Category: NYU

Intuitions without the Understanding So we appear to have many reasons for doubting that the understanding can play the roles that Sosa has assigned it, either in our theory of the nature of intuitions or in our account of their justificatory powers. Can we do better? I will try here to sketch the outlines of…

Intuitions and the Understanding Introduction In this essay, I take for granted that intuitions play a significant role in providing a priori justification within various domains, including philosophy itself.1 I focus on the question of what intuitions are, and how they might be able to supply the justification at issue. I will develop my account…

7 An intuitional construal of taking It might be thought that an intuitional construal of taking will do a lot better than any of the doxastic construals that we have been considering. While I think there is something to this claim, the intuitional proposal ultimately succumbs to some of the same objections we have been…

What is Inference? 1 Introduction In some previous work, I tried to give a concept-based account of the nature of our entitlement to certain very basic inferences (see the papers in Part III of Boghossian 2008b ). In this previous work, I took it for granted, along with many other philosophers, that we understood well…

What does Kornblith mean when he talks about ‘responsiveness to reasons’? He doesn’t really say, but it’s clear that he doesn’t mean responsiveness to reasons qua reasons, but, rather, just that the behaviour in question conforms to, or is consistent with, the reasons one has. That is why he can be so confident that the…

Reasoning and Reflection: A Reply to Kornblith 1. Introduction Hilary Kornblith’s book is motivated by the conviction that philosophers have tended to overvalue and overemphasize reflection in their accounts of central philosophical phenomena. He seeks to pinpoint this tendency and to correct it. Kornblith’s claim is not without precedent. It is an oft-repeated theme of…

5 Broome’s account of reasoning Since Broome doesn’t think that satisfying the requirements of rationality is, as a matter of fact, always done by automatic processes, he does face the question how we comply with the requirements of rationality when we need to rely on some reasoning. How, on his view, can we reason our…

Rationality, reasoning and rules: reflections on Broome’s rationality through reasoning 1 Two pictures of rationality Broome proposes a particular picture of what it is for someone to be fully rational: according to him, a fully rational person satisfies all the requirement of rationality: (Requirements) Being fully rational is satisfying all the requirements of rationality. Broome…

The argument for this is quite straightforward and recapitulates the considerations we have just been looking at. You don’t ever want the possession conditions for a concept to foreclose on the possible falsity of some particular set of claims about the world, if you can possibly avoid it. You want the possessor of the concept…

VII. BLIND YET BLAMELESS INFERENCE: CONCEPT CONSTITUTION An important question-which I don’t wish to prejudge for present purposes-is whether the validity of the inference is a necessary condition on warrant transfer. What I will be exclusively concerned with in the remainder of this paper is the question of blamelessness. The inflationary’ answer to that question…