Close Strangers

Nationalism is normally directed against closest neighbors. This simple fact -- The Hated Neighbor Truism -- has important consequences, mostly overlooked in moral debates on nationalism. First, it undercuts the defense of nationalism based on the (alleged) moral worth of proximity: since nationalists hate closest neighbors, they cannot consistently rely upon such defense. Second, it blocks the usual theoretical contrast of nationalism with cosmopolitanism: the main enemies of the nationalist are not indiscriminate cosmopolitans, but the neighbor-lovers, call them macro-regionalists. Finally, it suggests that the proper response to nationalism is a graded, region-sensitive moderate cosmopolitanism.     

Is Color-dispositionalism Nasty and Unecological?

This article is a brief presentation and defense of response-dispositionalist intentionalism against a family of objections. The view claims that for a surface to have an objective stable color is to have a disposition to cause in normal observers a response, namely, intentional phenomenal-color experience. The objections, raised recently by M. Johnston, B. Stroud, and by Byrne and Hilbert, claim that any dispositionalist view is unfair to the naive perceiver-thinker, saddles her with massive error and represents her as maladaptated to her environment. The paper reconstructs the main line of thought in favor of response-intentionalism and argues that it is in fact rather charitable and fair to na?ve cognizers, and also avoids a cluster of related objections.     

Science,commonsense and philosophy: A defense of continuity (a critique of "network apriorism")

A popular line in philosophy championed by Jackson and his followers analyses concepts as networks of propositions. It takes even network-propositions characterizing ordinary empirically applicable concepts to be a priori, in contrast to statements of empirical science. This is meant to guarantee both the autonomy of conceptual analysis, and its substantial and informative character. It is argued here, to the contrary, that empirically applicable and entrenched concepts owe the acceptability of their own network precisely to its empirical pedigree. Promoting an empirical proposition into a network proposition does not make it ultimately a priori: no matter how entrenched the network is, it owes its ultimate justification to its empirical pedigree. Autonomy from experience and informativeness clash with each other: the stipulative "knowledge" is a priori in a weak sense, but not informative and substantial, the factual knowledge is substantial but not a priori .     

National Identities in Transition

Studies in East European Thought -     

Secondary and Tertiary Qualities: Semantics and Response-Dependence

Abstract: Secondary and tertiary qualities are plausibly explained along dispositionalist lines. Concepts of such qualities are response-dependent, denoting properties that are partly mind/brain-dependent. Unfortunately, dispositionalism is hard to square with extant versions of naturalistic theories of representation. In particular the standard naturalistic (indicational) semantics of representational content cannot handle the question from either the subjectivist or the dispositional viewpoint. The paper proposes a remedy: the problem can be solved in a smooth and natural way, provided that we revise and supplement the standard semantics in a rather obvious fashion, by allowing the mind/brain-involving properties to figure within it.