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1.
Michael E. Levin 《Synthese》2007,155(1):35-64
It is argued that the intuition driving Kripke’s famous version of Wittgenstein’s meaning skepticism is precisely the one
that prompted Hume to despair of his bundle theory of the self: there are no necessary connections between distinct mental
states. This interpretation is shown to throw light on Wittgenstein’s notorious idea that all proofs “create concepts.”
Wittgenstein has invented a new form of skepticism. Personally I am inclined to regard it as the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to date[.] – Saul Kripke相似文献
2.
Ira M. Schnall 《Philosophical Studies》2010,150(2):271-283
David Widerker, long an opponent of Harry Frankfurt’s attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), has recently
come up with his own Frankfurt-style scenario which he claims might well be a counterexample to PAP. Carlos Moya has argued
that this new scenario is not a counterexample to PAP, because in it the agent is not really blameworthy, since he lacks weak
reasons-responsiveness (WRR), a property that John Fischer has argued is a necessary condition of practical rationality, and
hence of moral responsibility. I argue that in Widerker’s scenario the agent is indeed blameworthy, even though he lacks WRR;
and that therefore this scenario is a counterexample not only to PAP, but also to Fischer’s claim that WRR is necessary for
blameworthiness. 相似文献
3.
Peter Mark Ainsworth 《Synthese》2008,162(2):157-165
The past hypothesis is that the entropy of the universe was very low in the distant past. It is put forward to explain the
entropic arrow of time but it has been suggested (e.g. [Penrose, R. (1989a). The emperor’s new mind. London:Vintage Books; Penrose, R. (1989b). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 571, 249–264; Price, H. (1995). In S. F. Savitt (Ed.), Times’s arrows today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Price, H. (1996). Time’s arrow and Archimedes’ point. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Price, H. (2004). In C. Hitchcock (Ed.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of science. Oxford: Blackwell]) that it is itself in need of explanation. It has also been suggested that cosmic inflation could provide
the explanation, but Price (2004) raises a serious objection to this suggestion, which has otherwise received very little
attention in the philosophical literature. Price points out that the standard inflationary explanation involves a double standard:
although the evolution of the universe described by the inflationary model seems natural from the standard temporal perspective
it looks highly unnatural from the reversed temporal perspective. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a novel form
of the inflationary explanation that avoids this objection. It is argued that the inflationary model would not involve a double
standard (but would still explain the past hypothesis) if we construct the model with a global “boundary” condition instead
of a conventional boundary condition: if we assume that the universe is as generic as possible overall, rather than as generic
as possible at some given point (e.g. the Big Bang) as is assumed in the standard inflationary model. This novel form of the
inflationary explanation is then compared with Price’s 1996 preferred explanation, a version of the so-called “Weyl hypothesis”. 相似文献
4.
Steffen Ducheyne 《Journal for General Philosophy of Science》2009,40(2):227-258
In this essay, I attempt to assess Henk de Regt and Dennis Dieks recent pragmatic and contextual account of scientific understanding
on the basis of an important historical case-study: understanding in Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and Huygens’
reception of universal gravitation. It will be shown that de Regt and Dieks’ Criterion for the Intelligibility of a Theory
(CIT), which stipulates that the appropriate combination of scientists’ skills and intelligibility-enhancing theoretical virtues is a condition for scientific understanding, is too strong. On the basis of
this case-study, it will be shown that scientists can understand each others’ positions qualitatively and quantitatively,
despite their endorsement of different worldviews and despite their convictions as what counts as a proper explanation. 相似文献
5.
This study examined various hypotheses for facilitation on Wason’s four-card selection task by means of a factorial experiment.
The factors were memory cuing vs. nonmemory cuing content, violation vs. true-false instructions, and verbalization procedure.
The results indicated that memory cuing content may be a necessary and sufficient condition for facilitation, but that the
amount of facilitation is affected by the type of instructions. Verbalization procedure had no effects, but this may have
been due to the subjects’ failure to comply completely with the various verbalization instructions. An explanation of the
results that assumes that content and instructions determine the cognitive processing load of the task and hence the solution
strategies employed is considered.
