Paul Boghossian

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 does not 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 this, we rely on a set of epistemic rules that tell us in some general way what it would be most rational to believe under various epistemic circumstances. We reason about what to believe; and we do so by relying on a set of rules....

The main impetus for my book came from the widespread acceptance of relativistic views about truth and knowledge within the Academy, especially within the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. In its introductory sections, though, I noted that there is one discipline within the humanities in which the influence of relativistic views is quite weak—namely, within analytic philosophy itself. Ironically, no sooner had the ink dried on the final version of my manuscript sometime in mid-2005—although, of course it had been in the works for a number of years prior to that—than I began to become aware of a huge interest in certain kinds of relativistic views that was beginning to build within analytic philosophy. That interest—which is ongoing as I write—has been fueled to a considerable extent by the work of a younger generation of philosophers including John MacFarlane, Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn.

The fact that we can hear a particular passage of music as expressing a “tranquil gratitude” is a central aspect of the phenomenology of musical experience; without it we would be hard pressed to explain how purely instrumental music could move us in the way that it does. The trouble, here as so often elsewhere in philosophy, is that what seems necessary also seems impossible: for how could a mere series of nonlinguistic sounds, however lovely, express a state of mind? One of the central tasks of the philosophy of music is to remove this mystery....

The core idea seems clear enough. To say of something that it is socially constructed is to emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. It is to say: This thing could not have existed had we not built it; and we need not have built it at all, at least not in its present form. Had we been a different kind of society, had we had different needs, values, or interests, we might well have built a different kind of thing, or built this one differently. The inevitable contrast is with a naturally existing object, something that exists independently of us and which we did not have a hand in shaping.

The question I want to look at in this paper is this: To what extent does an externalist conception of mental content threaten our ability to know the contents of our thoughts? I shall argue that, in an important sense, externalism is inconsistent with the thesis that we have authoritative first-person knowledge of thought content: in particular, I shall argue, it is inconsistent with the thesis that our thought contents are epistemically transparent to us. I shall further argue that this is true in a sense that falsifies another important and traditionally fundamental view —that we can detect a priori whether our inferences are logically valid or not. I shall leave for another occasion the question whether these results reflect badly on epistemic transparency or on externalism.

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’.

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.

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.