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According to proper functionalist theories of warrant, a belief is warranted only if it is formed by cognitive faculties that are properly functioning according to a good, truth-aimed design plan, one that is often thought to be specified either by intentional design or by natural selection. A formidable challenge to proper functionalist theories is the Swampman objection, according to which there...
Traditional eliminativism is the view that a term should be eliminated from everyday speech due to failures of reference. Following Edouard Machery, we may distinguish this traditional eliminativism about a kind and its term from a scientific eliminativism according to which a term should be eliminated from scientific discourse due to a lack of referential utility. The distinction matters if any terms...
Conciliationism faces a challenge that has not been satisfactorily addressed. There are clear cases of epistemically significant merely possible disagreement, but there are also clear cases where merely possible disagreement is epistemically irrelevant. Conciliationists have not yet accounted for this asymmetry. In this paper, we propose that the asymmetry can be explained by positing a selection...
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Lange’s (Philos Stud 101:213–51, 2000) argument in support of Sellars’ scientific realism (i.e. against ’the layer-cake picture’ of theoretical explanation), which, if successful, surprisingly, undermines Sellars’ scientia mensura principle and justifies the anti-Sellarsian view to the effect that certain domains of discourse which use irreducibly normative...
The focus in the literature on scientific explanation has shifted in recent years towards model-based approaches. In recent work, Alisa Bokulich has argued that idealization has a central role to play in explanation. Bokulich claims that certain highly-idealized, structural models can be explanatory, even though they are not considered explanatory by causal, mechanistic, or covering law accounts of...
Coherence is the property of propositions hanging or fitting together. Intuitively, adding a proposition to a set of propositions should be compatible with either increasing or decreasing the set’s degree of coherence. In this paper we show that probabilistic coherence measures based on relative overlap are in conflict with this intuitive verdict. More precisely, we prove that (i) according to the...
An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists’ theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focused...
We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to $$\upvarphi $$ φ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact $$\upvarphi $$ φ is a way for them to $$\upvarphi $$ φ . These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief,...
The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: (a) that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and (b) that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses (a) and (b) are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them...
This paper sets out some new skeleton mathematically-couched models for dealing with supervenience in some, if not all, its many guises. Our models are based around a naïve invocation of a ‘topology’ induced on object sets by property sets. We have two aims: one is to provide an overview of supervenience with enough rigour and detail to act as a self-contained introduction to the subject; and the...
Color relationalism holds that the colors are constituted by relations to subjects. The introspective rejoinder against this view claims that it is opposed to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. The rejoinder seems to be correct about how colors appear when looking at how participants respond to an item about the metaphysical nature of color but not when looking at an item about the...
Pragmatic encroachment (PE) is the view that whether one knows a proposition is, at least in part, a function of one’s practical situation, such as the stakes given the truth or falsity of that proposition. PE seems to be entailed by a principle stating that properly treating a proposition as a reason for acting requires that one knows that proposition, combined with intuitive judgments that the epistemic...
This paper argues that the intentional actions of collective entities, such as corporations and agencies, are not necessarily joint intentional actions by several members of those collectives. I briefly summarize the social action theories of John Searle, Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and Seumas Miller, which I argue are all theories of joint action. I then describe a case based...
Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to introduce a formalization of preference utilitarianism in physical world models, specifically cellular automata. Even though our formalization is not immediately applicable,...
Ruetsche (Interpreting quantum theories, 2011) argues that a problem of unitarily inequivalent representations arises in quantum theories with infinitely many degrees of freedom. I provide an algebraic formulation of classical field theories and show that unitarily inequivalent representations arise there as well. I argue that the classical case helps us rule out one possible response to the problem...
I respond to the bad lot argument in the context of biological systematics. The response relies on the historical nature of biological systematics and on the availability of pattern explanations. The basic assumption of common descent enables systematic methodology to naturally generate candidate explanatory hypotheses. However, systematists face a related challenge in the issue of character analysis...
In this paper, I adopt the view that if general forces or processes can be detected in ecology, then the principles or models that represent them should provide predictions that are approximately correct and, when not, should lead to the sorts of intervening factors that usually make trouble. I argue that Lotka–Volterra principles do not meet this standard; in both their simple “strategic” and their...
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