Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

Julian Schlöder (2018) examines Timothy Williamson's proposal that knowledge is the norm of assertion within the context of deontic logic. He argues for two claims, one concerning the formalisation of the thesis that knowledge is a norm of assertion and another concerning the formalisation of the thesis that knowledge is the only norm of assertion. On the basis of these claims, Schlöder goes on to raise a series of problems for Williamson's proposal. In response, I argue that both of Schlöder's claims can—and should—be rejected.

Keith DeRose defends contextualism: the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions vary with the context of the ascriber. Mark Richard has criticised contextualism for being unable to vindicate intuitions about disagreement. To account for these intuitions, DeRose has proposed truth-conditions for “knows” called the Gap view. According to this view, knowledge ascriptions are true iff the epistemic standards of each conversational participant are met, false iff each participant's standards aren't met, and truth-valueless otherwise. An implication of the Gap view is that people with divergent standards can enter conversations and thereby render knowledge claims gappy. We characterise this as a form of trolling. We argue that trolling results in unacceptably counterintuitive implications and that this constitutes a reductio against the Gap view. We also briefly explore the implications of trolling for other contextualist views about “knows,” as well as a broader class of context sensitive expressions.

We uncover a surprising discovery about the basis of thoughts. We begin by giving some plausible axioms about thoughts and their grounds. We then deduce a theorem, which has dramatic ramifications for the basis of all thoughts. The theorem implies that thoughts cannot come deterministically from any purely “thoughtless” states. We expect this result to be too dramatic for many philosophers. Hence, we proceed to investigate the prospect of giving up the axioms. We show that each axiom's negation itself has dramatic consequences that should be of interest to philosophers of mind. Our proof of the theorem provides a new guiderail for thinking about the nature and origin of thoughts.

This article takes a critical look at four instances of a similar idea: that the normativity of a sentence is a matter of what it rules out semantically. These views aim to give both stand-alone conceptions of normativity and solutions to a dilemma that A. N. Prior raised against Hume's no ought from is doctrine. First, I argue that acknowledged adequacy problems with the approach have not been sufficiently explained away. Second, I raise some new concerns, which create additional barriers to defending Hume using the approach. To conclude, I suggest an alternative way of understanding Hume's doctrine that avoids the need for a sentence-level account, and opens up avenues for preserving the insight behind the ruling-out approach.

According to a simple formulation of doxasticism about propositional faith, necessarily faith that p requires belief that p. Support of doxasticism is long-standing and was rarely a matter of dispute until William Alston (1996) proposed that that the content of propositional faith need not be believed if it is accepted. Subsequently non-doxastic theories that reject the belief requirement have proliferated and have come to dominate literature in the field. This paper aims to redress the balance by identifying a dilemma for non-doxasticism that comes into view when we draw out the implications of non-doxasticism for the interpretation of affirmations of religious propositional faith. One horn of this dilemma commits non-doxasticists to hermeneutic fictionalism: a substantive, contentious and little explored theory about religious discourse. The other appears to render the affirmation of faith prima facie bullshitting, leading to problems about the integrity of religious discourse and its speakers.

Recent debates about mathematical ontology are guided by the view that Platonism's prospects depend on mathematics' explanatory role in science. If mathematics plays an explanatory role, and in the right kind of way, this carries ontological commitment to mathematical objects. Conversely, the assumption goes, if mathematics merely plays a representational role then our world-oriented uses of mathematics fail to commit us to mathematical objects. I argue that it is a mistake to think that mathematical representation is necessarily ontologically innocent and that there is an argument from mathematics' representational capacity to Platonism. Given that it is common ground between the Platonist and nominalist that mathematics plays a representational role in science, this representationalist argument is to be preferred over the explanatory, or enhanced, indispensability argument.

According to Whitehead's rectified principle, two individuals are connected just in case there is something self-connected which overlaps both of them, and every part of which overlaps one of them. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi have offered a counterexample to the principle, consisting of an individual which has no self-connected parts. But since atoms are self-connected, Casati and Varzi's counterexample presupposes the possibility of gunk or, in other words, things which have no atoms as parts. So one may still wonder whether Whitehead's rectified principle follows from the assumption of atomism. This paper presents an atomic countermodel to show the answer is no.

This paper criticizes the circularity reading of Frege's argument for the indefinability of truth. According to this reading, Frege is appealing to a sort of circularity in the argument. I argue that the circularity reading is interpretatively incorrect, or makes Frege's argument a non-starter.

I argue that those who accept modal rationalism, the idea that all of modal space is accessible to a priori reflection, must also accept a seemingly much more ambitious thesis: fundamental scrutability, which says that from a description of the world's fundamental layer, one can reason a priori to all truths.

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained.Thus,Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism.

Here, I examine the connective called Knot, which may be considered a threat to semanticists, but not to inferentialists. I argue that it constitutes a problem for neither, by showing, first, how to characterize it proof-theoretically, and second, by showing how the issues it allegedly poses for the semanticist rest on an imprecise understanding of metainferences. I conclude that one should be careful in grounding philosophical disputes merely on formal tools.

The central claim of this paper is that people who ignore recherche cases might actually understand ethics better than those who focus on them. In order to establish this claim, I employ a relatively new account of understanding, to the effect that one understands to the extent that one has a representation/process pair that allows one to efficiently compress and decode useful information. I argue that people who ignore odd cases have compressed better, understand better, and so can be just as ethical (if not more so) as those who focus on such cases. The general idea is that our intuitive moral judgments only imprecisely track the moral truth—the function that maps possible decisions onto moral valuations—and when we try to specify the function precisely we end up overfitting what is basically a straightforward function to accommodate irrelevant data points.

Work on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logical theory countenances depends not only on its stock of logical terms, but also on its range of grammatical categories and modes of composition. Furthermore, there is a sense in which logical terms are unnecessary. Alexandra Zinke has recently pointed out that propositional logic can be done without logical terms. By defining a logical-term-free language with the full expressive power of first-order logic with identity, I show that this is true of logic more generally. Furthermore, having, in a logical theory, non-trivial valid forms that do not involve logical terms is not merely a technical possibility. As the case of adverbs shows, issues about the range of argument forms logic should countenance can quite naturally arise in such a way that they do not turn on whether we countenance certain terms as logical.

Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms.

A world is gunky iff every object that exists according to it has others as proper parts. A world is junky iff every object that exists according to it is a proper part of some others. Several philosophers have followed (Bohn, 2009a) in then saying that a world is “hunky” just in case it is both gunky and junky. The present note explains a need to clarify the determinative criteria for being hunky. It then provides the needed clarification and explains why the issue, though subtle, is not merely pedantic.

It is almost universally assumed that the indicative conditional connective is stronger than the material conditional connective. In the logic of certainty, however, the deduction theorem for the material conditional connective fails, and consequently the material conditional connective is stronger than the indicative conditional connective. One implication of this is that the import–export rule and modus ponens for the indicative conditional connective can both hold, without the indicative conditional connective collapsing into material conditional connective.