On Justification,Idealization, and Discursive Purchase

Philosophia - Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what...     

Justification Incorporated: a Discursive Approach to Corporate Responsibility

Contrasting two standard models of corporate responsibility—the so-called “collectivist” and “individualist” model—this essay proposes a third option, namely, a discursive conception of responsibility and examines whether and how this conception can be applied to the corporate level. It does so by taking a careful look at one of the preconditions of individual discursive responsibility, i.e. discursive practical reason, and discussing how corporate agents can meet this precondition. Building on this new concept, the essay also offers a novel approach to justifying corporate responsibility by referring to an argument advanced by Rainer Forst stating that a fundamental human right to justification is the normative core of any kind of responsibility and combining it, in a second step, with an argument recently proposed by Philip Pettit and Christian List showing the impossibility of forming consistent group attitudes and beliefs as a function of the attitudes and beliefs of individual group members. Finally, this essay outlines certain preliminary conclusions about the incorporation of responsibility in a corporate context.     

Anti-Individualism, Conceptual Omniscience, and Skepticism

Given anti-individualism, a subjectmight have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking thatp, have complete and exhaustiveexplicational knowledge of all of the conceptscomposing the content that p, and yetstill need empirical information (e.g.regarding her embedding conditions and history)prior to being in a position to apply herexhaustive conceptual knowledge in aknowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed byanti-individualists: it squares with everythingthat compatibilist-minded anti-individualistshave said regarding e.g. the compatibility ofanti-individualism and basic self-knowledge;and more importantly it contains the crux of aresponse to McKinsey-style arguments againstanti-individualism.     

内容外在论与辩护内在论

20世纪的哲学出现了多种形式的外在论.它们带来了难以估量的思想冲击.本文侧重于讨论内容外在论对知识论的影响.这种影响是双面的.一方面,内容外在论的确排除了某些形式的辩护内在论.另一方面,它又可以用来改良辩护内在论,从而形成一种更为可取的内在论知识论.笔者以博格西安的自我知识论证、邦约尔的不可达及论证和伯奇的知觉资证理论为例说明了这一点.笔者的结论是,知识论的辩护理论不但可以,而且应该容纳心灵哲学的外在论.     

Memory, Anaphora, and Content Preservation

Tyler Burge defends the idea that memory preserves beliefswith their justifications, so that memory's role in inferenceadds no new justificatory demands. Against Burge's view,Christensen and Kornblith argue that memory is reconstructiveand so introduces an element of a posteriori justificationinto every inference. I argue that Burge is right,memory does preserve content, but to defend this viewwe need to specify a preservative mechanism. Toward thatend, I develop the idea that there is something worthcalling anaphoric thinking, which preserves content inBurge's sense of ``content preservation.' I providea model on which anaphoric thought is a fundamentalfeature of cognitive architecture, consequentlyrejecting the idea that there are mental pronounsin a Language of Thought. Since preservativememory is a matter of anaphoric thinking, thereare limits on the analogy of memory and testimony.     

Global Supervenience, Coincident Entities and Anti-Individualism

Theodore Sider distinguishes two notions of global supervenience: strong global supervenience and weak global supervenience. He then discusses some applications to general metaphysical questions. Most interestingly, Sider employs the weak notion in order to undermine a familiar argument against coincident distinct entities. In what follows, I reexamine the two notions and distinguish them from a third, intermediate, notion (intermediate global supervenience). I argue that (a) weak global supervenience is not an adequate notion of dependence; (b) weak global supervenience does not capture certain assumptions about coincidence relations; (c) these assumptions are better accommodated by the stronger notion of intermediate global supervenience; (d) intermediate global supervenience, however, is also not an adequate notion of dependence; and (e) strong global supervenience is an adequate notion of dependence. It also fits in with anti-individualism about the mental. It does not, however, serve to rebut arguments against coincident entities.     

Content Externalism and the Internalism/Externalism Debate in Justification Theory

While recent debates over content externalism have been mainly concerned with whether it undermines the traditional thesis of privileged self-knowledge, little attention has been paid to what bearing content externalism has on such important controversies as the internalism/externalism debate in epistemology. With a few exceptions, the question has either been treated as a side issue in discussions concerning the implications of content externalism, or has been dealt with in a cursory way in debates over the internalism/externalism distinction in justification theory. In this paper, I begin by considering some of the arguments that have sought to address the question, focusing mainly on Boghossian's pioneering attempt in bringing the issue to the fore.¹ It will be argued that Boghossian's attempt to exploit the alleged non-inferentiality of self-knowledge to show that content externalism and justification internalism are incompatible fails.
In the course of this examination, I consider and reject as inadequate some recent responses to Boghossian's argument (due to James Chase²). I then turn to evaluating Chase's own proposed argument to show how content externalism can be brought to bear on the internalism/externalism debate in epistemology, and find it wanting. Finally, having discussed BonJour's terse remarks in this connection,³ I set out to present, what I take to be, the strongest argument for the incompatibility of content externalism and justification internalism while highlighting the controversial character of one of its main premises. Let us, however, begin by drawing the contours of the debate.     

Justification,knowledge, and normality

There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith in Between probability and certainty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016; Goodman and Salow in Philosophical Studies 175: 183–196, 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. Such cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or to externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on knowledge, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification that depends directly upon normality.

     

Justification,sociality, and autonomy

Theories of epistemically justified belief have long assumed individualism. In its extreme, or Lockean, form individualism rules out justified belief on testimony by insisting that a subject is justified in believing a proposition only if he or she possesses first-hand justification for it. The skeptical consequences of extreme individualism have led many to adopt a milder version, attributable to Hume, on which a subject is justified in believing a proposition only if he or she is justified in believing that there is testimony in favor of the proposition deriving from a reliable source. I argue that this Humean individualism also leads to skepticism in a wide range of cases; it makes it impossible for a layperson to be justified on expert testimony. In addition, I argue that the apparent motivation for the Humean view, an insistence on intellectual autonomy in justification, does not succeed in motivating it. I then explore the contours of a collectivist view of justification on testimony, with special attention to the place of a subject's intellectual autonomy in such justification. I try to bring empirical results of the psychology of persuasion to bear on the epistemological issues.     

Performative Force,Convention, and Discursive Injustice

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.     

Justification,Attachments and Regret

Abstract: In The View From Here, Jay Wallace emphasises that an agent's capacity to regret a past decision is conditioned by the attachments that she may have developed as a result. Those attachments shape the point of view from which she retrospectively deliberates. Wallace stresses, however, that not every normative aspect of her decision is affected by this change in perspective, because her decision will remain as unjustified as it was in the past. I will argue, however, that this approach to justification is inconsistent with the normative import that Wallace ascribes to the actual dynamics of our attachments in his defence of the rationale of regret. If I am right, Wallace's approach is caught in the following dilemma: Either he renounces a nonperspectival approach to justification or he revises his view about the normative import of the actual dynamics of our attachments.