Fiction and Thought Experiment - A Case Study

Many philosophers are very sanguine about the cognitive contributions of fiction to science and philosophy. I focus on a case study: Ichikawa and Jarvis’s account of thought experiments in terms of everyday fictional stories. As far as the contribution of fiction is not sui generis, processing fiction often will be parasitic on cognitive capacities which may replace it; as far as it is sui generis, nothing guarantees that fiction is sufficiently well-behaved to abide by the constraints of scientific and philosophical discourse, not even by the minimum requirements of conceptual and logical coherence

Das cartesische Begründungsideal und seine kritische Rezeption durch Sosa und Wittgenstein

Descartes nennt als Ziel seiner Bemühungen, mit gesicherter Zuversicht durchs Leben zu schreiten (AT VI, 10). Dieses Ziel hängt von der möglichst großen Gewißheit des Denkers ab, daß die Überzeugungen, gemäß denen er lebt, wahr sind. Daran richtet Descartes die Aufgabe der Philosophie aus, die daher durch zwei Aspekte gekennzeichnet ist: 1. Gewißheitsstreben: In einer programmatischen Äußerung avisiert Descartes vier "Stufen der Weisheit" und stellt ihnen eine "[..]fünfte unvergleichlich erhabenere und sicherere Stufe der Weisheit[..]" (AT IX / 2, 5)1 gegenüber. Überzeugungen, die ihr zugehören, erfüllen einen höheren Maßstab der Gewißheit als andere. Descartes sieht die traditionelle Aufgabe der Philosophie darin, diese Stufe zu erreichen (AT IX / 2, 5). 2. Fundierungsideal: Descartes umreißt den Bereich dieses Wissens, wenn er erklärt, daß die Philosophen "die wahren Prinzipien suchten, woraus man die Gründe alles Wißbaren ableiten könnte"( AT IX / 2, 5)2 Die Philosophie soll das gesamte Wissen auf eine neue Grundlage stellen und unseren Überzeugungen unvergleichlich größere Gewißheit geben

Should Special Science Laws Be Written into the Semantics of Counterfactuals?

Abstract Adam Elga has presented an anti-thermodynamic process as a counterexample to Lewis's default semantics for counterfactuals. The outstanding reaction of Jonathan Schaffer and Boris Kment is revisionary. It sacrifices Lewis's aim of defining causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Lewis himself suggested an alternative: «counter-entropic funnybusiness» should make for dissimilarity. But how is this alternative to be spelled out? I discuss a recent proposal: include special science laws, among them the laws of thermodynamics. Although the proposal fails, it serves to uncover the limits of Elga's example

McDowell und das Regelfolgenproblem

John McDowell hat eine einflussreiche Interpretation von Wittgensteins Überlegungen zum Regelfolgen vorgelegt. Wenn Regeln einer Interpretation bedürfen, bricht die Unterscheidung von richtigen und falschen Anwendungen zusammen, denn jede Anwendung lässt sich durch eine geeignete Interpretation mit der Regel in Einklang bringen, es sei denn, man akzeptiert einen metaphysisch unattraktiven Platonismus. Wenn Regeln naturalistisch durch bloße Verhaltensregularitäten rekonstruiert werden, geht der normative Begriff der Richtigkeit verloren. Nach McDowells Überzeugung kann nur die Auffassung, Regeln würden von einer Praxis getragen, die einem direkten Zugang zu ihnen ermöglicht, dieses Problem lösen. Es soll untersucht werden, ob er damit Wittgenstein gerecht wird, und inwieweit er eine haltbare Position bietet

‘Mais la fantaisie est-elle un privilège des seuls poètes?’ Schlick on a ‘Sinnkriterium’ for Thought Experiments

Ever since the term ‘thought experiment’ was coined by Ørsted, philosophers have struggled with the question of how thought experiments manage to provide knowledge. Ernst Mach’s seminal contribution has eclipsed other approaches in the Austrian tradition. I discuss one of these neglected approaches. Faced with the challenge of how to reconcile his empiricist position with his use of thought experiments, Moritz Schlick proposed the following ‘Sinnkriterium’: a thought experiment is meaningful if it allows to answer a question under discussion by imagining the experiences that would confi rm that the thought experimental scenario is actual. I trace this view throughout three exemplary thought experiments of Schlick’s

Interpretive Charity and Content Externalism

Interpretive charity is an important principle in devising the content of propositional attitudes and their expression. I want to argue that it does not square well with externalism about content. Although my argument clearly also applies to a principle of maximizing truth (as it requires only the true belief - component of knowledge), I will focus my attention to Timothy Williamson’s more intriguing recent proposal of maximizing knowledge

Counterfactuals, Accessibility, and Comparative Similarity

Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno (2008) have defended the validity of counterfactual hypothetical syllogism (CHS) within the Stalnaker-Lewis account. Whenever the premisses of an instance of CHS are non-vacuosly true, a shift in context has occurred. Hence the standard counterexamples to CHS suffer from context failure. Charles Cross (2011) rejects this argument as irreconcilable with the Stalnaker-Lewis account. I argue against Cross that the basic Stalnaker-Lewis truth condition may be supplemented in a way that makes (CHS) valid. Yet pace Brogaard and Salerno, there are alternative ways of spelling out the basic truth condition which are standard in most debates; and given these ways, the counterexamples to CHS are successful

What Zif

In a series of articles, David Barnett (2006, 2009, 2010) has developed a general theory of conditionals. The grand aim is to reconcile the two main rivals: a suppositional and a truth-conditional view (Barnett 2006, 521). While I confine my critical discussion to counterfactuals, I will give some hints how they might spell trouble for his suppositional view in general

The Unthinkable, Might It Be?

A basic intuition about epistemic possibility is the following: It might be that p iff it is open whether p. The standard way of cashing out this intuition is: It might be that p iff it is reconcilable with one’s informational state that p. However, there are certain examples which point to a lacuna in this conception. They indicate that epistemic possibility is restricted to what one can conceive as an alternative, what one can have a cognitive attitude to