Deflationism and the Normativity of Truth

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Philosophical Studies, 112, 1: 47-67, 2003. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. Link active at time of submission. DOI: 10.1023/A:1022542710305Deflationist theories of truth, some critics have argued, fail to account for the normativity of truth. This is one of the more promising, if also more elusive, objections to deflationism. Here I will consider and answer a recent version of this objection offered by Huw Price (1998), which builds upon a version offered by Crispin Wright (1992)

Contextualism and Intellectualism

This is a preprint of an article published in Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 24, Issue 1, pages 383-405, December 2010. The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com doi: 10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00197.xThe main goal of this paper is to show that the common ground between Jason Stanley and Keith DeRose concerning contextualism against subject-sensitive invariantism, which is assumed in the literature generally, is a false assumption. If I am right about this, then one of the main motivations for accepting contextualism over SSI is undermined. This might seem to be good news for SSI. However, other key test cases provide motivations for contextualism, even once intellectualism is abandoned. In fact, I will argue that anti-intellectualist contextualism is not merely a coherent possibility but that it has distinct advantages over SSI

Defeating pragmatic encroachment?

This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath's argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two ways to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the "risky" action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Memory and Epistemic Conservatism

This is a preprint of an article published in Synthese, Volume 157, Number 1, 1-24, 2007. http://www.springerlink.com/content/c13x216853307026/ doi:10.1007/s11229-006-0011-3. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. Links active at time of submission.We are all conservatives, at least when it comes to belief retention. We are forgetful, of course, but we typically do not abandon our beliefs unless we have special reasons to do so. Whichever view one takes of the psychology, an epistemological question arises: if a subject S believes that p, does the retention of that belief thereby have some positive epistemic status for S, at least prima facie? An epistemic conservative is someone who answers this question in the affirmative. In this paper, I will defend a form of conservatism about rational belief retention. I focus on rationality mainly for two reasons. First, this notion is regularly employed in ordinary epistemic evaluations of belief (arguably unlike justification). Second, rational belief retention does not require that one's belief be true, and so does not require knowledge, truth-tracking, safety, or other truth-entailing externalist statuses. Conservatism with respect to these statuses is a non-starter, at least under any reasonably narrow construal of the range of defeating conditions. I will argue that epistemic conservatism makes a good epistemology of memory. More particularly, I will argue, first, that the two standard accounts of the rationality of memory belief, preservationism and evidentialism, face insuperable problems, and second, that conservatism, properly honed, avoids those problems and incurs no unacceptable commitments. I make the case against the standard accounts in sections I and II, and defend conservatism against objections in section III. What will emerge is a moderate form of conservatism that is fundamentally an epistemological principle about memory

No objects, no problem?

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2005 ©Taylor & Francis; Australasian Journal of Philosophy is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0004-8402&volume=83&issue=4&spage=457. DOI 10.1080/00048400500338609One familiar form of argument for rejecting entities of a certain kind is that, by rejecting them, we avoid certain difficult problems associated with them. Such problem-avoidance arguments backfire if the problems cited 'survive' the elimination of the rejected entities. In particular, we examine one way problems can survive: a question for the realist about which of a set of inconsistent statements is false may give way to an equally difficult question for the eliminativist about which of a set of inconsistent statements fail to be 'factual'. Much of the first half of the paper is devoted to explaining a notion of factuality that does not imply truth but still consists in 'getting the world right'. The second half of the paper is a case study. Some 'compositional nihilists' have argued that, by rejecting composite objects (and so by denying the composition ever takes place), we avoid the notorious puzzles of coincidence, for example, the statue/lump and the ship of Theseus puzzles. Using the apparatus developed in the first half of the paper, we explore the question of whether these puzzles survive the elimination of composite objects

