Eudaimonistic Virtue Epistemology

I just uploaded a first rough draft of my Eudaimonistic Virtue Epistemology paper to my website. If you're interested, you can find it here.

Perceptual Reports

I have uploaded a new version of my "Perceptual Reports" to my website. Here is the link.

Knowledge-How: A Unified Account

I just received the proofs for my article "Knowledge-How: A Unified Account." Here is the link, if you're interested. And the abstract:

There are two competing views of knowledge-how: intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. According to the reductionist varieties of intellectualism defended by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) and Berit Brogaard (2007), knowledge-how simply reduces to knowledge-that. To a first approximation, s knows how to A iff there is a w such that s knows that w is a way to A. For example, John knows how to ride a bicycle if and only if there is a way w such that John knows that w is a way to ride a bicycle. John Bengson and Marc Moffett (2007) defend an antireductionist version of intellectualism that takes knowledge-how to require, in addition to a propositional attitude, that s understands the concepts involved in her attitude. According to the anti-intellectualist accounts originally defended by Gilbert Ryle and many others after him, knowledge-how requires the possession of a practical ability and so knowing that w (for some w) is a way to A does not suffice for knowing-how. For example, John knows how to ride a bicycle only if John has the ability to ride it; if John merely knows that w (for some w) is a way to ride a bicycle, John does not know how to ride a bicycle. Here I argue for a conciliatory position that is compatible with the reductionist variety of intellectualism: knowledge-how is reducible to knowledge-that. But, I argue, there are knowledge states that are not justification entailing and knowledge states that are not belief entailing. Both kinds of knowledge state require the possession of practical abilities. I conclude by arguing that the view defended naturally leads to a disjunctive conception of abilities as either essentially involving mental states or as not essentially involving mental states. Only the former kind of ability is a kind of knowledge-state, that is, a knowledge-how state.

Lemming's Birthday and a New Version of My Presentism Paper

Happy belated birthday to Lemmings. He turned 5 two days ago. In case you are interested, I have uploaded a new version of my new presentism paper, "Presentism, Primitivism and Cross-Temporal Relations: Lessons from Holistic Ersatzism and
Dynamic Semantics", to my website.

New Papers

I have uploaded a new version of my presentism paper and two new papers to my website:

Presentism, Primitivism and The Problem of Cross-Temporal Relations: Lessons from Hoslistic Ersatzism and Dynamic Semantics

Intellectual Flourishing as the Fundamental Epistemic Norm

Perceptual Reports

Vision for Action and the Contents of Perception

I have now uploaded a copy of this paper on vision for action and the contents of perception to my website. The paper is forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy.

My Paper on Unconscious Perceptual Processes

The official link to my paper "Are there unconscious perceptual processes?" is now up. The paper manuscript is available in full on my homepage.

Two Papers

I am back from the Pacific APA. In case you missed my talks (and care) I have posted links to them on my website here and here. The first link is to my comments from the author-meets-critics session on Uriah Kriegel's book Subjective Consciousness. The second link is to a very brief version of my paper on high-level properties in perception.

Update

I have now finally had a chance to upload a copy of my Inscrutability and Ontological Commitment paper to my webpage. Will soon upload some pics etc from my recent trip to the US and Copenhagen.

Descriptions

I just uploaded a draft of an encyclopedia entry I am writing on descriptions. It's still just a super-rough draft. But if any of you might have any comments you'd like to share, then please don't hesitate to email me. The word count is rather limited, so I apologize in advance if I haven't included your seminal work on descriptions in the entry. Of course, if it's seminal it should be included. So please don't hesitate to email me about that as well.

OPP

Wo's online papers in philosophy feed

New Year Links

A bunch of new Compass articles are now available, including my own on attitude ascriptions.

Automatic Press/VIP now has its own visibility online with all the interview books listed.

Check out this new super-interesting-looking paper on the swamping problem by Duncan Pritchard.

The Reasoner 2(1) is now available. New submissions welcome (100-1000 words)

Possibly Philosophy -- that's Andrew Bacon's new blog. Looks very promising and will no doubt be of interest to readers of Lemmings.

Pics and Pubs

Some pics from Declan Smithies' party last Friday

And some forthcoming pubs by ANU grads:

Ben Blumson: "Images, Intentionality and Inexistence", forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Jacek Brzozowski: "On Locating Composite Objects", forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.

