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Displaying: 1-20 of 12212 documents


the isaac levi prize 2023

1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 3
Akshath Jitendranath

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This paper will be concerned with hard choices—that is, choice situations where an agent cannot make a rationally justified choice. Specifically, this paper asks: if an agent cannot optimize in a given situation, are they facing a hard choice? A pair of claims are defended in light of this question. First, situations where an agent cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation constitute a hard choice. Second, situations where agents cannot optimize because the binary preference or value relation violates acyclicity do not constitute a hard choice.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 3
Benjamin Henke Orcid-ID

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I argue that beliefs based on irresponsibly formed experiences—whose causes were not appropriately regulated by the subject—are doxastically unjustified. Only this position, I claim, accounts for the higher epistemic standard required of perceptual experts. Section I defends this standard and applies it to a pair of cases in which either an expert umpire or a complete novice judge a force play in baseball. I argue that when the latter, but not the former, fails to follow rules about perceiving force plays, their resulting belief is justified. Section II shows that this difference can be explained by the fact that the novice, but not the expert, formed her experience responsibly. Section III shows that alternative explanations of the expert’s unjustified belief—from defeat, reliability, and inference—fail. Section IV shows that the epistemic relevance of responsible experience formation has broad implications for the epistemology of perceptual beliefs.

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3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 3
Ilkka Niiniluoto Orcid-ID

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4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 3

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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 2
Jeanette Kennett, Orcid-ID Steve Matthews Orcid-ID

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According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making is something we do together, and that we can support or undermine, it generates norms of interaction that constitute a further, distinct, mode of recognition and respect for another’s agency. But the requirements of truthfulness and support for sense-making sometimes conflict. Through a series of cases, we analyze why and when a rigid insistence on truthfulness is disrespectful of the other and undermining of their agency.

6. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 2
Manolo Martínez, Orcid-ID Bence Nanay Orcid-ID

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Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor of the latter option. Intentionalism so conceived can make better sense of contemporary neuroscience of perception, and is better equipped to confront several influential objections to traditional intentionalism.

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7. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 2
Caspar Jacobs Orcid-ID

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The infamous Hole Argument has led philosophers to develop various versions of substantivalism, of which metric essentialism and sophisticated substantivalism are the most popular. In this journal, Trevor Teitel has recently advanced novel arguments against both positions. However, Teitel does not discuss the position of Jeremy Butterfield, which appeals to Lewisian counterpart theory in order to avoid the Hole Argument. In this note I show that the Lewis-Butterfield view is immune to Teitel’s challenges.

8. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 1
Jaroslav Peregrin Orcid-ID

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I propose that logic may be seen as a science of patterns—however, not in the sense in which mathematics is a science of patterns, but rather in the sense in which physics is. The proposal is that logic identifies, explores, and fixes the inferential patterns which de facto govern our argumentative practices. It can be seen, I argue, as picking up the patterns and working from them toward the state of reflective equilibrium, where the laws it aims at are explicitly articulated. Due to the normativity of logic, this process is not quite the same as that in which a natural science works its way from data to its laws; however, there is no reason why it should be seen as proceeding via a mysterious "a priori analysis.” Instead, it should proceed in the intersubjective space in which the sciences are practiced.

9. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 1
Simon Goldstein, Orcid-ID John Hawthorne

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Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epistemic access to one’s methods. Several possible solutions are explored and rejected.

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10. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 121 > Issue: 1
Jennifer Lackey Orcid-ID

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11. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 12
Paul Studtmann Orcid-ID

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According to Augustine, abstract objects are ideas in the mind of God. Because numbers are a type of abstract object, it would follow that numbers are ideas in the mind of God. Call such a view the “Augustinian View of Numbers” (AVN). In this paper, I present a formal theory for AVN. The theory stems from the symmetry conception of God as it appears in Studtmann (2021). I show that the theory in Studtmann’s paper can interpret the axioms of Peano Arithmetic minus the induction schema. This fact allows for the development of arithmetic in a natural way. The development eventuates in a theory that can interpret second-order arithmetic. The conception of God that emerges by the end of the discussion is a conception of an infinite, ineffable, self-cause that contains objects that not only serve as numbers but also encode information about each other.

12. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 12
Wayne A. Davis

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I argue that modal terms have an epistemic interpretation on which concessive knowledge attributions are semantically contradictory. This is compatible with the fallibilist view that the basis on which we know something need not entail it, but not with the view that what is known need not be epistemically certain or necessary. The apparent contradictoriness of concessive knowledge attributions is not due to mere implicature, nor to assertion updating the modal base. And it is contextually invariant. Concessive knowledge attributions contrast markedly with concessive assertions and Moorean conjunctions, whose infelicity is plausibly due to norms of assertion. I briefly explain why the strict fallibilism I recommend is compatible with our ordinary use of ‘know,’ and with our knowing much on the basis of perception. Its contextual shiftiness closely parallels our variably strict use of temporal and other invariant terms with strict application conditions.

13. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 12
Avril Styrman Orcid-ID

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This work introduces a causal explanation of the passage of time, and contrasts it with rival explanations. In the causal explanation, laws of physics are shown to entail that events are in causal succession, and the passage of time is defined as their causal succession. The causal explanation is coupled with phenomenology of the passage of time, and contrasted with the project of making sense of the idea that time does not pass.

14. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 12

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15. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 12

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16. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 11
Ginger Schultheis

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Stalnaker’s Thesis about indicative conditionals says, roughly, that the probability one ought to assign to an indicative conditional is equal to the probability that one ought to assign to its consequent conditional on its antecedent. Skyrms’s Thesis about counterfactual conditionals says, roughly, that the probability that one ought to assign to a counterfactual conditional equals one’s rational expectation of the chance, at a relevant past time, of its consequent conditional on its antecedent. In this article, I develop a new uniform theory of conditionals that allows us to derive a tenable version of Skyrms’s Thesis from a tenable version of Stalnaker’s Thesis, together with a chance-deference relating rational credence to beliefs about objective chance.

17. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 11
Christopher Willard-Kyle Orcid-ID

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A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right.

18. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 10
Andrew T. Forcehimes Orcid-ID

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Why ought we to perform the actions that we ought to perform? We can categorize the various answers to this question depending on whether they hold that the oughts governing actions are explained by the oughts governing non-actions. In this essay, I show how a handful of plausible claims from normative ethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of action entail the conclusion that what an agent ought to do is explained by the attitudes she ought to have.

19. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 10
Elmar Unnsteinsson Orcid-ID

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Many theorists assume that a request is sincere if the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act requested. I argue that this assumption predicts an implausible mismatch between sincere assertions and sincere directives and needs to be revised. I present an alternative view, according to which directive utterances can only be sincere if they are self-directed. Other-directed directives, however, can be genuine or fake, depending on whether the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act in question. Finally, I argue that this new perspective opens the door to a satisfying theory of authentic expression, for both assertive and directive utterances. Authenticity consists in the combination of genuine and sincere speech, for example, in the case of assertion, when speakers assert something which they both believe (sincerity) and want the addressee to believe (genuineness).

20. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 120 > Issue: 10

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