Conciliatory Metaontology and the Vindication of Common Sense

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2008.00688.xDate of publication unknownDate of publication unknownAny self-respecting ontologist worries on occasion, “are the disputes I engage in and spend my career thinking about verbal?” Conciliatory metaontologists answer in the affirmative, at least for many of the ontological disputes filling philosophy journals. Conciliators have recently gained some traction against their “fractious” opponents (e.g., Sider 2001, van Inwagen 2002), mainly through the work of Hilary Putnam and Eli Hirsch. The verbalness of a dispute is certainly a reason to bring the dispute to a halt, and would seem, prima facie, to be a reason to take all the sides to be on equal footing as far as the facts are concerned. So, if we came to conclude that ontological disputes were one and all verbal, we might understandably conclude that ontology is silly, a waste of time. It therefore behooves ontologists to take a hard look at the best arguments for conciliatory conclusions. And that is the aim of this paper. My focus will be Hirsch's recent work. This work deserves scrutiny not only because it contains some of the most promising arguments to date for conciliatory conclusions but also because of an interesting further consequence drawn from them. One might expect that in a verbal dispute either all sides win or none do. Hirsch thinks otherwise: the winning side, if any, is the side that speaks the truth in English, and this will be the side that speaks “ordinary language.” Conciliatory metaontology, in other words, is used to vindicate common sense. This claim would have surprised Carnap, and it may surprise many of us

Schellenberg on the epistemic force of experience

According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the ‘‘capacity view.’’ In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but non demonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing.PostprintPeer reviewe

Lynch on the value of truth

This is a penultimate draft; final version published by Blackwell Publishing in Philosophical Books 46.4, 302-310, October 2005. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.comFew of us will deny that if a person believes something false, then she is wrong or mistaken, and that if a person believes something true, she is right. If someone believes that p, and is true, then she is right about whether p; and if someone believes that p, and is false, then she is wrong about whether p. With a nod to Plato, we may ask whether propositions are true because people who believe them are right or whether people who believe them are right because what they believe is true. If propositions were true because people were right to believe them, then we would have the makings of a definition of truth in terms of rightness of belief. I take it that few of us would be happy saying that propositions are true because people who believe them are right. There is the obvious problem that there are true propositions no one believes. But it doesn't help to say that propositions are true because were people to believe them they would be right. Even aside from worries about conditional analyses in general (e.g., the conditional fallacy), this just sounds like it gets things backwards. is not true because of anything about actual or counterfactual people actually or possibly believing it and being right. Rather, people who believe are right because that proposition is true. So, because the order of explanation runs from truth to rightness of belief, rather than vice versa, there is no prospect of defining truth as rightness of belief. That does not mean, of course, that the link between truth and rightness of belief is without interest

Rea on Universalism

Final version published by Blackwell Publishing in Analysis 61.269,69-76, January 2001. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.comUniversalism is the thesis that, for any (material) things at any time, there is something they compose at that time. In McGrath (1998), I argued that, contrary Peter van Inwagen (1990), Universalism is compatible with common sense metaphysical facts such as these: that I am now composed of atoms, that I was ten years ago composed of different atoms, but that the atoms that composed me ten years ago still exist today. However, I insisted that the price of this union is the admission of pluralism about composition, i.e., the thesis that some composition is automatic while some is not. Such pluralism, when conjoined with Universalism and common sense metaphysics, entails the possibility, indeed the actuality, of co-location.Michael Rea (1999) agrees that Universalism is compatible with common sense metaphysics but denies that the Universalist needs to pay the price of co-location. Rea concludes that Universalists who deny co-location may reject the principle (P1), used in my argument: (P1)For any xs, if the xs automatically compose something at t, there is exactly one object they automatically compose at t, their sum. Rea, in effect, denies that 'automatically composing something' entails 'there being something automatically composed'. In this note, I will describe some of the problems that Universalists face by giving up (P1) and pursuing Rea's strategy instead

Propositions

This encyclopedia article explores the basics of what philosophers mean by the word 'proposition.' The term 'proposition' has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truth-value, the objects of belief and other "propositional attitudes" (i.e., what is believed, doubted, etc.), the referents of that-clauses, and the meanings of sentences