Abstract Colonial slavery supercharged Europe’s prosperity in the eighteenth century. It was legally sanctioned, supported by state powers, and largely condoned by the public. Against this backdrop, Kant observed that “Negro slaves” functioned as money in trade, their number measured a nation’s wealth, and the slavery business was therefore intertwined with a competitive intra-European politics. Meanwhile, he racialized the “Negro” as uniquely suited for slave labor, indirectly benefited from such labor, refrained from calling colonial slavery an unjust institution, and occasionally signaled anti-abolitionist sympathies. Given these facts, what is the prospect of a deracialized, radical Kantian liberalism?
Abstract Non-naturalists claim that normative properties are sui generis , attitude-independent, and irreducible to natural properties. A common objection is that although we shape our lives around normative properties, non-naturalism rules out any plausible explanation of how this is possible. Non-naturalism seems to imply that we are hopelessly alienated from the normative. Our goal here is to better understand this worry and use constitutivist resources to develop a novel response. The basic thought is that we are constituted—as deeply social agents—to be gripped by normative properties. So while our constitution does not ground normativity, it grounds our non-alienation from it.
Abstract Perceptual experiences can be multimodal in weaker or stronger senses. The strongest form is often attributed to flavor perception, since flavors are type-multimodal features: features belonging to a type with no instances that can be experienced through a single sense. This paper accepts that flavors are type-multimodal but challenges the claim that flavor perception involves a stronger form of multimodality than ordinary audiovisual or visuo-tactile experiences. This is because there is a plausible reductive view of content of flavor experiences that is consistent with the philosophical and empirical evidence for the multimodality of flavor perception.
Abstract Ordinary thought and talk accepts epistemic evaluation as genuinely relevant to or bearing on what and how we ought to believe, all things considered. In this article, I treat our pretheoretical commitment to the normative significance of epistemic evaluation as a kind of datum that epistemic theorizing ought not merely accommodate but explain. I argue that familiar versions of two popular sorts of explanations are not well-positioned to fully vindicate our pretheoretical commitment to the genuine normative significance of epistemic evaluation. And I develop an alternative, fully vindicating explanation of this datum.
There is a straightforward conceptual distinction between “relational” and “nonrelational” obligations (obligations that are not conceived in explicitly relational terms). 1 Unlike nonrelational obligations, it is intrinsic to relational obligations that they are owed to others. In addition to the person subject to the obligation, the obligor , there is also an obligee (or obligees) to whom the obligation is owed. With nonrelational obligations, there need only be an obligor; no obligee is required. Similarly, when a nonrelational obligation is violated, something wrong has been done. When, however, the violated obligation is relational, not only is a ( pro tanto ) wrong done, someone to whom the obligation is owed is wronged.
Abstract In this review essay, I begin by considering Adler’s commitments, in defending his favored form of welfarism, regarding how we should conceive of well-being across human lives and account for this well-being in the social evaluation of outcomes and policies. Then I turn to Adler’s strategy for comparing his welfarist model(s) with traditional cost–benefit analysis in practical contexts of fatality risk regulation.
Conciliationism holds that it is rational to modify one's beliefs in the face of disagreement. But extant conciliatory norms yield incorrect results in cases involving excessive confidence-cases in which one's interlocutors are sure, or almost sure, that their opinions are correct. After explaining the problem of excessive confidence, I show that a Bayesian approach to Conciliationism handles the problem elegantly and effectively. Further, it has desirable-indeed essential-features, including the ability to (i) contend with multiple interlocutors, (ii) deal with gradations in competence, (iii) incorporate ubiquitous interdependence, and (iv) account for critical contextual features of cases of disagreement.
Neopragmatism is what local expressivism becomes when it is fully generalized and globalized. One of its attractions is its promise to demystify long-standing metaphysical puzzles by shifting the focus from ontology to language. Among current neopragmatists, there is an important divide. Members of one group hold that we cannot explain language without making use of normative notions such as reasons or entitlements. Members of the other group deny this. In this paper, I defend the naturalistic version of neopragmatism from arguments coming from proponents of the normative version.
Despite the centrality of the achievement thesis within standpoint epistemology, thereare gaps in the literature on the epistemic significance of consciousness-raising and itsrole in providing access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible. To addressthese gaps, I argue that consciousness-raising is a transformative experience, one thatmakes us a different person. If, as the standpoint epistemologist suggests, what weknow is sensitive to facts about who we are, then to change what we know we mustchange who we are.
I develop in this paper some epistemological themes inspired by the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi famously thought the method of nonviolence he'd pioneered-satyagraha, as he called it-a powerful means of effecting change in the political domain, but he also thought it a way of life, applicable in the warp and woof of everyday, interpersonal interactions. I will investigate here what it might look like to practice the way of Gandhian nonviolence in one's everyday epistemic interactions. There will be connections between this sort of epistemic practice and some main themes in contemporary work on intellectual humility.
