Brogaard and Salerno on antirealism and the conditional fallacy

Brogaard and Salerno (2005, Nous, 39, 123–139) have argued that antirealism resting on a counterfactual analysis of truth is flawed because it commits a conditional fallacy by entailing the absurdity that there is necessarily an epistemic agent. Brogaard and Salerno’s argument relies on a formal proof built upon the criticism of two parallel proofs given by Plantinga (1982, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 56, 47–70) and Rea (2000, Nous, 34, 291–301). If this argument were conclusive, antirealism resting on a counterfactual analysis of truth should probably be abandoned. I argue however that the antirealist is not committed to a controversial reading of counterfactuals presupposed in Brogaard and Salerno’s proof, and that the antirealist can in principle adopt an alternative reading that makes this proof invalid. My conclusion is that no reductio of antirealism resting on a counterfactual analysis of truth has yet been provided.

Finite rational self-deceivers

I raise three puzzles concerning self-deception: (i) a conceptual paradox, (ii) a dilemma about how to understand human cognitive evolution, and (iii) a tension between the fact of self-deception and Davidson’s interpretive view. I advance solutions to the first two and lay a groundwork for addressing the third. The capacity for self-deception, I argue, is a spandrel, in Gould’s and Lewontin’s sense, of other mental traits, i.e., a structural byproduct. The irony is that the mental traits of which self-deception is a spandrel/byproduct are themselves rational.

Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others' past performance to guide their learning

A wealth of human knowledge is acquired by attending to information provided by other people – but some people are more credible sources than others. In two experiments, we explored whether young children spontaneously keep track of an individual’s history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to facilitate subsequent learning. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds favor a previously accurate individual when learning new words and learning new object functions and applied the principle of mutual exclusivity to the newly learned words but not the newly learned functions. These findings expand upon previous research in a number of ways, most importantly by showing that (a) children spontaneously keep track of an individual’s history and use it to guide subsequent learning without any prompting, and (b) children’s sensitivity to others’ prior accuracy is not specific to the domain of language.     

Darwinizing debunking arguments

To ‘Darwinize’ a debunking argument is to broaden and thereby strengthen it in ways inspired by Charles Darwin. It is to employ Darwinian strategies that converge on the conclusion that certain putative phenomena – the reality of stance‐independent moral properties, for instance – are illusory or epistemically problematic for animals like us. The aim of this essay is to defend one such strategy and illustrate its power relative to most evolutionary debunking arguments currently on offer.     

The theoretical diagnosis of skepticism

Radical skepticism about the external implies that no belief about the external is even prima facie justified. A theoretical reply to skepticism has four stages. First, show which theories of epistemic justification support skeptical doubts (show which theories, given other reasonable assumptions, entail skepticism). Second, show which theories undermine skeptical doubts (show which theories, given other reasonable assumptions, do not support the skeptic’s conclusion). Third, show which of the latter theories (which non-skeptical theory) is correct, and in so doing show that all of the rival theories of justification, skeptical and non-skeptical alike, are mistaken. Fourth, explain why skeptical doubts are sometimes (or sometimes merely seem) intuitive, and thereby accommodate skeptical doubts without capitulation. Michael Williams has pioneered the very idea of a theoretical reply. A theoretical diagnosis consists in just the first two stages. An adequate reply, which is correct at each stage, would rebut the skeptic entirely. Williams’ own reply, I argue, is inadequate. I offer in its place an exhaustive and accurate diagnosis of skepticism. I distinguish four kinds of skepticism and five theories of justification. I then show which theories do, and which theories do not, support which kinds of skepticism.     

Entitlement and rationality

This paper takes the form of a critical discussion of Crispin Wright’s notion of entitlement of cognitive project. I examine various strategies for defending the claim that entitlement can make acceptance of a proposition epistemically rational, including one which appeals to epistemic consequentialism. Ultimately, I argue, none of these strategies is successful, but the attempt to isolate points of disagreement with Wright issues in some positive proposals as to how an epistemic consequentialist should characterize epistemic rationality.     

Safety and epistemic luck

There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.     

Metacognition and metarepresentation: is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition?

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct.     

Conceivability and Epistemic Possibility

The notion of conceivability has traditionally been regarded as crucial to an account of modal knowledge. Despite its importance to modal epistemology, there is no received explication of conceivability. In recent discussions, some have attempted to explicate the notion in terms of epistemic possibility. There are, however, two notions of epistemic possibility, a more familiar one and a novel one. I argue that these two notions are independent of one another. Both are irrelevant to an account of modal knowledge on the predominant view of modal reality. Only the novel notion is relevant and apt on the competing view of modal reality; but this latter view is problematic in light of compelling counterexamples. Insufficient care regarding the independent notions of epistemic possibility can lead to two problems: a gross problem of conflation and a more subtle problem of obscuring a crucial fact of modal epistemology. Either problem needlessly hampers efforts to develop an adequate account of modal knowledge. I conclude that the familiar notion of epistemic possibility (and the very term ‘epistemic possibility’) should be eschewed in the context of modal epistemology.