{"title":"Objecting and quiescing, Aptly","authors":"Rory Aird","doi":"10.1111/nous.70061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70061","url":null,"abstract":"Objecting to asserted falsehood is an everyday practice. Despite its apparent ubiquity however, there remains a distinct dearth of discussion of objecting in the epistemology literature, with the small amount of extant scholarship focusing primarily on the prescriptive—that is, epistemic duties to object. The spotlight being placed so has elided a key area of research which seems to precede any prescriptive discussion; namely, evaluative norms about what makes for a good objection. After all, knowledge that one ought to object lacks utility if one does not also know how to well discharge such a duty. Thus, in this paper, I build a complete picture of the evaluative normativity of objecting based on a Sosan performance‐normative framework, neatly answering the question of what is an epistemically good objection—it is an apt one. The view is then extended to explain a novel area: the evaluative normativity of forbearance from objecting, what I call quiescing.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148693323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What's in a Promise?","authors":"Eliot Michaelson","doi":"10.1111/nous.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70059","url":null,"abstract":"Many, perhaps even most, philosophers hold that, in order to promise someone something, the promisor must intend to communicate what they are promising. I argue against this claim, explain why it matters to the nature of promising, and sketch an alternative picture of normatively powerful speech acts.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148623898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Natural Argument for Contextualism","authors":"Neil Mehta","doi":"10.1111/nous.70060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70060","url":null,"abstract":"In the debate between contextualist and standard invariantist theories of knowledge, linguistic data have been the primary focus. This paper comes at the debate from a different angle: I argue that contextualism is much better than standard invariantism at respecting the <jats:italic>objective metaphysical structure of epistemic reality</jats:italic> . From this, I draw several further conclusions—for instance, that we should significantly boost our relative credence in contextualism over standard invariantism.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148623891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jacqueline Harding, Tobias Gerstenberg, Thomas Icard
{"title":"A Communication‐First Account of Explanation","authors":"Jacqueline Harding, Tobias Gerstenberg, Thomas Icard","doi":"10.1111/nous.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70053","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what‐if‐things‐had‐been‐different questions. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the account, relative to previous accounts, by showing that widely recognized “explanatory virtues” emerge naturally, as do subtle empirical patterns concerning the impact of norms on causal judgments. This shows the value of a “communication‐first” approach to explanation: getting clear on explanation's communicative dimension is an important prerequisite for philosophical work on explanation. The result is a simple but powerful framework for incorporating insights from the cognitive sciences into philosophical work on explanation, which will be useful for philosophers or cognitive scientists interested in explanation.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148459745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Being Biased and Knowing How to Reason","authors":"Wayne Wu","doi":"10.1111/nous.70055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70055","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explains how reasoning is action and not reflex. It then uses that theory to explain one form of knowing how to reason. Reasoning is thinking biased by knowledge. Drawing on Louise Antony's emphasis on bias as critical for dealing with underdetermination in induction, I show that underdetermination confronts all forms of reasoning, including deduction. Reasoning must be biased if it is to emerge from action underdetermination. The bias framework recasts the concept of taking, as advocated by Paul Boghossian, in terms of biased reasoning. This philosophical hypothesis is supported by empirical work demonstrating how beliefs bias attention. The paper then reveals a psychological‐epistemic structure that is actualized whenever an agent reasons. The agent's knowledge, implicit or explicit, resolves underdetermination, and the underlying structure that integrates knowledge with capacities for thinking constitutes the agent's knowing how to reason.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148475865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enticing Epistemic Reasons","authors":"Z Quanbeck","doi":"10.1111/nous.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70054","url":null,"abstract":"Most epistemologists hold that epistemic norms not only forbid believing propositions for which one lacks sufficient evidence, but also sometimes positively require believing propositions for which one has excellent evidence. That is, on the standard view, there are both negative and positive epistemic obligations. Yet proponents of positive epistemic obligations face a serious challenge: Namely, to provide an extensionally adequate, explanatorily satisfying account of when positive epistemic obligations are triggered. In light of this challenge, this article defends the claim that there are no positive epistemic obligations by developing a distinctive account of epistemic reasons called the “Enticing Epistemic Reasons View” (EERV). On this view, all epistemic reasons for belief are <jats:italic>enticing</jats:italic> rather than requiring: They justify believing <jats:italic>p</jats:italic> and favor believing <jats:italic>p</jats:italic> , but they do not contribute to making believing <jats:italic>p</jats:italic> required. Unlike other views rejecting positive epistemic obligations, the EERV both successfully explains why there are no positive epistemic obligations and offers resources to accommodate the intuitive datum that failing to believe practically irrelevant propositions can be criticizable.