{"title":"Suspension of Judgment, Non-additivity, and Additivity of Possibilities","authors":"Aldo Filomeno","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00590-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00590-7","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In situations where we ignore everything but the space of possibilities, we ought to suspend judgment—that is, remain agnostic—about which of these possibilities is the case. This means that we cannot sum our degrees of belief in different possibilities, something that has been formalised as an axiom of non-additivity. Consistent with this way of representing our ignorance, I defend a doxastic norm that recommends that we should nevertheless follow a certain additivity of possibilities: even if we cannot sum degrees of belief in different possibilities, we should be more confident in larger groups of possibilities. It is thus shown that, in the type of situation considered (in so-called “classical ignorance”, i.e. “behind a thin veil of ignorance”), it is epistemically rational for advocates of suspending judgment to endorse this comparative confidence, while on the other hand it is shown that, even in classical ignorance, no stronger belief—such as a precise uniform probability distribution—is warranted.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"40 1","pages":"21 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140714099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intention, Action, and De Se Indexicality","authors":"Robert Francescotti","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00588-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00588-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The view that first-person (<i>de se</i>) mental content is essential to the explanation of action in general is a strong essential indexicality thesis. A weaker essential indexicality claim is that <i>de se</i> mental content is an essential ingredient of <i>intentional</i> action. An argument by Bermúdez for the former thesis and an argument from Babb in support of the latter are discussed in Section 2, and for reasons presented there it seems that both arguments are unsound and the conclusions are false as well. However, the discussion of their arguments helps us identify a certain class of intentional action, and an apparently very large class, the members of which are guaranteed to have <i>de se</i> origin. This class of intentional action is identified in Sections 3 and 4 and it is shown that necessarily, any member of this class has its origin in indexical, specifically, <i>de se</i> mental content.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"40 1","pages":"95 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140243082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fragmentalism and Tensed Truths","authors":"Xiaochen Qi","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00592-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00592-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Fine’s discussion of McTaggart’s paradox and tense realism may be the most significant progress in the philosophy of time in recent years. Fine reformulates McTaggart’s paradox and develops a novel realist theory called fragmentalism. According to Fine, one major advantage of fragmentalism is its ability to account for the connection between reality and tensed truths. I will argue that fragmentalism cannot give an adequate account of this connection. The reason is that while external relations between fragments are required by this kind of account, these relations are not allowed in fragmentalism.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"40 1","pages":"155 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143108347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identity Theory and Falsifiability","authors":"Anders Søgaard","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00587-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00587-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>I identify a class of arguments against multiple realization (MR): <i>BookofSand</i> arguments. The arguments are in their general form successful under reasonably uncontroversial assumptions, but this, on the other hand, turns the table on identity theory: If arguments from MR can always be refuted by <i>BookofSand</i> arguments, is identity theory falsifiable? In the absence of operational demarcation criteria, it is not. I suggest a parameterized formal demarcation principle for brain state/process types and show how it can be used to identify previously unconsidered contenders for evidence for MR, e.g., binary classification, division, and sorting. For these to be <i>actual</i> instances of MR, the corresponding psychological kinds must be verifiably, relevantly similar. I also briefly discuss possible linguistic, behavioral, and experimental demarcation criteria for psychological kinds.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 4","pages":"737 - 748"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12136-024-00587-2.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140429976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pritchard, Luck, Risk, and a New Problem for Safety-Based Accounts of Knowledge","authors":"James Simpson","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00591-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00591-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper, I develop a serious new dilemma involving necessary truths for safety-based theories of knowledge, a dilemma that I argue safety theorists cannot resolve or avoid by relativizing safety to either the subject’s basis or method of belief formation in close worlds or to a set of related or sufficiently similar propositions. I develop this dilemma primarily in conversation with Duncan Pritchard’s well-known, oft-modeled safety-based theories of knowledge. I show that Pritchard’s well-regarded anti-luck virtue theory of knowledge and his recently proposed (allegedly superior) anti-risk virtue theory of knowledge clearly succumb to the dilemma, and so they are inadequate as they stand. If Pritchard’s safety-based theories of knowledge are shown to be inadequate by the dilemma that is developed in this paper, then a number of other safety-based theories of knowledge (e.g., Beddor and Pavese’s, Luper’s, Dutant’s, early Pritchard’s, and others) look to be in jeopardy in this connection as well.