Paul Boghossian

The question whether we can have a priori knowledge, and if so to what extent, has lain at the center of philosophy practically since the beginning. For many philosophers, including Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and most of the Logical Positivists, to name just a few, it seems to have been the problem around which everything else was made to turn. It's an interesting question why philosophers have been so obsessed with this problem and why they have been inclined to assign it so much importance. One reason, no doubt, has to do with its relation to the possibility of philosophy itself. Although it has become fashionable in some circles to pretend otherwise, I don't really see that anyone out there has much idea how analytic philosophy is to be done, if not a priori; in particular, I don't really see that anyone has much idea how it is to be done without a hefty helping of a priori conceptual analysis....

Herman Cappelen (2012) has written a book that's devoted to arguing against the following claim: Centrality (of Intuitions in Contemporary Philosophy): Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories. In arguing against Centrality, Cappelen is not making a normative claim: that although philosophers rely on intuitions, they ought not to. He's not making a metaphysical claim to the effect that there are no intuitions, hence none that philosophers can rely on to justify their claims....

Compatibilism combines an externalist view of mental content with a doctrine of privileged self‐knowledge. The essay presents a reductio of compatibilism by arguing that if compatibilism were true, we would be in a position to know certain facts about the world a priori, facts that no one can reasonably believe are knowable a priori. Whether this should be taken to cast doubt on externalism or privileged self‐knowledge is not discussed. Consideration is given to the ’empty case’—the case in which a thinker expresses what he takes to be a genuine thought concerning a natural kind but where there is in fact no relevant natural kind, so that the putative natural kind term fails to refer. It is argued that, in such a case, on an externalist conception of natural kind terms, the thinker is deluded in taking himself to be expressing a complete thought, and that such delusions are not compatible with privileged self‐knowledge.

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's..

In a piece provocatively entitled “Does Philosophy Matter?” Stanley Fish sets out to respond to my July 24, 2011 Stone column on moral relativism in the New York Times. His argument proceeds as follows. First, Fish changes the topic: instead of talking about the thesis I was discussing, he defines another thesis that, he claims, implausibly, also deserves to be called “moral relativism.” This thesis, he implies, is both more interesting and more defensible than the one I was criticizing. Second, he argues that neither his thesis nor mine could make any difference to “real life,” because philosophical conclusions don’t travel outside the seminar room. His argument limps at both stages. Fish’s ‘relativism’ is neither relativism, nor interesting in its own right. And his claim that no philosophical or meta-ethical thesis can matter in real life is clearly false.

This essay criticizes Williamson’s attempt, in his book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, to undermine the interest of the a priori–a posteriori distinction. Williamson’s argument turns on several large claims. The first is that experience often plays a role intermediate between evidential and merely enabling, and that this poses a difficulty for giving a theoretically satisfying account of the distinction. The second is that there are no constitutive understanding–assent links. Both of these claims are subjected to detailed scrutiny. In particular, it is argued that Williamson’s case of the deviant logician, Simon, fails to constitute an intelligible counterexample to the status of conjunction elimination as an understanding–assent link for ‘and’.

I believe that the notion of epistemic transparency does play an important role in our ordinary conception of mental content and I want to say what that role is. Unfortunately, the task is a large one; here I am able only to begin on its outline. I shall proceed somewhat indirectly, beginning with a discussion of externalist conceptions of mental content. I shall show that such conceptions violate epistemic transparency to an extent that has not been fully appreciated. Subsequently, I shall look at the implications of this violation and at the reconstructive project that a rejection of transparency entails. I am inclined to think it unlikely that we will get a conception of propositional content that underwrites epistemic transparency. But I am concerned that we have not fully appreciated the role that transparency currently plays and the work that would need to be done were we to discard it.

This essay attempts to clarify the project of explaining the possibility of ‘blind reasoning’—namely, of basic logical inferences to which we are entitled without our having an explicit justification for them. The role played by inferentialism in this project is examined and objections made to inferentialism by Paolo Casalegno and Timothy Williamson are answered. Casalegno proposes a recipe for formulating a counterexample to any proposed constitutive inferential role by imaging a subject who understands the logical constant in question but fails to have the capacity to make the inference in question; Williamson’s recipe turns on imagining an expert who continues to understand the constant in question while having developed sophisticated considerations for refusing to make it. It’s argued that neither recipe succeeds.

