The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience

Philosoph

Particular Reasons

Moral particularists argue that because reasons for action are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest in ethics for true and exceptionless moral principles is hopelessly misguided. In making this claim, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative properties and relations. They then argue that there is no cashing out in finite terms either (i) when a given non-normative feature gives rise to a reason for or against action, or (ii) how the reasons that are present in a given context play off each other to determine one's overall duties. However, the conjunction of these two theses leaves particularists without a coherent notion of a reason for action: posit too much irreducible context-dependence in the behavior of reasons, and the reasons-based framework breaks down. One upshot is that the particularists' challenge to principle-based approaches to ethics has not, at present, been successfully made out; another upshot is that perhaps the best way to formulate that challenge involves renouncing the reasons-based framework all together.Philosoph

Luminosity Regained

The linchpin of Williamson (2000)'s radically externalist epistemological program is an argument for the claim that no non-trivial condition is luminous—that no non-trivial condition is such that whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know that it obtains. I argue that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument succeeds only if one assumes that, even in the limit of ideal reflection, the obtaining of the condition in question and one's beliefs about that condition can be radically disjoint from one another. However, no self-respecting defender of the luminosity of the mental would ever make such an assumption. Thus Williamson can only secure his controversial claims in epistemology by taking for granted certain equally controversial claims in the philosophy of mind. What emerges is that the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs.Philosoph

Gupta’s Gambit

After summarizing the essential details of Anil Gupta’s account of perceptual justification in his book Empiricism and Experience, I argue for three claims: (1) Gupta’s proposal is closer to rationalism than advertised; (2) there is a major lacuna in Gupta’s account of how convergence in light of experience yields absolute entitlements to form beliefs; and (3) Gupta has not adequately explained how ordinary courses of experience can lead to convergence on a commonsense view of the world.Philosoph

Quasi-Dependence

Quasi-realists aim to account for many of the trappings of metanormative realism within an expressivist framework. Chief among these is the realist way of responding to the Euthyphro dilemma: quasi-realists want to join realists in being able to say, "It’s not the case that kicking dogs is wrong because we disapprove of it. Rather, we disapprove of kicking dogs because it’s wrong." However, the standard quasi-realist way of explaining what we are up to when we assert the first of these two sentences rests on a mistaken identification of metaphysical dependence (or grounding) with counterfactual covariation. This chapter proposes a better way for expressivists to understand such sentences, on which they serve to express complex states of mind in which an attitude bears a relation of psychological dependence (or basing) to another state of mind. It is argued that this proposal is a natural, versatile, and fruitful approach for expressivists to take that helps them secure the first half of the Euthyphro contrast—but at the cost of making it difficult to see how expressivists can make sense of that contrast’s second half

Does Evolutionary Psychology Show That Normativity Is Mind-Dependent?

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? This chapter argues that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls “normative realism,” the chapter argues that there are two largely independent lines of argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it.Philosoph

Essays at the interface of ethics and epistemology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-138).This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the nature of normativity in ethics and epistemology, with an emphasis on insights that can be gleaned by comparing and contrasting debates within those two fields. In chapter 1, I consider particularism, a relatively recent view which holds that, because reasons for action and belief are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest for a general theory of what one ought to do or believe is doomed for failure. In making these claims, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative relations. However, I argue that the claims particularists make about the behavior of reasons undermines the very framework within which they make those claims, thus leaving them without a coherent notion of a reason for action or belief. Chapter 2 concerns a problem arising for certain theories that take the opposite extreme of particularism and posit a fully general theory of what one ought to believe or do. In the epistemic realm, one such theory is process reliabilism. A well-known difficulty for process reliabilism is the generality problem: the problem of determining how broadly or narrowly to individuate the process by which a given belief is formed. Interestingly, an exactly parallel problem faces one of the most dominant contemporary ethical theories, namely Kantianism. I show how, despite their seeming differences, process reliabilism and Kantianism possess a markedly similar structure, and then use this similarity in structure to assess the prospects that each has of ever solving its version of the generality problem.(cont.) Finally, in chapter 3, I consider a recent argument by Timothy Williamson that what it would be rational for one to do or believe is not luminous, in the following sense: it can be rational for one to do or believe something, without one's being in a position to know that it is. Careful attention to the details of Williamson's argument reveals that he can only establish this limit to our knowledge by taking for granted certain controversial claims about the limits of belief.by A. Selim Berker.Ph.D