Temporary Safety Hazards

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time (like the “growing block” and “moving spotlight”) imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” (objects of belief change truth‐value) together with “metaphysical eternalism” (the world does not objectively privilege any particular time).     

The Dark Side of Morality: Group Polarization and Moral Epistemology

This article argues that philosophers and laypeople commonly conceptualize moral truths or justified moral beliefs as discoverable through intuition, argument, or some other purely cognitive or affective process. It then contends that three empirically well‐supported theories all predict that this “Discovery Model” of morality plays a substantial role in causing social polarization. The same three theories are then used to argue that an alternative “Negotiation Model” of morality—according to which moral truths are not discovered but instead created by actively negotiating compromises—promises to reduce polarization by fostering a progressive willingness to “work across the aisle” to settle moral issues cooperatively. This article then examines potential methods for normatively evaluating polarization, arguing there are prima facie reasons to favor the Negotiation Model over the Discovery Model based on their hypothesized effects on polarization. Finally, I outline avenues for further empirical and philosophical research.     

Why Truthmaking Is Not a Case of Grounding

Truthmaker theorists often express their core commitment by saying that truth is grounded in being, and grounding theorists often take truthmaking to be a paradigm case of grounding. But I will argue that truthmaking is not a case of grounding. What is crucial for understanding truthmaking is not grounding but rather meaning (in a broad sense including reference). Truth is still constrained by how things are, so even if (so-called) truthmakers don't play a role in grounding truths, the methodological program of truthmaker theory survives. Here I lay out my understanding of truth and truthmaking, and distinguish two conceptions of grounding. I argue that truthmaking is not plausibly seen as a case of grounding on either conception. I argue further that treating truthmaking as grounding threatens to violate a plausible irreflexivity principle, and makes trouble for the view that grounding is transitive. I then suggest that there is no genuine relation of truthmaking (which there would have to be if it were a true case of grounding). Finally, I show how the core insights of truthmaker theory are preserved by the understanding of truthmaking that I favor.     

Rational Thought And Rational Behavior: A Review Of Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox.

Standard economic theory says that the rational approach to a decision is to weigh all alternatives on all relevant dimensions and then to select the one with the highest weight. Such a procedure would maximize subjective expected utility. But, because of constraints on time and available information, people and other animals often bypass this process by using “fast and frugal” heuristics to make decisions. Rationality is thus said to be “bounded” by time and information constraints. The articles in this book describe and organize common heuristics. They show that use of such heuristics is generally the best approach to many real world problems and therefore not irrational. Heuristics evolved, they say, not as deviations from rationality but as aids to rationality in cases where the standard model would have proved to be too slow or inefficient. Although the approach of almost all of the authors of these papers is that of cognitive psychology—a focus on internal cognitive mechanisms—their findings and even their theories may be interpreted in terms of reinforcement and punishment acting on behavioral patterns.     

Moral principles as moral dispositions

What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular truths about what is morally permissible, impermissible, etc. Moreover, they can do other things that moral principles are supposed to do: explain the phenomena “falling within their scope,” support counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. And they are apt to be the truthmakers for moral laws, or “lawlike” moral generalizations.     

Does Truth Matter? Introduction to Papers by Jody Davies,Shlomit Gadot,and Donnel Stern

Each of these three essays touches on the universal meaning and relevance of truth. Yet all are dealing with the relational truths that survive and hold us after the 2016 election amounted to a loss of certain assumed truths of everyday life.

Donnel Stern asks, If relational truth is constructed, dialogical, multiple, how does this belief survive when we find ourselves outraged, by what seem like cavalier untruths—lies, some kind of runaway, twittered, subjective truth? He argues that a credible, measurable, objectivity about certain truths indeed survives perfectly well within our overall relational worldview.

Shlomit Gadot adds that truth, relational truth, does and can exist most stably in our essential recognition of the multiplicity of (often relationally shaped) premises, frameworks, perspectives on truth. What “matters” when truth becomes threatened with serious shattering (here in a clash with love) is that she begins with an effort at genuine openness to the truth of the other.