Yuri Cath: "The Ability Hypothesis and the New Knowledge-how", forthcoming in Noûs.

Ole Koksvik: "Conservation of Energy is Relevant to Physicalism", forthcoming in Dialectica.

Dan Marshall: "Can 'Intrinsic' Be Defined Using Only Broadly Logical Notions?", forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Knowledge and Action

There is an interesting discussion of John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley's "Knowledge and Action", forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy, over at Certain Doubts. I would have liked to join it but I am too busy packing. Maybe later.

UPDATE: Clayton Littlejohn has written a reply to Hawthorne and Stanley. I haven't read it yet but it looks very interesting.

The Reasoner 1(3)

The Reasoner - issue 1(3) is now available. Joe and I wrote a short note for this month's issue, which discusses Timothy Williamson's line against non-trivial counterpossibles and replies to Alan Baker.

New Paper

I have uploaded this paper on two-dimensionalism to my website. The paper is scheduled to appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, October 2007.

Trip to Europe

I am off to Europe. My paper for Aberdeen is available here. After Aberdeen Joe and I are presenting something on subjunctives, impossible worlds and two-dimensionalism in Edinburgh (we will also give our new account of essences). After Edingburgh I am off to England. Then back to Scotland to St. Andrews. I will be taking a sidetrip to Copenhagen as well. See you in a month.

Materials Concerning Women and Minorities in Philosophy

Sally Haslanger has posted the available data concerning the status of women and other minorities in philosophy at the SGRP site. Her paper on the status of women in philosophy, which she presented at the Central Meeting of the APA, 2007, is available here (HT: Brian Weatherson).

Reflections on Donkey Sentences

Philosophers and linguists tend to agree that donkey sentences such as:

(1) If a farmer buys a donkey, he vaccinates it

are deeply problematic. What they tend to disagree about is how best to deal with them. My students sometimes wonder why (1) is thought to be problematic at all. It just says that for all farmers x and all donkeys y, if x buys y, then x vaccinates y, doesn't it? The problem with this reply is that it treats 'a farmer' and 'a donkey' (constructions that look like existentially quantified constructions) as universally quantified constructions.

There are numerous alternative proposals in the literature. And old and famous one is David Lewis'. (1) is to be understood as containing an implicit adverb (e.g. 'always', or 'generally'). The adverb is thought to bind both variables. It is a so-called unselective quantifier quantifying over pairs, triples, or whatever (in this case, pairs of farmers and donkeys standing in certain relations).

Lewis' view runs into trouble. Consider:

(2) If a farmer buys a donkey, he usually vaccinates it.

Given Lewis' view, (2) is true iff for most farmer-donkey-bought-by-farmer pairs, the farmer in the pair vaccinates the donkey. But consider now a scenario with 31 farmers and 130 donkeys. 1 rich farmer buys exactly 100 donkeys and vaccinates all of them. 30 poor farmers buy exactly one donkey each but do not vaccinate it. There are then 100 farmer/donkey pairs (of the right sort) where the farmer and the donkey stand in the vaccination relation. And there are 30 farmer/donkey pairs (of the right sort) where the farmer and the donkey do not stand in the vaccination relation. Since most farmer-donkey-bought-by-farmer pairs are such that the farmer in the pair vaccinates the donkey, Lewis' view predicts that (2) is true. but intuitively, it is false. This is the so-called 'proportion problem'.

There is also the so-called D-type account (defended by numerous people, including Stephen Neale). On this view, donkey pronouns go proxy for numberless descriptions. For example, in (1) the 'it' goes proxy for 'the donkey(s)'. The D-type approach predicts that (1) is equivalent to 'every farmer who buys a donkey vaccinates every donkey he buys'.

In my talk at the Central Meeting, I argued that a problem arises for this account (Neale acknowledges that this is a problem in a footnote in an article from 1990, and if I remember correctly, he also refers to a personal correspondence he had with Heim).

Consider a different scenario in which 10 farmers (the only ones) buy 10 donkeys each and vaccinate 9 of them. The majority of informants report that (1) is true in these circumstances. But the D-type approach predicts that it should be false. A similar problem arises in the following case:

(3) If a farmer buys a donkey, he sometimes vaccinates it.