This study is based on a master’s thesis completed by the first author under the second author’s supervision. 相似文献
6.
Keeley has recently argued that the philosophical issue of how to analyse the concept of a sense can usefully be addressed
by considering how scientists, and more specifically neuroethologists, classify the senses. After briefly outlining his proposal,
which is based on the application of an ordered set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for modality
differentiation, I argue, by way of two complementary counterexamples, that it fails to account fully for the way the senses
are in fact individuated in neuroethology and other relevant sciences. I suggest substantial modifications to Keeley’s account
which would both solve the problem cases and make better sense of the actual classifications made by scientists. I conclude
by noting some limits to the way of classifying the senses that I suggest. I conclude by suggesting that the problem I identify
in Keeley’s account has arisen from a confusion that sometimes arises in the philosophical literature between how we individuate
the senses and what constitutes a sense. 相似文献
7.
Steven Crowell 《Synthese》2008,160(3):335-354
This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of
semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how
the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that
is, how they can set up conditions of satisfaction or be responsive to norms such that they can succeed or fail at referring.
The standard representationalist view—which thinks of the problem in first-person terms—is contrasted with Brandom’s pragmatic
inferentialist approach, which adopts a third-person stance. The rest of the paper defends a phenomenological version of the
representationalist position (seeking to preserve its first-person stance) but offers a conception of representation that
does not identify it with an entity ‘in the head.’ The standard view of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist is undermined by
rejecting its fundamental assumption—that Husserl’s concept of the ‘noema’ is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of
‘phenomenological immanence’ that has a normative, rather than a psychological, structure. Finally, it is argued that phenomenological
immanence cannot be identified with ‘consciousness’ in Husserl’s sense, though consciousness is a necessary condition for
it. 相似文献
8.
Brindell S 《Science and engineering ethics》2000,6(3):351-364
‘Scientific integrity’ certainly requires that data and references be beyond reproach. However, issues within the theory of
scientific explanation suggest that there may be more to it than just this. While it is true that some contemporary, pragmatic
analyses of explanation suffer from the ‘problem of relevance’ (an inability to ensure that explanations which are paradigmatic
technically are relevant to the question being posed), it does not seem to be true that the addition of formal, metaphysical
constraints is necessary to solve this problem. I argue that, when viewed as requests for help with an epistemic problem, explanation-seeking questions reveal the existence of a set of moral criteria centered in trust which, when satisfied, prevent trivial or irrelevant explanations from being offered, thereby broadening the concept of ‘scientific
integrity’. 相似文献
9.
Luca Moretti 《Synthese》2012,184(3):217-234
Crispin Wright has given an explanation of how a first time warrant can fall short of transmitting across a known entailment.
Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper,
I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account respectively proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I argue that both
formalizations are unsatisfactory for different reasons, and I lay down a third Bayesian model that appears to me to capture
the valid kernel of Wright’s explanation. After this, I consider a recent development in Wright’s account of transmission
failure. Wright suggests that his condition sufficient for transmission failure of first time warrant also suffices for transmission
failure of supplementary warrant. I propose an interpretation of Wright’s suggestion that shields it from objections. I then
lay down a fourth Bayesian framework that provides a simplified model of the unified explanation of transmission failure envisaged
by Wright. 相似文献
10.
Greg Ray 《Journal of Philosophical Logic》2005,34(4):433-457
Alfred Tarski (1944) wrote that “the condition of the ‘essential richness’ of the metalanguage proves to be, not only necessary,
but also sufficient for the construction of a satisfactory definition of truth.” But it has remained unclear what Tarski meant
by an ‘essentially richer’ metalanguage. Moreover, DeVidi and Solomon (1999) have argued in this Journal that there is nothing that Tarski could have meant by that phrase which would make his pronouncement true.
