In this paper, I offer an analysis of fitting attitudes in terms of good reasoning inspired by how intuitionists understand the notion of truth. On this account, we can determine all the fitting attitudes based on the good patterns of reasoning, a notion used in several other normative analyses. Further, I argue against an account of good reasoning in terms of fittingness. These results show that good reasoning occupies a special role in the normative realm.
The paper argues that Crispin Wright’s account of transmission failure cannot be correct as it stands. For, it requires that reasoners are warranted to believe all the authenticity conditions for their evidence relative to the premises of their inferences. There are, however, cases in which there are pairs of such authenticity conditions such that one cannot be warranted to believe both.
We show that there is a version of dualism—and even of substance dualism—on which (a) the physical is causally closed, (b) there is no systemic overdetermination, (c) mental states are not physical states, and yet (d) mental states have physical effects. This shows that commonly-made claims about dualism about causal closure are not quite correct. The theory offered can be seen as a version of Aquinas’s theory of sensory consciousness, where sensory consciousness is partly constituted by the soul’s informing of the body and partly by the states of physical organs.
It is often thought that the phenomenon of rational inquiry for the sake of confirmation poses a challenge for Friedman’s “Don’t Believe and Inquire” norm (DBI). It is also often thought that, insofar as that phenomenon really does pose this challenge, it also challenges the claim that inquiry is essentially question-directed and driven by interrogative attitudes. This paper develops a new argument against DBI grounded in the phenomenon of confirmation-driven inquiry. This argument can presuppose that interrogative attitudes are essential to inquiry.
I consider the common usage of emojis as dogwhistles in light of the debate between pictorial and lexical accounts of emoji semantics. I argue that many dogwhistle emojis crucially rely on depiction to retain plausible deniability—a key feature of dogwhistles.
Pascal’s wager faces many challenges. Chief amongst them are the objection from mixed strategies (MS) and many gods (MG). One way of responding to these worries invokes unorthodox decision-theoretic frameworks such as surreal decision theory, lexicographic utility theory, or relative utility theory. All three of these approaches side-step the two objections cited above. Yet all three are vulnerable to a new worry we refer to as the parable of the penniless pilgrim. Namely, information informs decision-making and, as a result, information is of value. Yet in the context of Pascal’s wager, information pertaining to various religious hypotheses often has infinite value. Consequently, an individual will often be willing to give up any amount of material goods in order to perform an experiment.
Davidson's non-normative argument for the claim that inquiry does not aim at truth has not received much attention in the epistemological literature of the past two decades. As far as I know, only Christopher Hookway (2012) and Christoph Kelp (2021) have discussed it. Moreover, they have both rejected it, on similar grounds. After reconstructing Davidson's argument, I turn to Hookway's and Kelp's criticisms and show why Davidson's argument can in fact resist them.
