Acquaintance and first-person attitude reports

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought

Acts of desire

ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication

The Nyāya Argument for Disjunctivism

The Nyāya school of classical Indian epistemology defended (by today’s standards) a radical version of epistemic externalism. They also gave arguments from their epistemological positions to an early version of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. In this paper I assess the value of such an argument, concluding that a modified version of the Nyāya argument may be defensible

Phenomenal dispositions

In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p

Statistical methods for the identification and control of multivariate stochastic systems

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Studies on factors influencing the abundance and distribution of soil arthropods in grassland

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This Paper Might Change your Mind

Rational decision change can happen without information change. This is a problem for standard views of decision theory, on which linguistic intervention in rational decision-making is captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non-informational content - like epistemic modals - used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information change: replace a standard conception of value (on which the value of a set of worlds reduces to values of individual worlds in the set) with one on which the value of a set of worlds is determined by a selection function that picks out a generic member world. We discuss some upshots of this view for theorizing in philosophy and formal semantics

Tales from Wales show the challenges of COVID-19 and Brexit

Recently the rather unusual plans of a new entrant into automotive manufacturing –Ineos –to make SUVs in Wales have been paused (for which read almost certainly cancelled); shortly after this news came reports that a fledgling –but as yet not fully funded –British start-up, Britishvolt, would build a gigafactory for in Wales, near the new Aston Martin plant. One piece of bad news quickly followed by a piece of potentially good news.Maybe, or maybe not

No regulatory alignment with the EU: government policy becoming clear?

Speaking to the FT from a Westminster café, rather than the gilded rooms of the Treasury, Sajid Javid told UK businesses that they had had three years or more to prepare for leaving the EU so they should be ready for the UK to no longer follow EU rules.The country will no longer be a rule taker