Mind - current issue

Supervaluations Debugged

Asher, N., Dever, J., Pappas, C. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

Supervaluational accounts of vagueness have come under assault from Timothy Williamson for failing to provide either a sufficiently classical logic or a disquotational notion of truth, and from Crispin Wright and others for incorporating a notion of higher-order vagueness, via the determinacy operator, which leads to contradiction when combined with intuitively appealing ‘gap principles’. We argue that these criticisms of supervaluation theory depend on giving supertruth an unnecessarily central role in that theory as the sole notion of truth, rather than as one mode of truth. Allowing for the co-existence of supertruth and local truth, we define a notion of local entailment in supervaluation theory, and show that the resulting logic is fully classical and allows for the truth of the gap principles. Finally, we argue that both supertruth and local truth are disquotational, when disquotational principles are properly understood.

There Are No Phenomenal Concepts

Ball, D. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

It has long been widely agreed that some concepts can be possessed only by those who have undergone a certain type of phenomenal experience. Orthodoxy among contemporary philosophers of mind has it that these phenomenal concepts provide the key to understanding many disputes between physicalists and their opponents, and in particular offer an explanation of Mary’s predicament in the situation exploited by Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. I reject the orthodox view; I deny that there are phenomenal concepts. My arguments exploit the sort of considerations that are typically used to motivate externalism about mental content. Although physicalists often appeal to phenomenal concepts to defend their view against the knowledge argument, I argue that this is a mistake. The knowledge argument depends on phenomenal concepts; if there are no phenomenal concepts, then the knowledge argument fails.

Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head

Clark, A. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.

Illusions, Demonstratives, and the Zombie Action Hypothesis

Mole, C. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

David Milner and Melvyn Goodale, and the many psychologists and philosophers who have been influenced by their work, claim that ‘the visual system that gives us our visual experience of the world is not the same system that guides our movements in the world’. The arguments that have been offered for this surprising claim place considerable weight on two sources of evidence — visual form agnosia and the reaching behaviour of normal subjects when picking up objects that induce visual illusions. The present article shows that, if we are careful to consider the possibility that a demonstrative gesture can contribute content to a conscious experience, then neither source of evidence is compelling.

Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Knowledge

Roessler, J. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content plays no explanatory role: we make perceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role of experience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification), but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role of experience intelligible in terms of some such contribution.

The Moral Behaviour of Ethicists: Peer Opinion

Schwitzgebel, E., Rust, J. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

If philosophical moral reflection tends to improve moral behaviour, one might expect that professional ethicists will, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists. One potential source of insight into the moral behaviour of ethicists is philosophers’ opinions about ethicists’ behaviour. At the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, we used chocolate to entice 277 passers-by to complete anonymous questionnaires without their knowing the topic of those questionnaires in advance. Version I of the questionnaire asked respondents to compare, in general, the moral behaviour of ethicists to that of philosophers not specializing in ethics and to non-academics of similar social background. Version II asked respondents similar questions about the moral behaviour of the ethics specialist in their department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after their own. Both versions asked control questions about specialists in metaphysics and epistemology. The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. Whereas ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better.

Beth's Theorem and Deflationism

Bays, T. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:47 PST

In 1999, Jeffrey Ketland published a paper which posed a series of technical problems for deflationary theories of truth. Ketland argued that deflationism is incompatible with standard mathematical formalizations of truth, and he claimed that alternate deflationary formalizations are unable to explain some central uses of the truth predicate in mathematics. He also used Beth’s definability theorem to argue that, contrary to deflationists’ claims, the T-schema cannot provide an ‘implicit definition’ of truth. In this article, I want to challenge this final argument. Whatever other faults deflationism may have, the T-schema does provide an implicit definition of the truth predicate. Or so, at any rate, I shall argue.

Beth's Theorem and Deflationism -- Reply to Bays

Ketland, J. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Is the restricted, consistent, version of the T-scheme sufficient for an ‘implicit definition’ of truth? In a sense, the answer is yes (Haack 1978, Quine 1953). Section 4 of Ketland 1999 mentions this but gives a result saying that the T-scheme does not implicitly define truth in the stronger sense relevant for Beth’s Definability Theorem. This insinuates that the T-scheme fares worse than the compositional truth theory as an implicit definition. However, the insinuation is mistaken. For, as Bays rightly points out, the result given extends to the compositional truth theory also. So, as regards implicit definability, both kinds of truth theory are equivalent. Some further discussion of this topic is mentioned (Gupta 2008, Ketland 2003, McGee 1991), all in agreement with Bays’s analysis.

Roger Crisp on Goodness and Reasons

Stratton-Lake, P. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Roger Crisp distinguishes a positive and a negative aspect of the buck-passing account of goodness (BPA), and argues that the positive account should be dropped in order to avoid certain problems, in particular, that it implies eliminativism about value. This eliminativism involves what I call an ontological claim, the claim that there is no real property of goodness, and an error theory, the claim that all value talk is false. I argue first that the positive aspect of the BPA is necessary to explain the negative aspect. I accept the ontological claim but argue that this does not imply any sort of error theory about value.

Goodness and Reasons: A Response to Stratton-Lake

Crisp, R. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

This article is a response to some of Philip Stratton-Lake’s criticisms of an earlier paper of mine in this journal, on the so-called ‘buck-passing’ account of goodness. Some elucidation is offered of the ‘wrong kind of reasons’ problem and of T. M. Scanlon’s view, and the question is raised of the role of goodness in the view outlined by Stratton-Lake.

Truth and Truthmakers, by David M. Armstrong.

Keller, P. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception, edited by Thomas Baldwin.

Gallagher, S. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Conventionalism, by Yemima Ben-Menahem.

Leng, M. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics, by Sarah Broadie.

Clarke, T. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable, by Anjan Chakravartty.

Handfield, T. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives, by Yuval Dolev.

Le Poidevin, R. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Semantic Relationism, by Kit Fine.

Rattan, G. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love, by Peter Forrest.

Pruss, A. R. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

The Re-enchantment of the World: Art Versus Religion, by Gordon Graham.

Gellman, J. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Aristotle on the Common Sense, by Pavel Gregoric.

Johansen, T. K. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Contradiction in Motion: Hegel's Organic Concept of Life and Value, by Songsuk Susan Hahn.

Sedgwick, S. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

The Metaphysics of Knowledge, by Keith Hossack.

Lockard, M. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm, by F. M. Kamm

Lawlor, R. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Ineffability and Philosophy, by Andre Kukla.

Larvor, B. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

God, the Best, and Evil, by Bruce Langtry.

Schellenberg, J. L. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults, by Jerome Neu.

Walker, M. U. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Knowledge of God, by Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley.

Bishop, J. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World, by Zenon Pylyshyn.

Shapiro, L. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Self-Consciousness, by Sebastian Rodl.

Debus, D. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume 1, by Ernest Sosa.

Morton, A. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Books Received

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Announcements

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association 2010 * University College Dublin, 9-11 July 2010

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST

Index of Mind Vol. 118 * Nos 1-4, 2009

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:19:48 PST