Two Kinds of Commitments (And Two Kinds of Social Groups)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.     

Two Kinds of Unknowing

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non‐dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.     

Two Kinds of Stakes

I distinguish two different kinds of practical stakes associated with propositions. The W‐stakes (world) track what is at stake with respect to whether the proposition is true or false. The A‐stakes (attitude) track what is at stake with respect to whether an agent believes (or relies on) the proposition. This poses a dilemma for those who claim that whether a proposition is known can depend on the stakes associated with it. Only the W‐stakes reading of this view preserves intuitions about knowledge‐attributions, but only the A‐stakes reading preserves the putative link between knowledge and practical reasoning that has motivated it.     

Two Kinds of Learning

Episodic analysis is the separation of a novel into its component episodes —i.e., into short stories each of which has a unitary theme—in order to provide equivalent units for content analysis. Independent coders show two types of disagreement. Neither is serious for content analysis, and both may be minimized by some suggested ground rules. In a study of 13 stylistically different books, intercoder reliability ranged from 76% to 94%. Variations in accuracy were clearly related to literary style. Relevant information on the coding process and reliability, as well as data on the number and length of episodes in the 13 books, are given in tabular form. Problems connected with reliable coding are discussed and some solutions are suggested.     

Two Kinds of Time-Consciousness and Three Kinds of Content

This paper explores the distinction between perceiving an object as extended in time, and experiencing a sequence of perceptions. I argue that this distinction cannot be adequately described by any present theory of time-consciousness and that in order to solve the puzzle, we need to consider perceptual content as having three distinct constituents: Explicit content, which has a particular phenomenal character, modal content, or the kind of content that is contributed by the psychological mode, and implicit content, which lacks phenomenal character. These notions are then further clarified and related to each other.     

The Self-Knowledge Gambit

If we hold that perceiving is sufficient for knowing, we can raise a powerful objection to dreaming skepticism: Skeptics assume the implausible KK-principle, because they hold that if we don’t know whether we are dreaming or perceiving p, we don’t know whether p. The rejection of the KK-principle thus suggests an anti-skeptical strategy: We can sacrifice some of our self-knowledge—our second-order knowledge—and thereby save our knowledge of the external world. I call this strategy the Self-Knowledge Gambit. I argue that the Self-Knowledge Gambit is not satisfactory, because the dreaming skeptic can avail herself of a normative counterpart to the KK-principle: When we lack second-order knowledge, we should suspend our first-order beliefs and thereby give up any first-order knowledge we might have had. The skeptical challenge is essentially a normative challenge, and one can raise it even if one rejects the KK-Principle.     

Two Kinds of Role Property

The realization relation is commonly explicated via, or identified with, the causal role playing relation. However, the realization relation does not formally match the causal role playing relation. While realization is a relation between a base realizer property and a single higher level realized property, I argue that the causal role playing relation as typically defined is a relation between a base property and two higher-level role properties. Advocates of using causal role playing to explicate realization must therefore decide which of the two kinds of role property they identify with realized properties; I argue that neither choice is good, and the fact that one must make a choice is worse. A search for a new way of defining realization is in order.     

Two Kinds of Organic Unity

This paper distinguishes two interpretations of G. E. Moore's principle of organic unities, which says that the intrinsic value of a whole need not equal the sum of the intrinsic values its parts would have outside it. A holistic interpretation, which was Moore's own, says that parts retain their values when they enter a whole but that there can be an additional value in the whole as a whole that must be added to them. The conditionality interpretation, which has been defended by Korsgaard, says that parts can change their values when they enter wholes, so no additional value is needed. The paper shows that the two interpretations, which differ on such apparently important issues as the nature of intrinsic value, can always yield the same conclusions about the overall value in a state of affairs, so there is in that sense nothing to choose between them. At the same time, though, the differences between the interpretations make sometimes one and sometimes the other more appropriate for expressing a given evaluative view. In this last connection the paper considers views about beauty, posthumous achievement, vices of disproportion, deserved and compassionate pain, and undeserved and malicious pleasure.     

Two Kinds of Purposive Action

It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained by impersonal facts, such as facts about how things should be or have been historically (e.g. Millikan, Stout). Others claim that actions are explained by mental states, such as beliefs and desires (e.g. Davidson, Velleman). These philosophers are usually regarded as offering conflicting accounts of one thing. However, they are best understood as giving accounts of different models of action-explanation. Neither model fits every case, so there are at least two kinds of purposive action.     

Two Kinds of Mental Realism

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict.     

Two Kinds of Feminist Philosophy

This article makes a distinction between two kinds of feminist philosophy. One looks ‘up’ to the realm of philosophy and aims to intervene in this realm in order to make it feminist. The other looks ‘down’ to the world of human experience and aims to make it feminist. This article argues that feminist philosophers’ efforts are better spent on the second kind of feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy can better achieve its aims by applying philosophy to the critical analysis of women's lives and gender norms, rather than by attempting to change the discipline of philosophy itself.     

Infallibilism about Self-Knowledge

Descartes held the view that a subject has infallible beliefs about the contents of her thoughts. Here, I first examine a popular contermporary defense of this claim, given by Burge, and find it lacking. I then offer my own defense appealing to a minimal thesis about the compositionality of thoughts. The argument has the virtue of refraining from claims about whether thoughts are “in the head;” thus, it is congenial to both internalists and externalists. The considerations here also illuminate how a subject may have epistemicially priviledged and a priori beliefs about her own thoughts.     

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view.     

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.     

Two Kinds of Consequential Implication

The first section of the paper establishes the minimal properties of so-called consequential implication and shows that they are satisfied by at least two different operators of decreasing strength (symbolized by \(\rightarrow \) and \(\Rightarrow \)). Only the former has been analyzed in recent literature, so the paper focuses essentially on the latter. Both operators may be axiomatized in systems which are shown to be translatable into standard systems of normal modal logic. The central result of the paper is that the minimal consequential system for \(\Rightarrow \), CI\(\Rightarrow \), is definitionally equivalent to the deontic system KD and is intertranslatable with the minimal consequential system for \(\rightarrow \), CI. The main drawback ot the weaker operator \(\Rightarrow \) is that it lacks unrestricted contraposition, but the final section of the paper argues that \(\Rightarrow \) has some properties which make it a valuable alternative to \(\rightarrow \), turning out especially plausible as a basis for the definition of operators representing synthetic (i.e. context-dependent) conditionals.