Jody Azzouni

First, I discuss the older “theory-centered” and the more recent semantic conception of scientific theories. I argue that these two perspectives are nothing more than terminological variants of one another. I then offer a new theory-centered view of scientific theories. I argue that this new view captures the insights had by each of these earlier views, that it’s closer to how scientists think about their own theories, and that it better accommodates the phenomenon of inconsistent scientific theories.

A phenomenological distinction is drawn between what is imaginable and what is conceivable (but not imaginable). This distinction is rooted, historically, in Descartes’ famous discussion of the piece of wax, and he describes as the difference between “imagination” and “intellection.” His example is described, but then the distinction is extended to a number of unexpected other kinds of cases. One is the experience of a native speaker of her own words. She can conceive of these words meaning differently than they do but she can’t imagine this. So too, those brought up with forks can’t imagine experiencing them as objects without a function; although an experience like that is conceivable. The final class of important examples is the conceivability of borders of objects being elsewhere than we experience them to be. One surprising result of the analysis of these examples in this paper is that what’s conceivable isn’t a guide to metaphysical possibility; it’s not even a guide to possible experience.

Benjamin Callard has recently suggested that causation between Platonic objects—standardly understood as atemporal and non-spatial—and spatio-temporal objects is not ‘a priori’ unintelligible. He considers the reasons some have given for its purported unintelligibility: apparent impossibility of energy transference, absence of physical contact, etc. He suggests that these considerations fail to rule out a priori Platonic-object causation. However, he has overlooked one important issue. Platonic objects must causally affect different objects differently, and different Platonic objects must causally affect the same objects differently. How are Platonic objects—ones outside space and time—supposed to do that? CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

In this book Jody Azzouni challenges existing epistemological conventions about knowledge: what it means to know something, who or what is seen as knowing, and how we talk about it. He argues that the classic restrictive conditions philosophers routinely place on knowers only hold in special cases, and suggests that knowledge can be equally attributed to children, sophisticated animals, unsophisticated animals, and machinery or devices. Through this perspective and a close examination of its relation to linguistics and psychology, Azzouni freshly approaches longstanding epistemological puzzles including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, Agrippa's trilemma, and the surprise-exam paradox.