Modus Tonens

Restating an interlocutor’s position in an incredulous tone of voice can sometimes serve legitimate dialectical ends. However, there are cases in which incredulous restatement is out of bounds. This article provides an analysis of one common instance of the inappropriate use of incredulous restatement, which the authors call “modus tonens.” The authors argue that modus tonens is vicious because it pragmatically implicates the view that one’s interlocutor is one’s cognitive subordinate and provides a cue to like-minded onlookers that dialectical opponents are not to be treated as epistemic peers.

Contrastivism and Lucky Questions

There’s something deeply right in the idea that knowledge requires an ability to discriminate truth from falsity. Failing to incorporate some version of the discrimination requirement into one’s epistemology generates cases of putative knowledge that are at best problematic. On the other hand, many theories that include a discrimination requirement thereby appear to entail violations of closure. This prima facie tension is resolved nicely in Jonathan Schaffer’s contrastivism, which I describe herein. The contrastivist take on relevant alternatives is implausible, however, and this then threatens to undermine contrastivism’s anti-skeptical results.

Consciousness,self-consciousness,and meditation

Many spiritual traditions employ certain mental techniques (meditation) which consist in inhibiting mental activity whilst nonetheless remaining fully conscious, which is supposed to lead to a realisation of one’s own true nature prior to habitual self-substantialisation. In this paper I propose that this practice can be understood as a special means of becoming aware of consciousness itself as such. To explain this claim I conduct some phenomenologically oriented considerations about the nature of consciousness qua presence and the problem of self-presence of this presence.

Public and Private Meaning in Hume: Comments on Ted Morris’ “Meaningfulness without Metaphysics: Another Look at Hume’s Meaning-Empiricism”

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

Learning from Minimal Economic Models

It is argued that one can learn from minimal economic models. Minimal models are models that are not similar to the real world, do not resemble some of its features, and do not adhere to accepted regularities. One learns from a model if constructing and analysing the model affects one’s confidence in hypotheses about the world. Economic models, I argue, are often assessed for their credibility. If a model is judged credible, it is considered to be a relevant possibility. Considering such relevant possibilities may affect one’s confidence in necessity or impossibility hypotheses. Thus, one can learn from minimal economic models.

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Autonomy,Force and Cultural Plurality

Within now prolific debates surrounding the compatibility of feminism and multiculturalism in liberal societies, the need arises for a normative conception of women’s self-determination that does not violate the self-understandings or values of women of different backgrounds and forms of life. With reference to the recent British debate about forced marriage, this article proposes an innovative approach to this problem in terms of the idea of ‘plural autonomy’. While the capacity for autonomy is plural, in the sense of varying across cultures, autonomy in any world-view involves a capacity to ‘endorse’ one’s decisions in certain crucial spheres of life. Non-endorsement, coercion or force occurs if one risks being alienated from the (cultural) goods and relationships that structure one’s capacity to act in the world. This approach counsels more caution than prominent liberal approaches with respect to negotiating the contested boundary between freedom and force in a diverse society.

Credible Worlds, Capacities and Mechanisms

This paper asks how, in science in general and in economics in particular, theoretical models aid the understanding of real-world phenomena. Using specific models in economics and biology as test cases, it considers three alternative answers: that models are tools for isolating the ‘capacities’ of causal factors in the real world; that modelling is ‘conceptual exploration’ which ultimately contributes to the development of genuinely explanatory theories; and that models are credible counterfactual worlds from which inductive inferences can be made. The paper argues that the ‘credible worlds’ account captures significant aspects of scientific practice, even if many modellers see their work as conceptual exploration.

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The apparent truth of dualism and the uncanny body

It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not capture the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered.

Holding One’s Own

There is a tension with regard to regulative norms of inquiry. One’s commitments must survive critical scrutiny, and if they do not survive, they should be revised. Alternately, for views to be adequately articulated and defended, their proponents must maintain a strong commitment to the views in question. A solution is proposed with the notion of holding one’s own as the virtue of being reason-responsive with the prospects of improving the view in question.

Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’

Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha.

Was Kant a nonconceptualist?

