Mechanism, Truth, and Penrose's New Argument

Sections 3.16 and 3.23 of Roger Penrose's Shadows of the mind (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994) contain a subtle and intriguing new argument against mechanism, the thesis that the human mind can be accurately modeled by a Turing machine. The argument, based on the incompleteness theorem, is designed to meet standard objections to the original Lucas–Penrose formulations. The new argument, however, seems to invoke an unrestricted truth predicate (and an unrestricted knowability predicate). If so, its premises are inconsistent. The usual ways of restricting the predicates either invalidate Penrose's reasoning or require presuppositions that the mechanist can reject.     

Believing at Will is Possible

There are convincing counter-examples to the widely accepted thesis that we cannot believe at will. For it seems possible that the truth of a proposition depend on whether or not one believes it. I call such scenarios cases of Truth Depends on Belief (TDB) and I argue that they meet the main criteria for believing at will that we find in the literature. I reply to five objections that one might level against the thesis that TDB cases show that believing at will is possible, namely that (1) mind-reading is impossible, (2) in TDB cases, one's belief is caused by one's desire, (3) in TDB scenarios, one chooses not a belief but something else, (4) TDB cases are reducible to Feldman cases, and that (5) if truth depends on belief, we are on the road to a regress. Of course, TDB scenarios hardly, if ever, occur in real life. For three reasons, they are nonetheless important. First, they show that the thesis that it is conceptually impossible to believe at will is simply false. Second, they provide us with an important constraint on any version of the thesis that it is psychologically impossible to believe at will. Third, they show us that, contrary to what several philosophers claim or imply, believing at will should not be identified with believing irrespective of—what one considers to be—the truth, nor should believing irrespective of the truth be considered a necessary condition for believing at will.     

On Tugendhat's Analysis of Heidegger's Concept of Truth

This paper responds to Tugendhat's well‐known and influential critique of Heidegger's concept of truth with the resources of Heidegger's texts, in particular §44 of Being and Time. To start with, Tugendhat's primary critical argument is reconstructed. It is held to consist firstly in the charge of ambiguity against Heidegger's formulations of his concept of truth and secondly in the claim that Heidegger's concept of truth is incompatible with an adequate concept of falsehood. It is shown that the supposedly ambiguous meanings are, on the one hand, in fact clearly distinguished by Heidegger and, on the other, that they merely amount to different extensions of the same meaning of truth. It is then shown how this concept of truth is indeed compatible with an adequate, albeit post‐metaphysical, concept of falsehood. Finally, the grounds of falsehood in the untruth of the existential of Verfallen are pursued and further objections are dismissed.     

Prospects for Peircean Truth

Peircean Truth (PT) is the view that truth is in some sense epistemically constrained, constrained that is by what we would, if we inquired long enough and well enough, eventually come to believe. Contemporary Peirceans offer various different formulations of the view, which can make it difficult, particularly for critics, to see exactly how PT differs from popular alternatives such as correspondence theories or deflationism. This article, therefore, considers four possible formulations of PT, and sets out the different objections and challenges they each face and their relationships with one another. I focus upon the question of what, if anything, PT has to say about the property of truth.     

A DEFENSE OF BUDDHISM,MEDITATION, AND FREE WILL: A THEORY OF MENTAL FREEDOM

This is my response to the criticisms of Gregg Caruso, David Cummiskey, and Karin Meyers, in their roles as members of the “Author Meets Critics” panel devoted to my book, Buddhism, Meditation, and Free Will: A Theory of Mental Freedom at the 2019 annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, organized by Christian Coseru. Caruso's main objection is that I am not sufficiently attentive to details of opposing arguments in Western philosophy, and Cummiskey's and Meyers’ objections, similarly, are that I am insufficiently attentive to details of Buddhism. I argue that all such objections, however putatively correct, do not rise to the level of objections that actually undermine my account of mental freedom.     

Ability,Foreknowledge, and Explanatory Dependence

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism.     

Charles Darwin: Continuity,Teleology and Ideology

Climate change has mutated from being a physical phenomenon to be studied to an idea to be contested. The sites of adjudication between competing truth claims have therefore moved from the secluded academy and scientific peer review to the vociferous agora and the extended peer community. This move is illustrated here using the case of the shrinking glaciers of Mt Kilimanjaro. Both the British engineer Guy Callendar, in 1944, and the American campaigner Al Gore, in 2006, claimed that the primary cause of this glacial recession was rising world temperature. Both were passionate believers in the reality of human-induced global warming, but they had very different resources at their disposal to advance these beliefs. While Callendar's claim was revealed only to the editor of the science journal Nature, Gore's claims were visible to millions through his film An Inconvenient Truth. While the force of Callendar's claim was weighed and adjudicated by one peer reviewer, the validity of Gore's claim was tested very publicly in the British courts. Both claims about the cause of Kilimanjaro's retreating glaciers were found wanting. The paper argues that this simple, but powerful, comparison between identical claims-making drawn from two different eras of science, yet with contrasting processes of truth-adjudication, illuminates the different ‘post-normal’ world of science climate change now inhabits. The case study is used to reflect on the role of the extended peer community in establishing and validating scientific knowledge about climate change: who participates, how trust is stabilised and whether science is thereby democratised.     

Heidegger on Plato,truth, and unconcealment: The 1931–32 lecture on The Essence of Truth

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931–32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage‐setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more‐famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world‐disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self‐evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato.     

