Variations on incremental interpretation

The strict competence hypothesis has sparked a small dialogue among several researchers attempting to understand its ramifications for human sentence processing and incremental interpretation in particular. In this paper, we review the dialogue, reconstructing the arguments in an attempt to make them more uniform and crisp, and provide our own analyses of certain of the issues that arise. We argue that strict competence, because it requires a synchronous computation mechanism, may actually lead to more complex, rather than simpler, models of incremental interpretation. Asynchronous computation, which is arguably both psychologically more plausible and conceptually more basic, allows for incremental interpretation to fall out naturally, without additional machinery for interpreting partial constituents. We show that this is true regardless of whether the presumed interpretation mechanism is top-down or bottom-up, contra previous conclusions in the literature, and propose a particular implementation of some of these ideas using a novel representation based on tree-adjoining grammars.The research in this paper was supported in part by grant IRI-9157996 from the National Science Foundation to the first author. The authors would like to thank Fernando Pereira, Edward Stabler, and Mark Steedman for discussions on the topic of this paper and for their comments on previous drafts.     

Toward a Truly Social Epistemology: Babbage,the Division of Mental Labor,and the Possibility of Socially Distributed Warrant

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized.     

Expanding the scope of reflective knowledge: From MINE to OURS

Ernest Sosa has suggested that we distinguish between animal knowledge, on the one hand, and reflective knowledge, on the other. Animal knowledge is direct, immediate, and foundationally structured, while reflective knowledge involves a knower's higher‐order awareness of her own mental states, and is structured by relations of coherence. Although Sosa's distinction is extremely appealing, it also faces serious problems. In particular, the sorts of processes that would be required for reflective knowledge, as Sosa understands it, are not processes that are instantiated in human cognition. I argue that the problems facing Sosa's notion of reflective knowledge stem from treating human cognitive processes individualistically. They stem from what I will term Sosa's perspective of methodologically individualistic noetic explanation—or MINE. I suggest that these problems disappear if we expand the scope of what counts as cognitive processes to include socially distributed cognitive processes, if we adopt a framework of other‐derived united reflective self‐evaluation—or OURS. In other words, I'll suggest that a solution to the problems facing the distinction between animal and reflective knowledge may be found in a shift of perspective from MINE to OURS.     

A partial defense of intuition on naturalist grounds

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism.     

Personal responsibility and middle knowledge: a challenge for the Molinist

In this paper, I develop and discuss an argument intended to demonstrate that the Molinist notion of middle knowledge, and in particular the concept of counterfactuals of freedom, is incompatible with the notion of personal responsibility (for created creatures). In Sect. 1, I discuss the Molinist concepts of middle knowledge and counterfactuals of freedom. In Sect. 2, I develop an argument (henceforth, the Transfer of Negative Responsibility Argument, or TNRA) to the effect that, due to their construal of the concepts of middle knowledge and counterfactuals of freedom, Molinists are not entitled to the notion that individuals are personally responsible—even for those actions that they freely perform. I then discuss the only two promising strategies for rejecting the argument in Sects. 3 and 4. Finally, in Sect. 5, I contend that, although TNRA may be unsuccessful as an internal argument against the Molinist, either of the possible strategies for rejecting TNRA poses a difficulty for the Molinist. Both response strategies force the Molinist into adopting a popular compatibilist strategy for rejecting a common negative argument against compatibilism. Thus, if Molinism represents a libertarian—i.e., incompatibilist—account of human freedom (as, e.g., Flint claims in his recent Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, noting that libertarianism is one of the “twin bases of Molinism”), then the discussion of TNRA poses, if not a dilemma, at the very least a serious challenge for the Molinist.     

The Turing Test as Interactive Proof

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test based on indistinguishability of verbal behavior as a replacement for the question “Can machines think?” Since then, two mutually contradictory but well‐founded attitudes towards the Turing Test have arisen in the philosophical literature. On the one hand is the attitude that has become philosophical conventional wisdom, viz., that the Turing Test is hopelessly flawed as a sufficient condition for intelligence, while on the other hand is the overwhelming sense that were a machine to pass a real live full‐fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence. The arguments against the sufficiency of the Turing Test for determining intelligence rely on showing that some extra conditions are logically necessary for intelligence beyond the behavioral properties exhibited by an agent under a Turing Test. Therefore, it cannot follow logically from passing a Turing Test that the agent is intelligent. I argue that these extra conditions can be revealed by the Turing Test, so long as we allow a very slight weakening of the criterion from one of logical proof to one of statistical proof under weak realizability assumptions. The argument depends on the notion of interactive proof developed in theoretical computer science, along with some simple physical facts that constrain the information capacity of agents. Crucially, the weakening is so slight as to make no conceivable difference from a practical standpoint. Thus, the Gordian knot between the two opposing views of the sufficiency of the Turing Test can be cut.     

Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief-forming processes

Much of what we know results from information sources on which we epistemically rely. This fact about epistemic reliance, however, stands in tension with a very powerful intuition governing knowledge, an intuition that Pritchard (e.g., 2010) has termed the “ability intuition,” the idea that a believer's “reliable cognitive faculties are the most salient part of the total set of causal factors that give rise to [their] believing the truth” (Vaesen, 2011, p. 518; compare Greco, 2003; 2009; 2010). In this paper I suggest that this tension may indeed be ineliminable. I proceed by canvassing some representative attempts to reconcile epistemic reliance and the ability intuition. In doing so, I suggest that all of these attempts founder on one or the other of two elements of what I've previously described (Shieber, 2013, 2015) as a “personalist presumption” in discussions of social epistemology: an excessive focus on (i) reliability filters within the persons who are the recipients of information or (ii) on reliable truth-tracking and -conveying abilities in the persons who are the transmitters of information. In conclusion, I suggest how best to resolve the tension: by abandoning the ability intuition.     

Epistemological Contextualism and the Knowledge Account of Assertion

In this paper, I take up an argument advanced by Keith DeRose (Philosophical Review, 111:167–203, 2002) that suggests that the knowledge account of assertion provides the basis of an argument in favor of contextualism. I discuss the knowledge account as the conjunction of two theses—a thesis claiming that knowledge is sufficient to license assertion KA and one claiming that knowledge is necessary to license assertion AK. Adducing evidence from Stalnaker’s account of assertion, from conversational practice, and from arguments often raised in favor of the knowledge account, I suggest that neither the AK nor the KA theses are plausible. That is, I argue that the knowledge account of assertion to which DeRose appeals is in fact not suitable as an account of assertion. Given that DeRose’s argument stands and falls with the knowledge account, I claim that the argument therefore fails.

On the Tenability of Non-Factualism with Regard to the A Priori

In a number of recent articles, Hartry Field has attempted to reclaim the a priori for his own brand of non-factualist epistemology by introducing a non-epistemic notion of the a priori based purely upon the position of individual beliefs within belief systems. In this article we examine (i) whether a robust enough notion of aprioricity is available to Field, and, by extension, to the radical empiricist and (ii) whether it is possible to connect up the non-epistemic notion of aprioricity with questions about the epistemic status of those beliefs that happen to be a priori in the non-epistemic sense.