Epistemological Open Questions

While there has been a great deal of recent interest in parallels between metaethics and metaepistemology, there has been little discussion of epistemological analogues of the open question argument (hereafter: OQA). This is somewhat surprising—the general trend in recent work is in the direction of emphasizing the continuity between metaethics and metaepistemology, and to treat metanormative questions as arising in parallel in these two normative domains. And while the OQA has been subjected to a wide variety of objections, it is still influential in metaethics. In this paper, I aim to show that an epistemological version of the OQA is just as promising as its moral cousin. That's not to say that I'll unqualifiedly endorse either argument. Rather, my aim is to show that there is just as strong a prima facie (really, secunda facie) case for an OQA in metaepistemology as there is in metaethics—I leave open whether the ultima facie case collapses.     

Exposure to behavioral regularities in everyday life predicts infants’ acquisition of mental state vocabulary

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted in doing so by recognizing repeating patterns in behavior. The regularities in behavior allow them to predict future behaviors, succeed on theory-of-mind tasks, acquire mental state words, and eventually, understand the mental states underlying behavior. The present study provided the first clear evidence for the plausibility of this view by fitting head cameras to 54 infants aged 6 to 25 months, and recording their view of the world in their daily lives. At 6 and 12 months, infants viewed an average of 146.5 repeated behaviors per hour, a rate consistent with approximately 560,000 repetitions in their first year, and with repetitions correlating with children's acquisition of mental state words, even after controlling for their general vocabulary and a range of variables indexing social interaction. We also recorded infants’ view of people searching or searching for and retrieving objects. These were 92 times less common and did not correlate with mental state vocabulary. Overall, the findings indicate that repeated behaviors provide a rich source of information for children that would readily allow them to recognize patterns in behavior and help them acquire mental state words, providing the first clear evidence for this claim of minimalism.

Research Highlights

• Six- to 25-month-olds wore head cameras to record home life from infants’ point-of-view and help adjudicate between nativist and minimalist views of theory-of-mind (ToM).
• Nativists say ToM is too early developing to enable learning, whereas minimalists say infants learn to predict behaviors from behavior patterns in environment.
• Consistent with minimalism, infants had an incredibly rich exposure (146.5/h, >560,000 in first year) to repeated behaviors (e.g., drinking from a cup repeatedly).
• Consistent with minimalism, more repeated behaviors correlated with infants’ mental state vocabulary, even after controlling for gender, age, searches witnessed and non-mental state vocabulary.

     

Scanlon’s modal metaphysics

In Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford University Press, 2014) T. M. Scanlon argues that particular fact about reasons are explained by contingent non-normative facts together with pure normative principles. A question then arises about the modal status of these pure principles. Scanlon maintains that they are necessary in a sense, and suggests that they are ‘metaphysically’ necessary. I argue that the best view for Scanlon to take, given his other commitments, is that these pure normative principles are metaphysically contingent in some cases and necessary only in a weaker sense.     

Barry Taylor

I respond to an argument made by Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder against motivational internalism. Björnsson and Olinder present a hypothesis in which all of us are selfishly motivated to act in accordance with our moral judgments. The conceivability of such a possibility, they argue, rules out motivational internalism. I argue that this is not the case, and that, according to one dominant view about moral judgments, the agents in the hypothesis do not make genuine moral judgments. One therefore cannot argue decisively against motivational internalism without arguing against this view about moral judgments.     

Explicating Truth: Minimalism and Primitivism

This paper pursues two goals. The first is to show that Horwich's anti-primitivist version of minimalism must be rejected because, already for formal reasons, the truth-schema does not achieve a positive explication of any property of propositions. The second goal is to develop a more moderate primitivist version of minimalism according to which the truth-schema is admittedly powerless to underpin truth with something more basic but it still succeeds in giving a complete account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be true. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Zarathustra’s metaethics

Nietzsche takes moral judgments to be false beliefs, and encourages us to pursue subjective nonmoral value arising from our passions. His view that strong and unified passions make one virtuous is mathematically derivable from this subjectivism and a conceptual analysis of virtue, explaining his evaluations of character and the nature of the Overman.