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Hume's claim that we project necessity onto objects we take to be causally related has been influential in contemporary discussions of modality, inspiring deflationary accounts of our modal commitments. Hume is commonly understood as holding that modal projection explains our judging that an effect must follow its cause. This misunderstands the role of projection in Hume's discussions of causation and causal judgement. Projection is a diagnosis of a distinctively philosophical confusion: the commitment to mind-independent necessary connections. In arguing for this, I provide an account of the psychological process that, in Hume's view, underlies projection. This account resolves problems with Hume's projectivism identified by his commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does lying require a speaker to explicitly express something (she believes to be) false, or is it also possible to lie with deceptive implicatures? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of any philosophical definition of lying, several studies have addressed this question empirically in recent years. Their findings, however, seem to be in conflict. This paper reports an experiment with 222 participants that investigates the hypothesis that these conflicting results are due to variation regarding whether or not the speaker's intention to deceive and the implicated content are made explicit. It is found that the presence versus the absence of such explicitness has a strong impact on people's lie judgements, and can thus account for the conflicting results in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005 , 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010 , 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at issue in the dispute is Burge's acceptance, and McDowell's rejection, of the 'Cartesian idealization' of mind as a self-contained system. Burge's case against disjunctivism rests on the assumption of a clearly demarcated boundary between mind and world, a picture of the mind that McDowell's philosophy reacts against. This boundary is required for scientific, causal explanations of perceptual processing because it is a simplifying assumption that helps present scientists with a clearly demarcated object of investigation. Concurring with McDowell, I conclude that philosophers need not carve up their objects of investigation in the same way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with their theories. Finally, philosophers are more confident in rejecting theories to the extent that they have several (intuitive) counter examples involving diverse cases. I argue that these facts are better explained by philosophers' using intuitions as evidence than by any plausible contrary explanations. I further argue that aspects of philosophical practice that my thesis may initially seem ill-suited to explain are in fact unsurprising whether or not my thesis is true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Raz employs a methodology according to which we can learn truths about the nature of law by examining our concept of law. This article is devoted to interpreting and critiquing this idea, which I call the 'concept-nature nexus'. I propose three interpretations of the concept-nature nexus that attempt to make sense of it, and expose the flaws in each. The first employs immodest conceptual analysis and is problematic for that reason. The second I call the 'spotlight view', and I argue that it makes sense of the concept-nature nexus only by defining the thing in question in a stipulative way that undermines the enterprise. The third relies on the idea that our concepts make the law what it is; I argue that this could make our concepts relevant to understanding law's nature, but would involve prioritising the views of the legal officials with the power to make law what it is, which conflicts with Raz's approach. I conclude that, in the absence of some further account of the concept-nature nexus, we should abandon it. In closing, I briefly explore methodological possibilities that require only a concept-concept or a nature-nature nexus, but suggest that these face their own problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the nature of reflective intuitions that are used to ground conceptual analysis in philosophy. It is said that the philosophical method used by experimental philosophy, which involves empirical tests of the intuitions of multiple people, is not less accurate than is extended philosophical reflection on intuitions. A Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and a test of persons' need for cognition (NFC) are said to show that reflection does not improve the accuracy of intuitions.

The article discusses methods in ontology and modal questions, weighing the relative merits of experimental philosophy and conceptual analysis. The author argues that a constitutivist approach, which uses thought experiments and ties semantic rules to modal realities, should be used alongside experimental philosophy.

According to Lewis, causal claims must be analysed in terms of counterfactual conditionals, and these in turn are understood in terms of relations of comparative similarity among single concrete possible worlds. Lewis also claims that there is no trans-world causation because there is no way to make sense of trans-world counterfactuals without automatically making them come out to be false. In this paper I argue against this claim. I show how to make sense of trans-world counterfactuals in a non-trivial way that can make them come out to be true, by appealing to relations of comparative similarity among concrete possible worlds (i.e., assuming modal realism). I argue that either merely making such sense of a relevant counterfactual is not enough to have causation, or that Lewis' modal realism must be given up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine a distinctive kind of injustice which arises when people are maltreated in their capacity as potential conveyors of knowledge. Extant discussions of testimonial injustice usually assume that the injustice occurs when an audience ignores the claims made by a testifier. This assumption obscures the fact that there are occasions where the best framework for thinking about testimonial injustice is that of inappropriately rejecting, not ignoring, those claims; the injustice differs in these two kinds of case. Light is thrown on the injustice involved in inappropriate rejection by examining the epistemic import of the distinctive second-person interrelations in play in such testimonial interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I criticise an influential version of associative theory of political obligation and I offer a reformulation of the theory in 'quasi-voluntarist' terms. I argue that although unable by itself to solve the problem of political obligation, my quasi-voluntarist associative model can play an important role in solving this problem. Moreover, the model teaches us an important methodological lesson about the way in which we should think about the question of political obligation. Finally, I suggest that the quasi-voluntarist associative model is particularly attractive because it manages to combine the main thrust of the traditional associative view with the most attractive feature of transactional theories, while avoiding at the same time the main problems that afflict each of these two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lenman's 'argument from cluelessness' against consequentialism is that a significant percentage of the consequences of our actions are wholly unknowable, so that when it comes to assessing the moral quality of our actions, we are without a clue. I distinguish the argument from cluelessness from traditional epistemic objections to consequentialism. The argument from cluelessness should be no more problematic for consequentialism than the argument from epistemological scepticism should be for metaphysical realism. This puts those who would reject consequentialism on the ground of cluelessness in an awkward philosophical position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One alleged advantage of credit theories of knowledge is that they are capable of explaining why knowledge is essentially more valuable than mere true belief. I argue that credit theories in fact provide grounds for denying this claim and therefore are incapable of overcoming the 'value problem' in epistemology. Much of the discussion revolves around the question of whether true belief is always epistemically valuable. I also consider to what extent, if any, my main argument should worry credit theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]