Defeasibility and Gettierization: A Reminder

For some of us, the defeasibility theory of knowledge remains the most plausible approach to the Gettier Problem. Epistemological fashion and faded memories notwithstanding, persuasive objections to the theory are very hard to find. The most impressive of those objections to the theory that have hitherto gone unanswered are examined and rejected here. These are objections put forward by Richard Feldman, Richard Foley, and John Turri. While these are all interesting, the objection recently put forward by Turri is, we think, by far, the most serious threat to the theory that we have seen in a long time. A successful reply to it requires a surprising amount of care, as it turns out. If tenable, Turri's objection deals a devastating blow to the theory developed by Roderick Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, Peter Klein, Marshall Swain, Risto Hilpinen, John Pollock, and Paul Moser, among others. Under scrutiny, however, the threat proves illusory. It results from inattention to a crucial, but relatively subtle, aspect of the theory. Interestingly, there is only one source in the defeasibilist literature for a precise account of this crucial feature of the theory: one of the most neglected passages in Peter Klein's work on the issue. That crucial feature is put under the spotlight here. Our response to three major objections to the defeasibility theory requires a brief introduction to the theory as an anti-Gettier weapon, an introduction aimed at countering the numbing simplicity that characterizes most introductions to the topic. Following this brief introduction, those three objections are tackled. We conclude, on that basis, that anybody who fails to notice how resilient the defeasibility theory has proven to be for the last fifty years has a seriously deficient understanding of the current state of play in the debate over the Gettier Problem.     

When Expert Disagreement Supports the Consensus

It is often suggested that disagreement among scientific experts is a reason not to trust those experts, even about matters on which they are in agreement. In direct opposition to this view, I argue here that the very fact that there is disagreement among experts on a given issue provides a positive reason for non-experts to trust that the experts really are justified in their attitudes towards consensus theories. I show how this line of thought can be spelled out in three distinct frameworks for non-deductive reasoning: namely, Bayesian Confirmation Theory, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Inferential Robustness Analysis.     

Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice

Despite the now considerable literature on intellectual virtue, there remains relatively little philosophical discussion of intellectual vice. What discussion there is has been shaped by a powerful assumption—that, just as intellectual virtue requires that we are motivated by epistemic goods, intellectual vice requires that we aren't. In this paper, I demonstrate that this assumption is false: motivational approaches cannot explain a range of intuitive cases of intellectual vice. The popularity of the assumption is accounted for by its being a manifestation of a more general understanding of vice as an inversion or mirror image of virtue. I call this the inversion thesis, and argue that the failure of the motivational approach to vice exposes its limitations. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing these limitations can help to encourage philosophical interest in intellectual vice.     

Recommending beauty: semantics and pragmatics of aesthetic predicates

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for (i) the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, (ii) disagreements in aesthetic debates, and (iii) the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to (iv) error theory and (v) realist ontological commitments.     

The normativity of meaning and the hard problem of intentionality

This note addresses two of Gibbard's central contentions in Meaning and Normativity: first, that the concept of meaning is normative, and second, that an expressivist account of semantic concepts and statements can shed light on the hard problem of intentionality, the problem of explaining intentionality in naturalistic terms.     

Philosophy by Other Means?

I attempt to show that Marx was driven by a systematic philosophical goal expressed already in his doctoral dissertation and present throughout his mature political economic theory as well as in his practical political writings. I reconstruct this systematic – and critical – philosophical adventure in order to suggest that it is as philosophy that Marx's work retains its political bite today . In the process, I propose a reinterpretation of Marx's political theory that, once again, is traced through the entirety of Marx's corpus. The young Marx criticized Hegel's separation of the political from society; he then attempted to reduce the political sphere to civil society; the theory of alienated labor was elaborated as a theory of political economy that replaced the political; but in the end, when all three volumes of Capital and the unpublished Grundrisse are considered systematically, Marx sees capitalism as threatened ultimately by its inability to reflect politically on its own presuppositions, and hence its limits.     

Philosophical Diversity and Disagreement

Widespread and lasting consensus has not been philosophy's fate. Indeed, one of philosophy's most striking features is its ability to accommodate “not only different answers to philosophical questions” but also “total disagreement on what questions are philosophical” (Rorty 1995 , 58). It is therefore hardly surprising that philosophers' responses to this metaphilosophical predicament have been similarly varied. This article considers two recent diagnoses of philosophical diversity: Kornblith and Rescher (respectively) claim that taking philosophical disagreement seriously does not lead to metaphilosophical scepticism. The article argues that their confidence is misplaced in so far as both wrongly assume that ordinary, first‐order philosophical practice and second‐order metaphilosophical reflection are separate enterprises.     

Kripke's sole route to the necessary a posteriori

In ‘Kripke on epistemic and metaphysical possibility: two routes to the necessary a posteriori’, Scott Soames identifies two arguments for the existence of necessary a posteriori truths in Naming and Necessity (NN). He argues that Kripke's second argument relies on either of two principles, each of which leads to contradiction. He also claims that it has led to ‘two-dimensionalist’ approaches to the necessary a posteriori which are fundamentally at odds with the insights about meaning and modality expressed in NN. I argue that the alleged second argument is not in NN. I identify the mistakes that lead to Soames' misinterpretation.     

Skookumchuck,Kiidk'yaas,Gibbard: normativity,meaning, and idealization (critical notice of Allan Gibbard Meaning and Normativity)

Gibbard argues that ‘meaning is normative’. He explains the claim with an account of the normative which bases it on the process of planning, taken in part as issuing instructions to oneself. It seems to entail that the right kind of plans make norms. One ought to continue adding with plus rather than quus in a Kripkenstein horror story. I focus on Gibbard's characterization of normativity: it is not what one might expect. The main purpose of this review article is to present the way of understanding normativity that makes most sense of what he says, and which makes some otherwise implausible assertions defensible and perhaps even true. I give reasons for thinking that Gibbard's understanding of normativity-through-plans cannot do the work he wants it to. I also argue that he is onto something right, and it opens interesting new questions.     

SCIENCE AND VALUES: MY DEBT TO ERNAN McMULLIN

Abstract Ernan McMullin's 1982 presidential address to the Philosophy of Science Association dealt with the issue of science and values, arguing that although scientists are rightfully wary of the infiltration of cultural and social values, their work is guided by “epistemic values,” such as the drive for consistency and predictive fertility. McMullin argued that it is the pursuit of these epistemic values that drives nonepistemic values (like religious yearnings) from science. Using the case study of the fate of the nonepistemic value of progress in the history of evolutionary theorizing, I show that, vital though McMullin's thinking was for my own scholarship, in fact the study shows that the connections between epistemic and nonepistemic values in science are more complex than either of us supposed.