Search

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper's core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines Timothy Williamson’s claim that knowledge figures essentially in explanations of behavior. Since this claim implies that knowledge is causally efficacious in bringing about actions, it plays a key role in Williamson’s case for knowledge being a mental state. I first discuss a central example of Williamson, in which a burglar ransacks a house. I dispute Williamson’s claim that the best explanation of the burglar’s behavior invokes the burglar’s state of knowledge as he enters the house, by arguing that there is a better explanation that only mentions the burglar’s beliefs. Since the reasons that explain the superiority of my proposed explanation generalize, I conclude that one does not have to invoke a subject’s state of knowledge to explain behavior. Nevertheless, Williamson’s explanation is superior to belief-based explanations if one only considers facts that obtain before the action takes place. In the final part of the paper, I argue that this fact does not help Williamson’s case for considering knowledge as a mental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is knowledge-how, or “practical” knowledge, a species of knowledge-that, or “theoretical” knowledge? There is no comfortable position to take in the debate around this question. On the one hand, there are counterexamples against the anti-intellectualist thesis that practical knowledge is best analysed as an ability. They show that having an ability to ϕ is not necessary for knowing how to ϕ. On the other hand, the intellectualist analysis of practical knowledge as a subspecies of theoretical knowledge is threatened by its own set of counterexamples, which convincingly establish that practical knowledge lacks many of the typical characteristics of theoretical knowledge. Most strikingly it does not even appear to require a belief. In this paper, I develop an account of practical knowledge that avoids these counterexamples. It also manages to preserve both the status of such knowledge as a cognitive achievement and its apparently close conceptual relation to abilities. I start with the counterexamples against the necessity of abilities for practical knowledge and show that they fail because they underestimate the cognitive demands of attempts. I then make use of the logic of dispositions to bridge the gap that counterexamples against the necessity of abilities for practical knowledge open. It is argued that, instead of the ability to ϕ, it is a specific disposition to have the ability to ϕ that constitutes practical knowledge about ϕ. The resulting theory is an anti-intellectualist position that preserves essential intellectualist motivations and thus should be satisfactory for proponents of both views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we provide a psychological explanation for 'grounding observations'-observations that are thought to provide evidence that there exists a relation of ground. Our explanation does not appeal to the presence of any such relation. Instead, it appeals to certain evolved cognitive mechanisms, along with the traditional modal relations of supervenience, necessitation and entailment. We then consider what, if any, metaphysical conclusions we can draw from the obtaining of such an explanation, and, in particular, if it tells us anything about whether we ought to posit a relation of ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories (instead of consensus on a single theory), to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to cast some light on the circumstances in which one's finding something just obvious is an epistemically acceptable belief-state, perhaps a state of knowledge, even when the believer is unable to justify the belief. Using Peacocke's theory of concepts, I will argue that the relevant belief-state can result from the activation of reliable belief-forming dispositions which are due to the possession of certain concepts. The strategy is to concentrate on belief in a simple truth of Euclidean plane geometry and then to consider general implications. The layout of this paper between introduction and conclusion is as follows. Sections 2 and 3 set out the conceptual apparatus; section 4 uses the apparatus to explain the belief; section 5 concerns the epistemic appraisal of the belief; section 6 addresses the main Quinean objection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will discuss Kim’s powerful explanatory exclusion argument against the causal efficacy of mental properties. Baker and Burge misconstrue Kim’s challenge if they understand it as being based on a purely metaphysical understanding of causation that has no grounding in an epistemological analysis of our successful scientific practices. As I will show, the emphasis on explanatory practices can only be effective in answering Kim if it is understood as being part of the dual-explanandum strategy. Furthermore, a fundamental problem of the contemporary debate about mental causation consists in the fact that all sides take very different examples to be paradigmatic for the relation between psychological and neurobiological explanations. Even if we should expect some alignment in the explanatory scope of neurobiology and psychology/folk-psychology, there is no reason to expect that all mental explanations are exempted by physical explanations, since they do not in general explain the same phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first section of this paper, I articulate Jaegwon Kim's argument against emergent downward causation. In the second section, I canvas four responses to Kim's argument and argue that each fails. In the third section, I show that emergent downward causation does not, contra Kim, entail overdetermination. I argue that supervenience of emergent upon base properties is not sufficient for nomological causal relations between emergent and base properties. What sustains Kim's argument is rather the claim that emergent properties realized by base properties can have no causal powers distinct from those base properties. I argue that this is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An attractive admirer of George Bernard Shaw once wrote to him with a not-so modest proposal: ``You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.'' Shaw replied: ``What if the child inherits my body and your brains?'' What if, indeed? Shaw's retort is interesting not because it reveals a grasp of elementary genetics, but rather because it suggests his grasp of an interesting and important principle of axiology. Since the brainy but ugly Shaw and his beautiful but apparently dim admirer both fall short of the ideal, she suggests that the best thing would be to genetically recombine his intelligence with her beauty. But what then would be the value of another genetic possibility: that of recombining his ugliness with her stupidity? Underlining the prompted inference is a fundamental principle of the theory of value which, perhaps surprisingly, has so far gone largely unnoticed in the ethical literature. I will call it the principle of recombinant values. It is the purpose of this paper to formulate the principle in a way which makes its content obvious and accessible; to motivate the principle philosophically; to both disentangle it from, and exhibit its relations to, principles of evaluative reasoning; to show how this purely qualitative principle meshes with the infamous thesis of additivity of value; and finally, to use it to ground a rather simple but quite general theory of the intrinsic value of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]