Jody Davies implies that relational truth at virtually in all levels is embedded with the trauma narrative of truth, its meanings, and motivated hiding as we know it clinically. Truth survives its subjective shattering by recognizing that within the sociopolitical realm, we are being abused and traumatized by political authority and an abusive father.

The complexity of relational truth may involve creatively grieving certain certainties about truth that we may have experienced as lost. Truth in these three essays may lie in our overall effort to be equal to the full complexity of that loss and, paradoxically, to become expanded and more deeply connected through that experience.     

Is Colour incompatibility analytic?

It is widely believed that some a priori necessary truths are not analytic in the sense of transformable by substitution of synonyms into logical truths. One much-cited example comes from the supposed incompatibility between colour predicates. The idea is that sentences like “Nothing is both blue all over (or uniformly or at a point) and also red” are not transformable into a logical truth in the same way as “Nothing is both a bachelor and married” because the requisite conceptual link between “bachelor” and “not married” is absent between “blue” and “not red”. This paper examines whether colour exclusion may be more like the bachelor case than it initially appears. It transpires that the most promising line of thought is not, however, as has been argued at length in the literature, that “blue” in some more or less convoluted way manages to mean “not red”. Instead it is suggested that the requisite conceptual link may reside in the oft-ignored qualifications (“all over”, “uniformly”, etc.), without which there is no incompatibility in the first place.     

For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue

Cognitive neuroscience research on conceptual knowledge often is discussed with respect to “embodiment” or “grounding.” We tried to disentangle at least three distinct claims made using these terms. One of these, the view that concepts are entirely reducible to sensory-motor representations, is untenable and diminishing in the literature. A second is the view that concepts and sensory-motor representations “interact,” and a third view addresses the question of how concepts are neurally organized—the neural partitions among concepts of different kinds, and where these partitions are localized in cortex. We argue that towards the second and third issues, much fruitful research can be pursued, but that no position on them is specifically related to “grounding.” Furthermore, to move forward on them, it is important to precisely distinguish different kinds of representations—conceptual vs. sensory-motor—from each other theoretically and empirically. Neuroimaging evidence often lacks such specificity. We take an approach that distinguishes conceptual from sensory-motor representations by virtue of two properties: broad generality and tolerance to the absence of sensory-motor associations. We review three of our recent experiments that employ these criteria in order to localize neural representations of several specific kinds of nonsensory attributes: functions, intentions, and belief traits. Building on past work, we find that neuroimaging evidence can be used fruitfully to distinguish interesting hypotheses about neural organization. On the other hand, most such evidence does not speak to any clear notion of “grounding” or “embodiment,” because these terms do not make clear, specific, empirical predictions. We argue that cognitive neuroscience will proceed most fruitfully by relinquishing these terms.     

The grounding problem and presentist explanations

Opponents of presentism have often argued that the presentist has difficulty in accounting for what makes (presently) true past-tensed propositions (TptP) true in a way that is compatible with her metaphysical view of time and reality. The problem is quite general and concerns not only strong truth-maker principles, but also the requirement that truth be grounded in reality. In order to meet the challenge, presentists have proposed many peculiar present aspects of the world as grounds for truths concerning the past, such as uninstantiated haecceities, Meinongian non-existents, ersatz times, and dispositional and distributional properties. The main problem with all such solutions is that any explanation of what grounds a TptP that involves the past is eo ipso a better explanation than any that involves only the present. Thus, the quest for an account of grounding for TptP that is compatible with the presentist ontology and ideology is doomed to be explanatorily deficient with respect to eternalism. In a recent article, Ben Caplan and David Sanson have claimed that presentists should change their strategy and, rather than seeking for exotic grounds for TptP, should adopt a more liberal view of explanation. That is, they should allow themselves to resort to “past directed” explanations, even if they do not accept the past in their ontology and ideology. I argue that such a proposal is not compatible with the tenet that there is a substantial distinction between the ideology of such a version of presentism and that of eternalism. Therefore, the presentist cannot endorse such “deflationist” explanations as an easy way out to the problem of the grounding of TptP.     

