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1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 111 > Issue: 12
Justin Tiehen

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At the heart of David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World is his defense of A Priori Scrutability, the thesis that there is a compact class of truths such that for any truth p, a Laplacean intellect could know a priori that if the truths in the class hold, then p. In this paper I develop an objection to Chalmers’s defense of A Priori Scrutability that focuses on his reliance on a so-called that’s-all truth. After reviewing preliminaries in section 1, my objection, which draws heavily on Theodore Sider’s discussion of border-sensitive properties, is developed in sections 2 and 3. Section 2 argues against Chalmers’s analysis of the distinction between positive and negative truths, while section 3 argues that the that’s-all sentence formulated by Chalmers is a falsehood rather than a truth. Section 4 offers a concluding discussion of my argument.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 111 > Issue: 12
Gurpreet Rattan

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Quine’s arguments in the final two sections of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” bring semantic and epistemic concerns into spectacular collision. Many have thought that the arguments succeed in irreparably smashing a conception of a distinctively analytic and a priori philosophy to pieces. In Constructing the World, David Chalmers argues that much of this distinctively analytical and a priori conception of philosophy can be reconstructed, with Quine’s criticisms leaving little lasting damage. I agree with Chalmers that Quine’s arguments do not have the lasting damage some take them to have. However, I do not think that Chalmers has succeeded in explaining why. The core of Chalmers’s error lies in the rational dispositionalism that forms the metasemantics of his Carnapian intensionalism. Responding to Quine requires recognizing conceptions of both concepts and epistemic normativity that go beyond the opposition between irrationality and conceptual change that Chalmers brings to bear on Quine. I explain this expanded conception of concepts and epistemic normativity in terms of another fundamental aim of Constructing the World, namely that of providing an account of Fregean sense, or more generally of defending what Chalmers calls epistemological semantics.

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3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 111 > Issue: 12
Gary Ebbs

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David Chalmers has recently argued that Bayesian conditionalization is a constraint on conceptual constancy, and that this constraint, together with “standard Bayesian considerations about evidence and updating,” is incompatible with the Quinean claim that every belief is rationally revisable. Chalmers’s argument presupposes that the sort of conceptual constancy that is relevant to Bayesian conditionalization is the same as the sort of conceptual constancy that is relevant to the claim that every belief is rationally revisable. To challenge this presupposition I explicate a sort of “conceptual role” constancy that a rational subject could take to be necessary and sufficient for a rule of Bayesian conditionalization to govern her belief updating, and show that a rational subject may simultaneously commit herself to updating her beliefs in accord with such a rule and accept the claim that every belief is rationally revisable. 

4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 111 > Issue: 12

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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 111 > Issue: 12

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