We develop an answer to the historical question of what Tarski meant by ‘essentially richer’ and pinpoint the general result
that stands behind his essential richness claim. In defense of Tarski, we then show that each of the several arguments of
DeVidi and Solomon are either moot or mistaken.
One of the fruits of our investigation is the reclamation of what Tarski took to be his central result on truth. This is a
reclamation since: (i) if one does not understand ‘essential richness’, one does not know what that result is, and (ii) we
must unearth a heretofore unrecognized change that occurs in Tarski's view – an alteration of his main thesis in light of
a failing he discovered in it. 相似文献
11.
Peter W. Hanks 《Synthese》2007,154(1):121-146
In 1913 Wittgenstein raised an objection to Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment that eventually led Russell to
abandon his theory. As he put it in the Tractatus, the objection was that “the correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that
it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement,” (5.5422).
This objection has been widely interpreted to concern type restrictions on the constituents of judgment. I argue that this
interpretation is mistaken and that Wittgenstein’s objection is in fact a form of the problem of the unity of the proposition. 相似文献
12.
Alan Thomas 《Ethical Theory and Moral Practice》2011,14(2):151-167
This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity
threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the
best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by
the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge
model of justification. Secondly, the development of a theory of epistemic status and an explanation of those unearned entitlements
that accrue to such status. Thirdly, an explanation of the basis of epistemic virtues. Finally, an account must be given of
the executive capacity of rational decision itself as a ‘contentless ability’. This overall set of views can accommodate a
limited role for generalizations about categories of evidence, but not such as to rescue a principled generalism. In particular,
the version of particularism defended here explains why one ought not to accept the principled “holism” that has proved to
be a problem for Dancy’s form of particularism. Ethics certainly involves hedged principles. However, principles cannot be
self-hedging: there cannot be a “that’s it” operator in a principle as Richard Holton has claimed that there can be. Practical
reasoning is concluded by the categorical detachment of the action-as-conclusion itself. 相似文献
13.
The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature:
the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether
failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it. 相似文献
14.
Mark Bryant Budolfson 《Philosophical Studies》2011,153(2):243-259
Non-cognitivism might seem to offer a plausible account of evaluative judgments, at least on the assumption that there is
a satisfactory solution to the Frege–Geach problem. However, Cian Dorr has argued that non-cognitivism remains implausible
even assuming that the Frege–Geach problem can be solved, on the grounds that non-cognitivism still has to classify some paradigmatically
rational inferences as irrational. Dorr’s argument is ingenious and at first glance seems decisive. However, in this paper
I will show that Dorr’s argument equivocates between two different notions of evidence, and that once this equivocation is noted there is no reason to doubt that non-cognitivism is consistent with the rationality
of such inferences, at least if it is assumed that the Frege–Geach problem can be solved. In particular, I will show that
non-cognitivists can endorse the same explanation of the rationality of such inferences that cognitivists should endorse,
and that there is thus no need for non-cognitivists to offer any sort of idiosyncratic account of the epistemology of such
cases, in contrast to what other commentators on Dorr’s argument have thought. 相似文献
15.
Vasilis Tsompanidis 《Philosophia》2010,38(2):313-325
The aim of this paper is to defend a prototype B-theory answer to McTaggart’s Puzzle about Time. Smart hopes to solve the
issue by pointing to the “anthropocentricity” of temporal A-notions. There is one important problem: explaining Prior cases
(for instance being relieved that a painful experience is over) in B-theoretic terms. First, it is argued that the problem is how to explain the nature of the subject’s tensed belief in Prior cases; the essential indexicality of the concept ‘now’. Then it is suggested that Smart could utilize Burge’s framework for dealing with de re beliefs and a way of formalizing tensed beliefs is proposed. The last section of the paper deals with the exact role of the
formalized indexical element. If these three steps are worked out, we might have an explanation of the facts involved in Prior
cases without mentioning any A-facts. Hence an important problem to a Smart-influenced B-theory is solved, and McTaggart’s
Puzzle answered in an adequate manner. 相似文献
16.
