda.

11. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 10
Casey O’Callaghan

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My thesis is that perceptual awareness is richly multisensory. I argue for this conclusion on the grounds that certain forms of multisensory perceptual experience are incompatible with the claim that each aspect of a perceptual experience is associated with some specific sensory modality or another. First, I explicate what it is for some feature of a conscious perceptual episode to be modality specific. Then, I argue based on philosophical and experimental evidence that some novel intermodal features are perceptible only through the coordinated use of multiple senses. I appeal to cases that involve consciously perceptible feature instances and feature types that could not be perceptually experienced through the use of individual sense modalities working on their own or simply in parallel and co-consciously. Finally, I offer an account of how to type perceptual experiences by modality that makes room for richly multisensory experiences.

book reviews

12. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 10
Graham Priest

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13. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 10

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14. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 9
Shannon Spaulding

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We often have affective responses to fictional events. We feel afraid for Desdemona when Othello approaches her in a murderous rage. We feel disgust toward Iago for orchestrating this tragic event. What mental architecture could explain these affective responses? In this paper I consider the claim that the best explanation of our affective responses to fiction involves imaginative desires. Some theorists argue that accounts that do not invoke imaginative desires imply that consumers of fiction have irrational desires. I argue that there are serious worries about imaginative desires that warrant skepticism about the adequacy of the account. Moreover, it is quite difficult to articulate general principles of rationality for desires, and even according to the most plausible of these possible principles, desires about fiction are not irrational.

15. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 9
Michael Zhao

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A few purported counterexamples to the Adams thesis have cropped up in the literature in the last few decades. I propose a theory that accounts for them, in a way that makes the connections between indicative conditionals and counterfactuals clearer.

comments and criticism

16. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 9
Diana B. Heney

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In this paper, I argue that Huw Price’s widely read “Truth as Convenient Friction” overstates the onerousness, and underrates the utility, of the ontological commitments involved in Charles S. Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth. This argument comes in three parts. First, I briefly explain Peirce’s view of truth, and relate it to his account of assertion. Next, I articulate what I take Price’s grievance against Peirce’s view to be, and suggest that this criticism misses the target. Finally, I argue that Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth has greater explanatory power than the narrowly linguistic version put forward by Price, such that even the ontology-averse should accept it.

17. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 9

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18. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 9

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19. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 8
P. Kyle Stanford

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Critics who use historical evidence to challenge scientific realism have deployed a perfectly natural argumentative strategy that has created a profoundly misguided conception of what would be required to vindicate that challenge. I argue that the question fundamentally in dispute in such debates is neither whether particular terms in contemporary scientific theories will be treated as referential nor whether particular existential commitments will be held true by future scientific communities, but whether the future of science will exhibit the same broad pattern of repeated, profound, and unpredictable changes in theoretical orthodoxy that such historicist critics argue characterizes its past.

20. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 112 > Issue: 8
Jennifer Wang

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Actualist counterpart theory replaces David Lewis’s concrete possible worlds and individuals with ersatz worlds and individuals, but retains counterpart theory about de re modality. While intuitively attractive, this view has been rejected for two main reasons: (i) the problem of indiscernibles and (ii) the Humphrey objection. I argue that in insisting that ersatz individuals play the same role as Lewisian individuals, actualists commit the particularist fallacy. The actualist should not (as commonly believed) require stand-ins for every Lewisian individual. Ersatz individuals should instead be construed as representations of actually existing qualitative ways for individuals to be, or qualitative properties individuals can instantiate. This necessitates changes elsewhere. Non-instrumental uses of Kripke semantics and standard counterpart semantics also require stand-ins for particular non-actual individuals. I argue that the actualist should instead adopt a non-standard counterpart semantics that more clearly illuminates the role that actual properties and relations play in explaining de re possibilities and necessities. The result is an intuitive and forceful reply to both the problem of indiscernibles and the Humphrey objection.