Category: NYU

V. RATIONAL INSIGHT AND CARROLLIAN CIRCULARITY Even if we waived worries about the very cogency of the capacity for rational insight, however, it’s not clear how rational insight into the validity of MPP could help vindicate Simple Inferential Internalism, and this for reasons that are reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s famous note What the Tortoise Said…

Blind Reasoning 1 ABSTRACT The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being…

Intentions and Intentional states How should we proceed? I have been talking about the Intention View, but, of course, everything I’ve been saying will apply to any Intentional View. So let me restate our problem in full generality exposing as many of our assumptions as possible. The claim is that the following five propositions form…

Some Problems for the Intention View Why not just accept the Intention View? What, if anything, is wrong with this flat-footed response to the rule-following challenge? The problem with the intention View cannot be that there are no cases that are accurately described by it, for there clearly are. If I now adopt a policy…

II. HOW CAN WE FOLLOW RULES? The Intuitive Notion Let us assume, though, for the purposes of argument, that we have a satisfactory solution to this problem. Let us now turn to asking how it is possible for someone to follow a rule. For the purpose of posing this question it won’t much matter whether…

Epistemic Rules INTRODUCTION According to a very natural picture of rational belief, we aim to believe only what is true. However, as Bernard Williams used to say, the world doesn’t just inscribe itself onto our minds. Rather, we have to try to figure out what is true from the evidence available to us. To do…

IV. A REFORMULATED CONTENT IRREALISM The question arises whether there is some other, more salutary, way of formulating an irrealism about content and truth. Well, one set of views we may simply set aside: no version of an error conception of content can be made to yield anything satisfactory. So long as there is no…

II. THE STATUS OF CONTENT DISCOURSE Irrealist construals of content-based psychology have been formulated in both error-theoretic and non-factualist versions; and the error alternative, at least, in both eliminative and instrumentalist guises. Thus, Paul Churchland has defended the thesis that our common sense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes…

The Status of Content INTRODUCTION An irrealist conception of a given region of discourse is the view that no real properties answer to the central predicates of the region in question. Any such conception emerges, invariably, as the result of the interaction of two forces. An account of the meaning of the central predicates, along…

Our Grasp of the Concept of Truth by Paul Boghossian Reflections on Künne Künne’s Modest Account Wolfgang Künne’s Conceptions of Truth (2003) is a magnificent achievement. Wonderfully clear, erudite, compendious, honest and insightful on some very tricky issues – these are some of its many virtues. I have benefited a great deal from studying it.…