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"40 1","pages":"43 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140428654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Epistemology and Epidemiology","authors":"Benjamin W. McCraw","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00589-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00589-0","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this “contagion model,” beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman’s epidemiological approach in terms of epistemic trust. By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren’t the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier’s (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her “pathologies of trust.” The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such “pathological” epistemic trust inspired by Baier’s work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 4","pages":"627 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140436837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Existence Is Not Relativistically Invariant—Part 1: Meta-ontology","authors":"Florian Marion","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00586-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00586-3","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Metaphysicians who are aware of modern physics usually follow Putnam (1967) in arguing that Special Theory of Relativity is incompatible with the view that what exists is only what exists <i>now</i> or <i>presently</i>. Partisans of presentism (the motto ‘only present things exist’) had very difficult times since, and no presentist theory of time seems to have been able to satisfactorily counter the objection raised from Special Relativity. One of the strategies offered to the presentist consists in <i>relativizing</i> existence to inertial frames. This unfashionable strategy has been accused of counterfeiting, since the meaning of the concept of existence would be incompatible with its relativization. Therefore, existence could only be relativistically invariant. In this paper, I shall examine whether such an accusation hits its target, and I will do this by examining whether the different criteria of existence that have been suggested by the Philosophical Tradition from Plato onwards imply that existence cannot be relativized.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 3","pages":"479 - 503"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140448260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dead Past, Ad hocness, and Zombies","authors":"Ernesto Graziani","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00585-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00585-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—<i>DPGB-theory</i>—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present time). In this paper, I examine the additional arguments offered by P. Forrest and G. A. Forbes to back the DPGB-theory and show that they do not work. I also examine a proposal to rescue the DPGB-theory suggested by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and argue that it does not work either. Moreover, in line with D. Braddon-Mitchell and against Forbes, I argue that the DPGB-theory is indeed committed to the existence of zombies in the past. Being ad hoc and burdened by a very odd and counterintuitive ontological commitment, the DPGB-theory turns out to be rather unpalatable.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 3","pages":"579 - 592"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139960938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unfamiliarity in Logic? How to Unravel McSweeney’s Dilemma for Logical Realism","authors":"Matteo Baggio","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00583-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00583-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Logical realism is the metaphysical view asserting that the facts of logic exist and are mind-and-language independent. McSweeney argues that if logical realism is true, we encounter a dilemma. Either we cannot determine which of the two logically equivalent theories holds a fundamental status, or neither theory can be considered fundamental. These two conclusions together constitute what is known as the <i>Unfamiliarity Dilemma</i>, which poses significant challenges to our understanding of the epistemological and metaphysical features of logic. In this article, I present two strategies to address McSweeney’s dilemma. If these arguments prove effective, they would demonstrate that our knowledge of logic is not susceptible to the skeptical concerns raised by McSweeney’s hypothesis.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 3","pages":"439 - 465"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139592217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Progress in Understanding Consciousness? Easy and Hard Problems, and Philosophical and Empirical Perspectives","authors":"Tobias A. Wagner-Altendorf","doi":"10.1007/s12136-024-00584-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12136-024-00584-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>David Chalmers has distinguished the “hard” and the “easy” problem of consciousness, arguing that progress on the “easy problem”—on pinpointing the physical/neural correlates of consciousness—will not necessarily involve progress on the hard problem—on explaining why consciousness, in the first place, emerges from physical processing. Chalmers, however, was hopeful that refined theorizing would eventually yield philosophical progress. In particular, he argued that panpsychism might be a candidate account to solve the hard problem. Here, I provide a concise stock-take on both the empirical-neuroscientific and philosophical-conceptual progress on consciousness. It turns out that, whereas empirical progress is indisputable, philosophical progress is much less pronounced. While Chalmers was right, I argue, in distinguishing distinctive types of problems of consciousness, his prediction of progress on the hard problem was overly optimistic. Empirical progress and philosophical progress are essentially uncoupled; a more skeptical perspective on progress in philosophy in general is appropriate.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44390,"journal":{"name":"Acta Analytica-International Periodical for Philosophy in the Analytical Tradition","volume":"39 4","pages":"719 - 736"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12136-024-00584-5.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139604392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}