It is very common these days to come across the claim that the notions of mental content and linguistic meaning are normative notions. In the work of many philosophers, it plays a pivotal role. Saul Kripke made it the centerpiece of his influential discussion of Wittgenstein’s treatment of rulefollowing and private language; he used it to argue that the notions of meaning and content cannot be understood in naturalistic terms. Kripke’s formulations tend to be in terms of the notion of linguistic meaning, but his argumentative strategy makes it clear that he holds both versions of the claim....

I start with the observation that we often respond to a musical performance with emotion -- even if it is just the performance of a piece of absolute music, unaccompanied by text, title or programme. We can be exhilarated after a Rossini overture brought off with subtlety and panache; somber and melancholy after Furtlanger’s performance of the slow movement of the Eroica. And so forth. These emotions feel like the real thing to me – or anyway very close to the real thing. When one experiences them, it takes time for them to wear off, and one gets irritated with the companion who, because not similarly moved, wants immediately to start discussing where to go for dinner. Like many others, I am drawn to the philosophy of music by a need to understand how such emotional responses are possible. How can absolute music move us in the way that it does, and to the extent that it does?

In this chapter a new problem about rule-following is outlined, one that is distinct both from Kripke’s and Wright’s versions of the problem. This new problem cannot be correctly responsed to, as Kripke’s can, by invoking Wright’s Intentional Account of rule-following. The upshot might be called, following Kant, an antinomy of pure reason: we both must — and cannot — make sense of someone’s following a rule. The chapter explores various ways out of this antinomy without here endorsing any of them.

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 20th-century philosophy that philosophers have tended to give ‘overly intellectualized’ accounts of important phenomena. One thinks here of Wittgenstein, Ryle and many others. One version of this charge is that philosophers have tended to appeal to higher-order thoughts when first-order thoughts about the world are all that’s needed. A more specific version of this charge is that philosophers have tended to appeal to second-order thoughts with normative, or quasi-normative, contents when all that’s needed are first-order thoughts with factual contents. It is this second version of the charge that Kornblith is particularly interested in pressing. Although he doesn’t spell it out, the connection between this project and Kornblith’s previous work on naturalistic conceptions of epistemology should be fairly obvious. Very roughly, if you want humans to look a lot closer to the lower animals, then you’d better think that most central human abilities can be explained without appeal to reflection and without appeal to normative thought. What’s good and important about Kornblith’s book is that he gives this charge a sustained and illuminating treatment. He looks in detail at accounts of knowledge, reasoning, epistemic agency, free will and normativity; he identifies sympathetically some of the temptations to think that we must resort to second-order resources to explain these phenomena; and he attempts to show that the appeal never works and is, in any case, not needed, since first-order accounts manage very well.

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 enough what it is for a person to infer. In this paper, I turn to thinking about the nature of inference itself. This topic is of great interest in its own right and surprisingly understudied by philosophers. A correct understanding of inference promises to shed light on a number of important topics. In particular, it threatens to undermine the sort of concept-based story about entitlement to which I had previously been attracted.

The conviction that intentional realism requires intentional reductionism has the philosophy of mind in its grip. Thus, Jerry Fodor: .... It is worth noting — if only because it so seldom is nowadays — that this rationale for the naturalistic conviction begs a question that doesn't obviously deserve to be begged. Why, indeed, must we think that no property can be real unless it is identical with, or supervenient upon, the properties that appear in the catalogues provided by physics? There is, I think, no obvious answer.

Epistemic relativism has the contemporary academy in its grip. Not merely in the United States, but seemingly everywhere, most scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences seem to subscribe to some form of it. Even where the label is repudiated, the view is embraced. Sometimes the relativism in question concerns truth, sometimes justification. The core impulse appears to be a relativism about knowledge. The suspicion is widespread that what counts as knowledge in one cultural, or broadly ideological, setting need not count as knowledge in another.

Quine is usually read as arguing either for a non-factualism about analyticity (1) ... Or, at the very least, for an error thesis about it: (2) ... These attributions — including the stronger non-factualist thesis — seem licensed by many passages, including the famous one which concludes Quine's discussion in "Two Dogmas" ... Nevertheless, Paul Horwich does not wish to read Quine as endorsing either (1) or (2). He certainly does not wish to attribute (1) to him. And he wishes to attribute only a restricted version of (2). What this restriction is and why Paul wants to make it are matters I'll come to in just a moment.