Why Naturalism?

My goal in this paper is to explain what ethical naturalism is, to locate the pivotal issue between naturalists and non-naturalists, and to motivate taking naturalism seriously. I do not aim to establish the truth of naturalism nor to answer the various familiar objections to it. But I do aim to motivate naturalism sufficiently that the attempt to deal with the objections will seem worthwhile. I propose that naturalism is best understood as the view that the moral properties are natural in the sense that they are empirical. I pursue certain issues in the understanding of the empirical. The crux of the matter is whether any synthetic proposition about the instantiation of a moral property is strongly a priori in that it does not admit of empirical evidence against it. I propose an argument from epistemic defeaters that, I believe, undermines the plausibility of a priorism in ethics and supports the plausibility of naturalism.     

Pragmatism and revisionism: James's conception of truth

Abstract

The paper argues that James's conception of truth is non‐revisionist, that is, it sanctions common use of the notion of truth, but criticizes foundation‐alist philosophical accounts of that notion. This interpretation conflicts with traditional interpretations of James such as Russell's and Moore's, and contemporary interpretations such as Dummett's, all of which are revisionist. To the extent that objections raised against James's pragmatism depend on such revisionist reading, this paper constitutes a defence of James. The paper argues, further, that non‐revisionism distinguishes James from logical positivism and contemporary verificationism, and that James seeks to defend rather than renounce metaphysics. On this issue the paper disagrees with Rorty, who ascribes to James an extreme anti‐metaphysical stance.     

On the alleged normative significance of a platitude

It seems to be a platitude that the belief that p is correct iff it is true that p. And the claim that truth is the correct‐making feature of belief seems to be just another way of expressing this platitude. It is often thought that this indicates that truth constitutes a normative standard or criterion of correctness for belief because it seems to follow from this platitude that having a false belief is believing wrongly, and having a true belief is believing rightly or correctly. In this paper, I aim to show that when we judge the platitude in question to be indisputably true, we do not endorse that truth is normative for belief but merely the triviality that the belief that p is true iff it is true that p.     

How Truth Behaves When There’s No Vicious Reference

In The Revision Theory of Truth (MIT Press), Gupta and Belnap (1993) claim as an advantage of their approach to truth “its consequence that truth behaves like an ordinary classical concept under certain conditions—conditions that can roughly be characterized as those in which there is no vicious reference in the language.” To clarify this remark, they define Thomason models, nonpathological models in which truth behaves like a classical concept, and investigate conditions under which a model is Thomason: they argue that a model is Thomason when there is no vicious reference in it. We extend their investigation, considering notions of nonpathologicality and senses of “no vicious reference” generated both by revision theories of truth and by fixed-point theories of truth. We show that some of the fixed-point theories have an advantage analogous to that which Gupta and Belnap claim for their approach, and that at least one revision theory does not. This calls into question the claim that the revision theories have a distinctive advantage in this regard.     

Language,Ontology, and Metaphysics

Thomas Hofweber's Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics is ambitious, thought‐provoking, and a good read. It expands upon a project he's developed in several previous papers—a project that seamlessly weaves together both metaphysics and metametaphysics. The book is as much about methodology as it is about the substantive conclusions he draws about what there is. As a consequence, it is a long book that covers a lot of ground. Since I cannot do justice to all of it, I hope my fellow symposiasts will take up parts of the book that I neglect. There is a lot of good stuff in there.     

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, owing primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which—according to them—moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or—as it is sometimes put—what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties.     

Truth in Fiction,Impossible Worlds,and Belief Revision

We present a theory of truth in fiction that improves on Lewis's [1978] ‘Analysis 2’ in two ways. First, we expand Lewis's possible worlds apparatus by adding non-normal or impossible worlds. Second, we model truth in fiction as (make-believed) belief revision via ideas from dynamic epistemic logic. We explain the major objections raised against Lewis's original view and show that our theory overcomes them.     

Argumentation,epistemology and the sociology of language

Both the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science are centrally concerned with the succession of scientific beliefs. In case studies of scientific debates, however, the emphasis tends to be placed on the outcome of disputes. This paper proposes that attention should instead be focused on the process of debate: that is, on scientific argumentation. It is shown how such a focus circumvents many traditional epistemological problems concerning the truth-status of scientific knowledge. By reference to the consensus conception of truth, it is claimed that scientific arguments can be studied naturalistically whilst still honouring the orientation towards truth exhibited by scientists. Finally, the paper offers a brief résumé of recent studies indicating how this naturalistic study of scientific argumentation can be developed through the sociology of language.     

The True Wilkomirski

The paper considers whether it matters that Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments is not, as he presented it, a genuine survivor account, but rather a fabrication or fiction. It matters in one way and it doesn't in another. It matters because the truth is important: both in general and with regard specifically to the Holocaust. However, that Fragments is a fiction also doesn't matter, for it can be read independently of its author's identity; can be read as being, indeed, fiction. Read thus, the book retains much of its power and quality as a narrative of what the memories of a child survivor might be. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On Axiomatizing Shramko-Wansing’s Logic

This work treats the problem of axiomatizing the truth and falsity consequence relations, ⊨ _t and ⊨ _f , determined via truth and falsity orderings on the trilattice SIXTEEN ₃ (Shramko and Wansing, 2005). The approach is based on a representation of SIXTEEN ₃ as a twist-structure over the two-element Boolean algebra.