The majority of informants report that (3) is true if the only 10 farmers buy 10 donkeys each and vaccinate 3 of them.

I argued that we need to treat donkey pronouns as plural definite descriptions (using plural variables, in line with Boolos), and I then appealed to an earlier paper of mine in which I argued that plural definite descriptions function as partitive constructions at a subsequent level of analysis [my paper is forthcoming in Mind and Language, and also contains a precis of the donkey proposal].

I then said that the force of the partitive construction will depend on the monotonicity properties of the adverb (or initial quantifier in the case of relative clause doneky sentences). As a rule, the partitive that goes proxy for the pronoun inherits the force of the adverb of quantification (or initial quantifier in the case of relative clause donkey sentences) when the quantifier is upward-entailing in the VP. When the quantifier is downward entailing in the VP, the partitive has existential force. I also said that this cannot be the whole story, because of so-called weak and strong readings. I won't go over that again.

Before continuing let me just summarize how to test for monotonicity.

Right-upward monotonic (upward-entailing in VP, or just upward-entailing, e.g., 'some', 'most', 'almost all', 'every', 'all')
DFs are Gs
All Gs are Hs
DFs are Hs

Left-upward monotonic (upward-entailing in NP, e.g. 'not every', 'some')
DFs are Gs
All Fs are Hs
DHs are Gs

Right-downward monotonic (downward-entailing in VP, or just downward-entailing, e.g. 'no', 'not every', 'at most 3')
DFs are Gs
All Hs are Gs
DFs are Hs

Left-downward monotonic (downward-entailing in NP, e.g. 'every')
DFs are Gs
All Hs are Fs
DHs are Gs.

Non-monotone: e.g., 'exactly 3'

What I want to focus on here is Jessica Rett's most interesting example:

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

Rett took me to be saying that when a quantifier is upward-entailing in the NP the partitive inherits its force from the quantifier and when it is downward-entailing in the NP the partitive is existential. But that can't be right, as 'every' is not upward-entailing in its NP.

Anyway, if we follow me in taking the partitive to have existential force when the quantifier is downward-entailing in its VP, and if we follow Rett in taking 'not every' to be a quantifier construction, then we should expect (4) to be equivalent to:

(5) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the donkey(s) he owns.

This may or may not be a good reading of (4). I will get back to this later.

An alternative is to say that 'not every' is not a quantifier construction at all. We might treat 'not' as a sentential operator. 'Every' is then the quantifier, and the relevant quantifier in (4) is then upward-entailing in its VP. So, we'd get:

(6) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats all the donkeys he owns.

So which one (if any) is the best reading of (4)?

I have now pilot-tested this on students. The majority actually got (5) as the most natural reading. Here is how I tested it (thanks to Barbara Abbott for helping me think through this -- most of what follows is from a correspondence with her, and for the most part I am using her formulations -- all mistakes are mine).

If 'not' is a sentence negation, then

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

should be true if (6) is false:

(6) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats all the donkeys he owns.

E.g. if one farmer beat all but one of his donkeys (and all the other farmers beat all of them), then (4) would be true.

On the other hand if 'not every' is a quantifier, then (4) would be true if (5) is true (since 'not every' as a quantifier is downward entailing in the VP):

(5) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the donkeys he owns.

(5) would not be true in the circumstance given above (where all the farmers beat all their donkeys except for one, who spares just one). Instead, we'd need to have at least one farmer sparing all of his donkeys, and not just one.

In testing this I presented students with sentence (4):

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

and asked: If one farmer beat all but one of his donkeys (and all the other farmers beat all of them), is (4) true? The majority answered 'no'.

So, interestingly, if my proposal is right, then it is indeed the monotonicity properties of 'not every' that matter in this case and not the monotonicity properties of 'every'. That is, (4) comes out as 'not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the the donkeys he owns'.

Thanks to Barbara Abbott, Jessica Rett, and the audience.

The Reasoner vol. 1 no. 1

From Certain Doubts:

The first issue of The Reasoner, volume 1, no 1, is now online. Feature articles by Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, Laurence Goldstein, Amit Pundik, and Gregory Wheeler. The deadline for vol. 1, no. 2 is May 15.

Joe Salerno has a post summarizing one of the arguments from our short contribution to the counterpossibles debate.