Deferentialism

There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend—deferentialism, as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems can be swiftly and decisively dispatched by appeal to disciplines other than philosophy. In this paper we will argue that such an attitude of uncritical deference to any non-philosophical discipline is badly misguided. With reference to the work of John Burgess and David Lewis, we consider deference to mathematics. We show that deference to mathematics is implausible and that main arguments for it fail. With reference to the work of Michael Blome-Tillmann, we consider deference to linguistics. We show that his arguments appealing to deference to linguistics are unsuccessful. We then show that naturalism does not entail deferentialism and that naturalistic considerations even motivate some anti-deferentialist views. Finally, we set out deferentialism’s failings and present our own anti-deferentialist approach to philosophical inquiry.     

Soames on the Tractatus

Philosophical Studies -     

Skepticism and legal interpretation

For comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article, I would like to thank Kendall Walton, Edward Averill, Marcia Baron, Richard Brandt, and Walter Schaller. This paper was first developed while in residence as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I wish to thank both that institution for making its resources available to me during the 1986–87 academic year, and my home institution for granting me the Developmental Leave that permitted me to pursue my research. Finally, I wish to thank Thomas W. Pogge for helping me to make several substantive clarifications in the final version of this paper.     

Scott Soames on Gilbert Ryle

In his exceptionally well‐received history of analytic philosophy,¹ Scott Soames presents accounts of the work of Wittgenstein and Ryle that rest on his acceptance of metaphysical preconceptions that these philosophers implicitly question in their writings. Their shared expressive third‐person treatments of the mind, for example, serve to emphasise the inadequacy of Soames's distinction between private mental states and physical states/behaviour, which he regularly employs in assessing their views. His treatment of Gilbert Ryle in particular, reflects the radically different conceptions held by Ryle and Soames of the nature of philosophical investigation. Soames charges Ryle with a failure to recognise the distinction between the necessary and the analytic. He also harbours a clear understanding that philosophical problems arise naturally and directly from “our ordinary ways of thinking,”² where these ways of thinking, the reader discovers, involve metaphysical preconceptions. This is at odds with Ryle's claim that certain category mistakes, playing the role, roughly, of Wittgenstein's misleading pictures, underlie some of the main problems of philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to assess how well Ryle, occasionally aided by Wittgenstein, can be seen to parry Soames's direct onslaught on his work in parts of Dilemmas and in The Concept of Mind.     

Soames on Quine and Davidson

A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II.     

Soames on the logical empiricists on truth,meaning, convention,and logical truth

Philosophical Studies -     

The legal self: executive processes and legal theory

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but what is important to the law is what is done with the workspace content rather than the content itself. This makes executive processes more important to the law than consciousness, since they are responsible for channelling conscious decision-making into intentions and actions, or inhibiting action. We provide a summary of the current state of our knowledge about executive processes, which consists primarily of information about which portions of the prefrontal lobes perform which executive processes. Then we describe several examples in which legal principles can be understood as tacitly singling out executive processes, including principles regarding defendants' intentions or plans to commit crimes and their awareness that certain facts are the case (for instance, that a gun is loaded), as well as excusatory principles which result in lesser responsibility for those who are juveniles, mentally ill, sleepwalking, hypnotized, or who suffer from psychopathy.     

Margolis on interpretation

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Intimacy: A behavioral interpretation

This paper proposes that intimacy is a process that emerges from a sequence of events in which behavior vulnerable to interpersonal punishment is reinforced by the response of another person. These intimate events result in an increase in the probability of behavior vulnerable to interpersonal punishment in the presence of the reinforcing partner. The process results in intimate partnership formation and reports of feeling intimate. In addition to positing an operant process integrating the various components of intimacy, the theory also posits that the punishment of interpersonally vulnerable behavior is an integral aspect of intimate partnership formation and that intimate partnerships can develop that reinforce behavior that may be destructive both to the individual and to others.