Ability Theories of Practice and Turner’s Criticism of Bourdieu

The aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of ability theories of practice and, in this process, to defend Pierre Bourdieu’s ability theory against Stephen Turner’s objections. In part I, I outline ability theorists’ conception of practices together with their objections to claims about rule following and rule explanations. In part II, I turn to the question of what ability theorists take to be the alternative to rule following and rule explanations. Ability theorists have offered, and been ascribed, somewhat different answers to this question, just as their replies, or positive accounts, have been heavily criticized by Turner. Due to this state of the debate, I focus on the positive account advanced by a single—and highly famous—ability theorist of practice, Pierre Bourdieu. Moreover, I show that despite Turner’s claims to the contrary, his arguments do not refute Bourdieu’s positive account.     

Necessity and Language: The Gap Is Still Very Real

In my previous paper “Has the later Wittgenstein accounted for necessity?” I argued against the conventionalist account of necessity proposed by Wittgenstein and his followers. Glock has addressed some of my objections in his paper “Necessity and Language: In Defence of Conventionalism”. This brief rejoinder considers Glock's replies to three of those objections. In the course of doing so, I revisit Wittgenstein's explanation of the special status of necessary propositions, the supposedly arbitrary nature of colour‐grammatical propositions, and the relation between rules and modality.     

Religion,reason and non-directive teaching: a reply to Trevor Cooling

In other work I have argued that decisions about what to teach directively and what non-directively should be governed by an epistemic criterion. Trevor Cooling has recently advanced some objections to my defence and application of the epistemic criterion and proposed an alternative to it. Here I reply to his objections and comment on his proposed alternative.     

Roles for Values in Scientific Activities

My aim in this paper is to rebut objections that have been made of the account of the various roles for values in scientific activities that I have developed, initially in my book Is Science Value Free?, in response to criticizing the proposal that science is value free. Specifically I respond to objections that my account does not recognize the significance of basic science, and that my defense of the ideal of impartiality cannot be sustained.     

A virtue ethical approach to decisional capacity and mental health

It is a common assumption that lack of autonomy is incompatible with decisional capacity and mental health. However, there are two general conceptions of autonomy, one value-neutral and the other value-laden, which imply different notions of mental health. I argue that the value-neutral notion of autonomy is independently inadequate and that it also provides an inadequate foundation for judging whether someone is decisionally incapable or mentally disordered. I propose an alternative, value-laden account which posits ten capabilities required for basic human functioning. I then defend this account against objections and highlight its practical utility in designing optimal treatment.     

Searle's abstract argument against strong AI

Discussion of Searle's case against strong AI has usually focused upon his Chinese Room thought-experiment. In this paper, however, I expound and then try to refute what I call his abstract argument against strong AI, an argument which turns upon quite general considerations concerning programs, syntax, and semantics, and which seems not to depend on intuitions about the Chinese Room. I claim that this argument fails, since it assumes one particular account of what a program is. I suggest an alternative account which, however, cannot play a role in a Searle-type argument, and argue that Searle gives no good reason for favoring his account, which allows the abstract argument to work, over the alternative, which doesn't. This response to Searle's abstract argument also, incidentally, enables the Robot Reply to the Chinese Room to defend itself against objections Searle makes to it.     

ARISTOTLE'S ETHICAL EGOISM

Accepting the controversial thesis that Aristotle is an ethical egoist, I argue that Aristotle's brand of ethical egoism is immune to four important objections to such a position. I analyse the causes of the four objections showing (a) that Aristotle does not have a conception of happiness which would give rise to the first three, and (b) that his account of practical reasoning, of which I provide an original interpretation, can deal with the fourth.     

A Reconsideration of Indirect Duties Regarding Non-Human Organisms

According to indirect duty views, human beings lack direct moral duties to non-human organisms, but our direct duties to ourselves and other humans give rise to indirect duties regarding non-humans. On the orthodox interpretation of Kant’s account of indirect duties, one should abstain from treating organisms in ways that render one more likely to violate direct duties to humans. This indirect duty view is subject to several damaging objections, such as that it misidentifies the moral reasons we have to treat non-humans in certain ways and that it sanctions only weak obligations vis-à-vis organisms. I develop an alternative indirect duty view: given a direct duty to oneself to cultivate virtuous dispositions, one has an indirect duty to abstain from treating organisms in ways that erode one’s virtues or develop vices. I argue that this indirect duty view strictly proscribes knowingly causing unnecessary harm to organisms, and I show that it is not subject to the damaging objections directed against the indirect duty view attributed to Kant by the orthodox interpretation. This suggests that indirect duty views are more worthy of consideration than is often supposed.     

