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This paper takes an ontological approach to the subject of promising. Setting aside the typical concern over promissory obligations, I draw on recent work from the field of social ontology and develop a promissory schema that characterizes the functional role the practice of promising plays in our lives. This schema, put in terms of one agent's voluntary and intentional attempts to provide another...
Internalists and externalists fundamentally disagree about how moral judgments motivate. Internalists think that morally good people should have de re desires to do right things, and agents who are motivated by the de dicto desire to do whatever is right are moral fetishists. In contrast, externalists accept that morally good people can have both the relevant de re and de dicto desires. My aim is...
Not only is the common‐law standard of proof of mere likelihood in ordinary civil cases justifiable, but its justifiability supports the conclusion that there is no general norm that one must assert that p only if p is known. An argument by Voltaire is formalized to show that the mere likelihood standard is rational. It is also shown that no applicable norm preempts the common‐law rule. An objection...
According to a currently popular view within the camp of knowledge lovers, knowledge is the norm of (full) belief. It says that no‐one should believe p without knowing that p, and thus governs the state of belief; it is a static norm. I will argue that we need an additional, structurally different knowledge norm in order to cover cases in which a subject is such that she ought to start forming a belief...
Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. On its ‘broad‐spectrum’ version, it is expected to be appropriately applicable to any of our representation‐involving cognitive activities, with major consequences for our whole cognitive life. This paper is about the theoretical foundations of conceptual engineering thus characterised. With a view to ensuring...
According to an influential tradition in speech act theory, it takes more than linguistic mastery and normative entitlement to do things with words; one's words must also be given a suitable reception or social uptake. Working within this tradition, I identify and characterize the phenomenon of discursive paternalism. Discursive paternalism occurs when a party to a speaker's act takes control of the...
This paper considers the kind of control we exercise over hope. In doing so, we situate our discussion against the backdrop of the growing literature on hope's nature. Several important analyses of hope have the implication that, once the relevant desires and beliefs for hope are present, an agent can (sometimes) directly control whether they hope. But we argue against the possibility of direct control...
According to moral error theory, there are no ethical facts. Error theorists often defend this view with the metaphysical argument from queerness. This argument purports to show that it is most reasonable to believe that ethical facts do not exist, because such facts are metaphysically queer and explanatorily redundant. This paper argues that even if we assume that ethical facts are metaphysically...
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