Infants recognize counting as numerically relevant

Children do not understand the meanings of count words like “two” and “three” until the preschool years. But even before knowing the meanings of these individual words, might they recognize that counting is “about” the dimension of number? Here in five experiments, we asked whether infants already associate counting with quantities. We measured 14‐ and 18‐month olds’ ability to remember different numbers of hidden objects that either were or were not counted by an experimenter before hiding. As in previous research, we found that infants failed to differentiate four hidden objects from two when the objects were not counted—suggesting an upper limit on the number of individual objects they could represent in working memory. However, infants succeeded when the objects were simply counted aloud before hiding. We found that counting also helped infants differentiate four hidden objects from six (a 2:3 ratio), but not three hidden objects from four (a 3:4 ratio), suggesting that counting helped infants represent the arrays’ approximate cardinalities. Hence counting directs infants’ attention to numerical aspects of the world, showing that they recognize counting as numerically relevant years before acquiring the meanings of number words.     

Constructivism about Practical Reasons1

Philosophers commonly wonder what a constructivist theory as applied to practical reasons might look like. For the methods or procedures of reasoning familiar from moral constructivism do not clearly apply generally, to all practical reasons. The paper argues that procedural specification is not necessary, so long as our aims are not first‐order but explanatory. We can seek to explain how there could be facts of the matter about reasons for action without saying what reasons we have. Explanatory constructivism must assume constructive “norms of practical reasoning” which yield particular truths without assuming them. But philosophers often mistakenly assume that only “formal” norms of reasoning could fulfill this role. The paper describes a further possibility: norms of reasoning can be “situation‐specific” and yet retain truth‐independent authority. Though we might doubt whether such norms can be independently defended, we should not doubt the possibility or coherence of constructivism about practical reasons.     

Hard presentism

Presentists believe that only present things exist. Their theories, at first glance, seem to offer many admirable features: a simple ontology, and a meaningful, objective status for key temporal phenomena, such as the present moment and the passage of time. So intuitive is this theory that, as John Bigelow puts it, presentism was “believed by everyone...until at least the nineteenth century” (1996, p. 35). Yet, in the last 200 years presentism has been beset by criticisms from both physicists and metaphysicians. One of the most significant criticisms is that presentists cannot provide an acceptable system of truthmaking. If there is no past, how can there still be truths about the past? In this paper, I introduce a new theory of presentism, which addresses this problem in a novel way: by simply denying that there are any truths about the past. While prima facie an unintuitive position, I will argue that a sensible presentist philosophy of this kind can be described, so long as it is accompanied by an appropriate system of physics. I will also indicate at certain points that adopting presentism could allow us to understand fundamental physics in new, more intuitive ways. By the end of the paper, I hope to not only show that hard presentism is a defensible theory of time, but also that it could offer a number of advantages to the physicist and the philosopher alike.

     

Response to Ranganathan

This essay responds to Bharat Ranganathan's “Comment” on my essay, “The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (2011). Addressing key criticisms in this “Comment,” I make the following points. First, neither the idea of inherent dignity being “imparted” to humans, nor the Universal Declaration's implication—through its use of terms such as “inherent” and “inalienable”—that humans participate in transcendent reality, necessarily presuppose a Christian metaphysics. Second, a concept such as “inherent dignity” must be affirmed to be intrinsically heuristic unless we are to assume that its meaning can be completely known within the conditions of existence; but this affirmation does not render such concepts “indeterminate of sense.” Finally, Ranganathan's distinction between“weak” and “strong” senses of transcendence is untenable. If human truths beyond all contingencies are knowable (“weak” transcendence), then there must be a real dimension of meaning that transcends all contingencies (“strong” transcendence).     