Distinguishing Agent-Relativity from Agent-Neutrality

The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is one of the most important in contemporary moral theory. Yet providing an adequate formal account of it has proven to be difficult. In this article I defend a new formal account of the distinction, one that avoids various problems faced by other accounts. My account is based on an influential account of the distinction developed by McNaughton and Rawling. I argue that their approach is on the right track but that it succumbs to two serious objections. I then show how to formulate a new account that follows the key insights of McNaughton and Rawling's approach yet avoids the two objections.     

Part-Whole Physicalism and Mental Causation

A well-known ``overdetermination'argument aims to show that the possibility of mental causes of physical events in a causally closed physical world and the possibility of causally relevant mental properties are both problematic. In the first part of this paper, I extend an identity reply that has been given to the first problem to a property-instance account of causal relata. In the second, I argue that mental types are composed of physical types and, as a consequence, both mental and physical types may be causally relevant with respect to the same physical effect, contrary to the overdetermination argument. In further sections, I argue that mental types have causal powers, consider some objections and reject an alternative version of part-whole physicalism. Throughout I assume that causal relata are tropes and property types are classes of tropes.     

A new theory of absence experience

Ordering your morning coffee and then realising that your wallet is missing from your bag triggers an experience of the absence of your wallet. Familiar cases like this one provide good evidence for the idea that we frequently experience absences. According to one popular view, we experience absences by perceiving them. I argue that there are a number of problems with the perceptual view, and propose an alternative, cognitive account. Now, a cognitive account of absence experience has already been widely discussed and unequivocally rejected by participants in the debate. However, arguments against it depend upon the important, yet mistaken assumption that cognitive accounts must appeal to beliefs or judgements. I argue that the phenomenology involved in absence experience is not that associated with belief or judgement, but is instead an intellectual seeming. This renders my account immune to the objections that have been made against the existing cognitive view.     

Back in Style: A New Interpretation of Danto's Style Matrix

A number of objections to the style matrix that Arthur Danto introduced in “The Artworld” seem to have quelled most discussion of it. So telling have these arguments been that Danto himself later recanted the idea entirely. This situation is somewhat unfortunate. It may be that Danto's own interpretation of the style matrix is not tenable, but I believe we can articulate an alternative reading of it that escapes the aforementioned objections. While the interpretation I suggest cannot provide all that Danto initially imagined for his style matrix, it does maintain much that was theoretically beneficial in it.     

Social epistemology and the aim(s) of education

In Knowledge in a Social World (1999) Alvin Goldman has defended a ‘veritistic’ or truth-oriented, monistic account of the aim of education. In particular, he argued that the inculcation of true belief constitutes the ultimate goal of education, with other educational activities having only instrumental value insofar as they aid in this goal. In contrast, Harvey Siegel has defended a pluralistic alternative, on which the critical capacity for sustaining rational belief represents an independent, non-instrumental epistemic end of education. I argue that while some of Siegel's objections represent challenges to the sufficiency of Goldman's veritistic model, his alternative account fails to recognise the necessity of truth as an educational goal. This therefore commits Siegel to an unsatisfying pluralism regarding the ideal aim of education. Crucially, this disagreement hinges on two very different ways of understanding the nature of rationality: as instrumental or as epistemic. On Goldman's instrumentalist view, rationality merely involves the ordering of one's means to the end of true belief. However, Kelly (2003) has raised significant counterexamples against the instrumentalist view, and I adapt these to the case of the epistemic ends of education. I thus defend a non-pluralistic account of the ultimate end of education as involving knowledge in the ‘strong’ sense. This, I argue, overcomes the objections raised against Goldman and Siegel's accounts, and better accords with the notion of an ideal characterisation of the aim of education.     