Cases of identity confusion raise a challenge for convention-based meta-semantics. David Lewis's influential account of convention, as it applies to language use, fails to distinguish, among two candidate languages, the one used by the population in question. The problem extends to Paul Grice's influential account of sentence meaning.
Anil Gomes argues in The Practical Self that we must have faith that we are doxastic agents, sustained by commitment to an objective social world. I argue Gomes needs evidence he denies himself. Descartes, whom Gomes rejects, provides what's missing: we gain defeasible evidence both for objectivity and agency by perceiving them clearly. I reconstruct overlooked Cartesian insights, including his Commonsense Realism. Finally, while Gomes invokes Lichtenberg's "lightning" to question doxastic agency, I show that Lichtenberg equally addressed passivity in creative insight. The lesson: we need evidence for passivity no less than agency and objectivity-and Cartesian clarity provides it.
This paper reevaluates Walton's and Radford's claims about fiction-directed emotions by proposing to interpret their arguments through a motivational theory of emotion, rather than the cognitive framework typically employed. I first demonstrate that no cognitive theory justifies their conclusions. I then argue that a motivational account can alternatively support either Radford's or Walton's position, depending on whether we accept that emotions toward fiction involve action tendencies, as ordinary emotions do. If they do, the motivational theory justifies Radford's claim about the irrationality of fiction-directed emotions. If, by contrast, we deny that emotions for fiction involve readiness for action, the motivational account favors Walton's view of quasi-emotions. After developing this line of argument, I revisit textual evidence from Radford's and Walton's works that aligns with my interpretation.
In this paper, I argue that the literature on victims' duties to resist their own oppression has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of victims and how this affects their duties. The main aim of the paper is to introduce considerations and complications-informed by an intersectional analysis, and particularly the concept of privilege-that must be taken into account when determining how to assign duties to resist. I argue that failure to recognize these nuances results in an overcautiousness when it comes to assigning duties of resistance, and that a blanket reluctance to assign such duties is of most detriment to the most marginalized.
The paradox of dogmatism is an argument to the effect that any subject who knows that P can thereby know that any counterevidence is misleading and, therefore, the subject ought to ignore that counterevidence. Regulative epistemology is the effort to develop principles to guide inquiry. The paradox of dogmatism is not typically understood as a regulative problem. But that is an illuminating way to view it. Understood that way, this paper offers a solution grounded in an epistemic policy of "following the argument wherever it leads."
Philosophers are often embarrassed by philosophy, or at least write as if they are. But what should we make of this connection between philosophy and embarrassment? Taking a cue from sociologist Erving Goffman, this paper treats embarrassment in general as revealing of social phenomena and then considers the case of philosophical embarrassment from that point of view. As we will see, this allows us to formulate and explore several hypotheses about the discipline of philosophy, why it might be rational to be embarrassed by it, and how this embarrassment might be managed or overcome.
Proponents of modal knowledge accounts (safety and sensitivity) concur that one crucial advantage of their accounts is that they solve the so-called lottery problem-the problem of explaining why "lottery beliefs" based merely on statistical evidence do not constitute knowledge. Contra this claim, I argue that epistemic judgments about lottery beliefs do not consistently track what occurs in a specified set of nonactual possibilities. Thus, modal knowledge accounts cannot properly explain beliefs based merely on statistical evidence. Finally, I argue that these beliefs can be better accommodated by a rival theory of modal accounts-namely, explanationism.
The Practical Self begins with Descartes's withdrawal into isolation. And it ends where the Meditations end: in a world of others, offering objections and replies, holding one another to account. But its route from self-consciousness to objectivity is decidedly not Cartesian-it denies that we can establish a connection between self-consciousness and the world on theoretical grounds alone. Instead, it argues that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking and that our assent to this claim is sustained by practices which relate us to an objective world. Elliot Samuel Paul's thoughtful comments identify two gaps in this argument and argue that Descartes's account of agency and objectivity is needed to bridge them. The route from self-consciousness and objectivity needs supplementation with Cartesian resources.
Arguments challenging the existence of free will frequently share a common structure, relying on variants of a principle we call Closure, according to which having no choice about a truth is preserved under entailment. We show that, under plausible assumptions, Closure is valid if and only if the 'no choice' operator is intensional. By framing the debate in terms of the intensionality of this operator, this paper illuminates previously underappreciated constraints on defenses of Closure-based arguments against the existence of free will.
This article offers critique of Pascoe and Stripling's The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, which frames environmental disasters as a site of ethical and epistemic openness that enable social transformation. Although sympathetic to their justice-oriented framework, I argue that it implicitly relies on the continued epistemic labor of the most structurally marginalized. Drawing centrally on the work of Maria Lugones and Sara Ahmed, I argue that there is potentially catastrophic loses in the wake of environmental crisis that justify refusing epistemic solidarity with more privileged members of society. I contend that the ambiguity about refusal highlights a potential for Pascoe and Stripling's framework to unintentionally be epistemically exploitative.