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"236 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148499187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mercy: A Right and a Privilege","authors":"Jessica Isserow","doi":"10.1111/nous.70056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70056","url":null,"abstract":"Many accounts of mercy nowadays are morally neutral; agents show mercy when they impose less harm than they might have, whether or not such harm would have been permissible. More morally infused perspectives are often dismissed; for they seem too narrow to capture the full gamut of ordinary usage. This article develops a case for such a perspective, one which construes mercy as the forswearing of harm that one has the right to impose. This view is best placed to accommodate what are commonly taken to be core properties of mercy, most notably, its praiseworthy and elective character. Moreover everyday language is far from ruling it out. Indeed, many aspects of common usage favor it over its morally neutral counterparts. An additional feature of this approach is that it sharpens the commonly accepted contrast between private and public mercy.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148429219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Animal Logic: Locke and the Nature of Inference","authors":"Walter Ott","doi":"10.1111/nous.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70057","url":null,"abstract":"Can animals reason? If so, what would their reasoning consist in, and how, if at all, would it differ from its human counterpart? On these questions, John Locke stakes out a position that also merits consideration today. I argue that, for Locke, reasoning is a matter of the subject's construing her mental states as support for a conclusion, where that conclusion can be a self‐directed imperative. Locke does not require that the subject represent the rules governing her inferences, nor that she use language or deploy abstract ideas. I argue that Locke's particularist, imagistic account is worth taking seriously in the contemporary debates over the nature of inference and animal reasoning.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148414753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nature's Complexity Alive: Farewell to Several Unificatory Cosmological Arguments for Monism","authors":"Lok‐Chi Chan","doi":"10.1111/nous.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70051","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout history, numerous thinkers have claimed that monism—in the form of priority monism, existence monism, monotheistic monism, or versions that posit an extra‐cosmic ultimate being—theoretically surpasses pluralism, above all by positing a unified universe. This view re‐emerges in recent metaphysics through what I call cosmological arguments from parsimony (CAPs) and cosmological arguments from relations (CARs). According to CAPs, monism is more ontologically parsimonious than pluralism because it posits only one fundamental entity. According to CARs, the single fundamental object in monism serves as a required metaphysical explanans for how things in the universe can form certain relations with each other. I argue that this longstanding tradition of arguments spanning Neoplatonism, early and late modern philosophy, analytic philosophy, and even some Eastern traditions fails: monistic frameworks largely fail to reduce the universe's ontological complexity as alleged, and the remaining ones fail to show any theoretical advantage over pluralism for related reasons. Drawing on the broader materialist tradition, the article also offers a positive case for several theoretical merits of pluralism and ends with a takeaway concerning how best to inquire into the universe's unity.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148299666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life, but Not as We Know It: Why Fine‐Tuning Arguments Fail","authors":"Joe Gough","doi":"10.1111/nous.70052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70052","url":null,"abstract":"Definitions of “life” and theories of life are systematically neglected in arguments for and from fine‐tuning. Despite claims to be neutral about the definition of “life,” fine‐tuning arguments generally presuppose that life requires a form of structural complexity only afforded by physicochemical complexity of the sort with which we are familiar, and more specifically, by water and carbon molecules. Conversely, our best accounts of life construe life as a matter of <jats:italic>dynamic</jats:italic> rather than structural complexity, and as substrate‐ and scale‐independent. Life could be as radically different in the possible universes considered as their physics is. We have no idea whether the relevant form of dynamic complexity would develop in possible universes radically physically unlike our own.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148385881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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