On the Reality and Causal Efficacy of Familiar Objects

What caused the event we report by saying “the window shattered”? Was it the baseball, which crashed into the window? Causal exclusionists say: many, many microparticles collectively caused that event—microparticles located where common sense supposes the baseball was. Unitary large objects such as baseballs cause nothing; indeed, by Alexander’s dictum, there are no such objects. This paper argues that the false claim about causal efficacy is instead the one that attributes it to the many microparticles. Causation obtains just where there is an “invariance”, a true generalization to the effect that had things been different with the putative cause, things would have been correspondingly different with the putative effect. But “correspondingly” here requires a rough metric. There must be a fact as to which alternative group events, involving many microparticles, would have departed less from the putative cause of the shattering, and which would have departed more. Surprisingly, there is no such fact.     

The Role of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder in the Subjectification of Women

This paper will examine the way in which premenstrual symptomatology has been represented and regulated by psychology and psychiatry. It questions the “truths” about women's premenstrual experiences that circulate in scientific discourse, namely the fictions framed as facts that serve to regulate femininity, reproduction, and what it is to be “woman.” Hegemonic truths that define Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and its nosological predecessor Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) are examined to illustrate how regimes of objectified knowledge and practices of “assemblage” come to regulate individual women through a process of subjectification. Five interconnected “truths” are presented as objects of scrutiny: PMDD is a thing that can be objectively defined and measured; PMDD is a pathology to be eradicated; PMDD is caused and can be treated by one factor; PMDD is a bodily phenomenon; PMDD causes women's problems or symptoms. I examine the way in which these hegemonic truths function in framing the reproductive body as a cause of disorder or distress that leads women to interpret premenstrual experiences within a pathological framework deserving medical or psychological treatment. Finally, I offer an alternative framework drawing on Eastern models of selfhood that provides a more empowering model of women's premenstrual experiences.     

Against Strong Cognitivism: An Argument from the Particularity of Love

According to the view we may term “strong cognitivism”, all reasons for action are rooted in normative features that the motivated subject (explicitly or implicitly) takes objects to have independently of her attitudes towards these objects. The main concern of this paper is to argue against strong cognitivism, that is, to establish the view that conative attitudes do provide subjects with reasons for action. The central argument to this effect is a top‐down argument: it proceeds by an analysis of the complex phenomenon of love and derives a conclusion regarding the (motivational and normative) nature of more basic mental phenomena—particular desires. More specifically, its starting point is the crude intuition that the significance conferred by love upon its objects is of a distinctively personal kind—an intuition that is expressed by the apparent non‐substitutability of two similar subjects only one of whom is loved with respect to their importance for the lover. I argue that the initial notion of non‐substitutability can be refined and modified so as to form a real challenge to all versions of strong cognitivism and to establish the existence of attitude‐dependent reasons.     

Nominalistic content,grounding, and covering generalizations: Reply to ‘Grounding and the indispensability argument’

‘Grounding and the indispensability argument’ presents a number of ways in which nominalists can use the notion of grounding to rebut the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects. I will begin by considering the strategy that puts grounding to the service of easy-road nominalists (“Nominalistic content meets grounding” section). I will give some support to this strategy by addressing a worry some may have about it (“A misguided worry about the grounding strategy” section). I will then consider a problem for the fast-lane strategy (“Grounding and generality: a problem for the fast lane” section) and a problem for easy-road nominalists willing to accept Liggins’ grounding strategy (“More on the grounding strategy and easy-road nominalism” section). Both are related to the problem of formulating nominalistic explanations at the right level of generality. I will then consider a problem that Liggins only hints at (“Mathematics and covering generalizations” section). This problem has to do with mathematics’ function of providing the sort of covering generalizations we need in scientific explanations.     

SIMPLIFYING ALETHIC PLURALISM

What is truth? What precisely is it that truths have that falsehoods lack? Pluralists about truth (or “alethic pluralists”) tend to answer these questions by saying that there is more than one way for a proposition, sentence, belief—or any chosen truth‐bearer—to be true. In this paper, I argue that two of the most influential formations of alethic pluralism, those of Wright (1992, 2003a ) and Lynch (2009 ), are subject to serious problems. I outline a new formulation, which I call “simple determination pluralism,” that I claim offers better prospects for alethic pluralism, with the potential to have applications for pluralist theories beyond truth.