I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

Iterated Belief Revision

This is a discussion of the problem of extending the basic AGM belief revision theory to iterated belief revision: the problem of formulating rules, not only for revising a basic belief state in response to potential new information, but also for revising one’s revision rules in response to potential new information. The emphasis in the paper is on foundational questions about the nature of and motivation for various constraints, and about the methodology of the evaluation of putative counterexamples to proposed constraints. Some specific constraints that have been proposed are criticized. The paper emphasizes the importance of meta-information—information about one’s sources of information—and argues that little of substance can be said about constraints on iterated belief revision at a level of abstraction that lacks the resources for explicit representation of meta-information.

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Towards a semantics for biscuit conditionals

This essay proposes a semantic analysis of biscuit-conditionals, such as Austin’s classic example “there are biscuits in the cupboard if you want some”. The analysis is grounded on the ideas of contextual restrictions, and of non-character encoded aspects of meaning, and provides a rigorous framework for the widespread intuitions that (i) the if-clause in a biscuit-conditional is truth-conditionally idle, but (ii) it ‘qualifies’ the speech-act in question. In the concluding section of this essay, the analysis is also applied to the importantly similar phenomenon of speech-act adverbs.

Wittgenstein on Meaning and Life

This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.

Negative Actions

Some philosophers have argued that refraining from performing an action consists in actively keeping oneself from performing that action or preventing one’s performing it. Since activities must be held to be positive actions, this implies that negative actions are a species of positive actions which is to say that all actions are positive actions. I defend the following claims:

Concerning the Preservation of God’s Omnipotence

Numerous examples have been offered that purportedly show that God cannot be omnipotent. I argue that a common response to such examples (i.e., that failure to do the impossible does not indicate a lack of power) does not preserve God’s omnipotence in the face of some of these examples. I consider another possible strategy for preserving God’s omnipotence in the face of these examples and find it wanting.

A Further Reply to Beyer on Omniscience

I provide a further response to Jason A. Beyer’s objections to the alleged inconsistency between God’s omniscience and His other attributes.

Confusion of Tongues: Christian Discipleship and the Problem of Patriotism

This article addresses the dynamics of faith manifested in Christian discipleship and patriotism. Exploration of the dynamics of faith, whether in Christian or patriotic discipleship, involves identifying the nature of the object of devotion and concomitant expectations of one’s relationship vis-à-vis the object. From this exploration, various contradictions between Christian and patriotic discipleship are identified. To resolve cognitive dissonance or smooth over contradictions, Christian patriots employ several psychosocial strategies, namely, merger, weak dissociation, rationalization, and denial.

A strange hand: On self-recognition and recognition of another

This article provides a phenomenological analysis of the difference between self-recognition and recognition of another, while referring to some contemporary neuroscientific studies on the rubber hand illusion. It examines the difference between these two forms of recognition on the basis of Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work. It argues that both phenomenologies, despite their different views on inter-subjectivity, allow for the specificity of recognition of another. In explaining self-recognition, however, Husserl’s account seems less convincing. Research concerning the rubber hand illusion has confirmed that self-recognition involves more than an immediate experience of oneself. Merleau-Ponty’s later work, describing self-recognition as the result of assimilative identification, will be used to explain the possibility of illusion between one’s “hereness” and “thereness”. The possibility of this illusion is inherent to self-recognition, while it is lacking in recognition of another.

Bestowal Without Appraisal: Problems in Frankfurt’s Characterization of Love and Personal Identity

Harry Frankfurt characterizes love as “a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it.” As such, he views romantic love as an inauthentic paradigm for love since such love desires reciprocation, sexual gratification and so on. I argue that Frankfurt’s conception of love is (a) too general—he does not distinguish between the type of love one has for one’s partner, one’s country, a moral ideal, etc., (b) it overemphasizes the role of bestowal at the expense of the part played by appraisal and (c) it is insufficiently social. Certain forms of love, romantic love and friendship for instance, are defined largely in terms of reciprocation. For Frankfurt, reciprocation is somewhat of an accidental feature of love. This deficiency in Frankfurt’s conception of love can be traced to a problem in his conception of selfhood which I argue is insufficiently social in nature.