Taking the Perceptual Analogy Seriously

This paper offers a qualified defense of a historically popular view that I call sentimental perceptualism. At a first pass, sentimental perceptualism says that emotions play a role in grounding evaluative knowledge analogous to the role perceptions play in grounding empirical knowledge. Recently, András Szigeti and Michael Brady have independently developed an important set of objections to this theory. The objections have a common structure: they begin by conceding that emotions have some important epistemic role to play, but then go on to argue that understanding how emotions play that role means that there must be some alternative, emotion-independent route to obtaining knowledge of value. If there has to be such an emotion-independent route, then the perceptual analogy breaks down in a significant way. In this paper, I argue that the right ways for sentimental perceptualists to respond to each of these objections are revealed by thinking through how analogous objections applied to perception and the empirical domain would be answered. Although Szigeti's and Brady's objections should not persuade sentimental perceptualists to give up their view, the objections do put important constraints on what a form of the view has to be like in order to do exciting metaethical work.     

Standing up for an affective account of emotion

This paper constitutes a defence of an affective account of emotion. I begin by outlining the case for thinking that emotions are just feelings. I also suggest that emotional feelings are not reducible to other kinds of feelings, but rather form a distinct class of feeling state. I then consider a number of common objections that have been raised against affective accounts of emotion, including: (1) the objection that emotion cannot always consist only of feeling because some emotions—for example, indignation and regret—necessarily have a cognitive component (say, the perception of a lost opportunity in the case of regret); (2) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because in order to explain how emotions have intentional objects we will have to recognise that emotion consists of cognition; and (3) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because emotion, but not feeling, can be variously assessed or evaluated. However, I demonstrate how an affective account of emotion might be successfully defended against all of the objections that are cited.     

Inter-species variation in colour perception

Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to selectionist views, objects simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy.     

Modesty as Kindness

The trait of modesty has received significant philosophical attention in recent years. This is due, in part, to Julia Driver's claim that modesty is able to act as a counter‐example to intellectualist accounts of the nature of virtue. In this paper I engage with the debate about the nature of modesty by proposing a new account. ‘Modesty as kindness’ states that the trait of modesty ought to be considered as intimately connected with the more fundamental virtue of kindness. I set out the account, explain its benefits and defend it against possible objections. I then ask whether or not the intense focus on the trait of modesty has actually furthered our understanding of the nature of virtue more generally, and suggest that alternative approaches ought to be considered.     

Concepts as Pluralistic Hybrids

In contrast to earlier views that argued for a particular kind of concept (e.g. prototypes), several recent accounts have proposed that there are multiple distinct kinds of concepts, or that there is a plurality of concepts for each category. In this paper, I argue for a novel account of concepts as pluralistic hybrids. According to this view, concepts are pluralistic because there are several concepts for the same category whose use is heavily determined by context. In addition, concepts are hybrids because they typically link together several different kinds of information that are used in the same cognitive processes. This alternative view accounts for the available empirical data, allows for greater cognitive flexibility than Machery's recent account, and overcomes several objections to traditional hybrid views.     

A heterodox defense of the actualist higher-order thought theory

I defend the actualist higher-order thought theory against four objections. The first objection contends that the theory is circular. The second one contends that the theory is unable to account for the alleged epistemic position we are in with respect to our own conscious mental states. The third one contends that the theory is unable to account for the evidence we have for the proposition that all conscious mental states are represented. The fourth one contends that the theory does not accommodate the intimacy we have with our own conscious mental states. To some extent, my defense will be heterodox, in the sense that I will show that some objections are satisfactorily answerable even if we concede to the objectors a point that higher-order theorists do not seem to be willing to concede, that is, that the theory is the result of conceptual analysis.

     

Indiscernible universals

Universals have traditionally thought to obey the identity of indiscernibles, that is, it has traditionally been thought that there can be no perfectly similar universals. But at least in the conception of universals as immanent, there is nothing that rules out there being indiscernible universals. In this paper, I shall argue that there is useful work indiscernible universals can do, and so there might be reason to postulate indiscernible universals. In particular, I shall argue that postulating indiscernible universals can allow a theory of universals to identify particulars with bundles of universals, and that postulating indiscernible universals can allow a theory of universals to develop an account of the resemblance of quantitative universals that avoids the objections that Armstrong’s account faces. Finally, I shall respond to some objections and I shall undermine the criterion of distinction between particulars and universals that says that the distinction between particulars and universals lies in that while there can be indiscernible particulars, there cannot be indiscernible universals.