Tomasz Bigaj 《Erkenntnis》2012,76(1):1-22
David Lewis’s latest theory of causation defines the causal link in terms of the relation of influence between events. It
turns out, however, that one event’s influencing another is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for its being a cause
of that event. In the article one particular case of causality without influence is presented and developed. This case not
only serves as a counterexample to Lewis’s influence theory, but also threatens earlier counterfactual analyses of causation
by admitting a particularly troublesome type of preemption. The conclusion of the article is that Lewis’s influence method
of solving the preemption problem fails, and that we need a new and fresh approach to the cases of redundant causation if
we want to hold on to the counterfactual analysis of causation. 相似文献
17.
Ned Markosian 《Philosophical Studies》2012,157(3):383-398
In a recent paper I argued that agent causation theorists should be compatibilists. In this paper, I argue that compatibilists
should be agent causation theorists. I consider six of the main problems facing compatibilism: (i) the powerful intuition
that one can’t be responsible for actions that were somehow determined before one was born; (ii) Peter van Inwagen’s modal
argument, involving the inference rule (β); (iii) the objection to compatibilism that is based on claiming that the ability
to do otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom; (iv) “manipulation arguments,” involving cases in which an agent is
manipulated by some powerful being into doing something that he or she would not normally do, but in such a way that the compatibilist’s
favorite conditions for a free action are satisfied; (v) the problem of constitutive luck; and (vi) the claim that it is not
fair to blame someone for an action if that person was determined by forces outside of his or her control to perform that
action. And in the case of each of these problems, I argue that the compatibilist has a much more plausible response to that
problem if she endorses the theory of agent causation than she does otherwise. 相似文献
18.
Peter Schulte 《Synthese》2011,181(3):413-431
Truthmakers are supposed to explain the truth of propositions, but it is unclear what kind of explanation truthmakers can
provide. In this paper, I argue that ‘truthmaker explanations’ conflate two different explanatory projects. The first project
is essentially concerned with truth, while the second project is concerned with reductive explanation. It is the latter project,
I maintain, which is really central to truthmaking theory. On this basis, a general account of truthmaking can be formulated,
which, when combined with a specific theory of reduction (the ‘conceptual entailment approach’), yields a new analysis of
truthmaking. This analysis is intuitively appealing and avoids the problem of necessary truths, which poses a serious obstacle
for standard accounts. 相似文献
19.
Christopher Nathan 《Res Publica》2011,17(3):211-225
There is an apparent problem in identifying a basis for equality. This problem vanishes if what I call the ‘intuited response’
is successful. According to this response, there is no further explanation of the significance of the feature in virtue of
which an individual matters, beyond the bare fact that it is the feature in virtue of which an individual matters. I argue
against this claim, and conclude that if the problem of identifying a basis for equality is to be resolved, it is necessary
to defend a substantive account of the independent significance of some feature. 相似文献
20.
Huib Looren de Jong 《Synthese》2006,151(3):435-443
It is argued that John Bickle’s Ruthless Reductionism is flawed as an account of the practice of neuroscience. Examples from genetics and linguistics suggest, first, that not every mind-brain link or gene-phenotype link qualifies as a reduction or as a complete explanation, and, second, that the higher (psychological) level of analysis is not likely to disappear as neuroscience progresses. The most plausible picture of the evolving sciences of the mind-brain seems a patchwork of multiple connections and partial explanations, linking anatomy, mechanisms and functions across different domains, levels, and grain sizes. Bickle’s claim that only the molecular level provides genuine explanations, and higher level concepts are just heuristics that will soon be redundant, is thus rejected. In addition, it is argued that Bickle’s recasting of philosophy of science as metascience explicating empirical practices, ignores an essential role for philosophy in reflecting upon criteria for reduction and explanation. Many interesting and complex issues remain to be investigated for the philosophy of science, and in particular the nature of interlevel links found in empirical research requires sophisticated philosophical analysis. 相似文献