Paul Boghossian

This chapter extends the debate with Timothy Williamson on the possibility of acquiring a priori knowledge via intuition (Boghossian and Williamson 2020). It first takes up the question what intuitions are and why we have reason to believe in them. It then looks at why they are properly regarded as providing justification for beliefs —indeed, a justification that is sometimes so strong that it can overturn highly entrenched theories. It examines why that justification is properly regarded as a priori. Finally, it confronts the question whether a philosophy that is friendly to intuitions inexorably leads to our having to regard odious normative beliefs as justified.

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of the properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer.

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error.

This chapter revisits the question whether facts about intentional content can be understood in purely naturalistic terms. In a previous work, ‘The Rule-Following Considerations’, it was argued that Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein-inspired discussion of following a rule was, _pace_ Kripke’s intention, best understood as showing that facts about intentional content resist naturalistic reduction. The message of this chapter is the same, although it differs from, and hopefully improves upon, the earlier work in several respects. First, it argues for a somewhat weaker conclusion—not that facts about intentional content cannot be naturalistically reduced, but, rather, that _either_ they cannot be reduced _or_ that they are indeterminate. Second, it uses bits of Kripke’s discussion not emphasized previously and that, in any case, have been widely rejected as ineffective. And, finally, it takes into account important distinctions that were missing both from Kripke’s original discussion and from the previous work referenced here.

Let's suppose that we think in a language of thought and that there are causal facts of the following form: the appearance in O's belief box of a sentence S₁ has a tendency to cause the appearance therein of a sentence S₂ but not S₃. Ignoring many complications, we may describe this sort of fact as consisting in O's disposition to infer from S₁ to S₂, but not to S₃. Let's call the totality of the inferences to which a sentence is capable of contributing, its total inferential role. A sub-sentential constituent's total inferential role can then be defined accordingly, as consisting in the contribution it makes to the total inferential role of the sentences in which it appears. Against this rough and ready background, an inferential role semantics is just the view that there is some construct out of an expression's total inferential role that constitutes its meaning what it does. Let us call this construct an expression's meaning-constituting inferential role, or MIR, for short. As no one will care to deny, at the present time an inferential role semantics (hereafter, IRS) is no more than a twinkle in the eyes of its advocates. To this day, no one has proposed a version that is detailed enough to be called a ‘theory’; in particular, no one has even come close to providing a plausible specification of the constructs that are to constitute MIRs.

Many philosophers, however, have been tempted to be relativists about specific domains of discourse, especially about those domains that have a normative character. Gilbert Harman, for example, has defended a relativistic view of morality, Richard Rorty a relativistic view of epistemic justification, and Crispin Wright a relativistic view of judgments of taste.¹ But what exactly is it to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse? The term ‘‘relativism’’ has, of course, been used in a bewildering variety of senses and it is not my aim to discuss each and every one of those senses here. Rather, what interests me is the notion that is characterized by the following core idea: the relativist about a given domain, D, purports to have discovered that the truths of D involve an unexpected relation to a parameter.

Is Reason a Neutral Tool in Comparative Philosophy? In his answer to the symposium’s question, Jonardon Ganeri develops a »Manifesto for [a] Re:emergent Philosophy.« Tracking changes in the understanding of ›comparative philosophy,‹ he sketches how today’s world of academic philosophy seems to be set to enter an »age of re:emergence« in which world philosophies will be studied through modes of global participation. In their responses, the symposium’s discussants tease out implications of this Manifesto for different issues: While Mustafa Abu Sway suggests that comparative philosophy be understood as an intra-philosophical dialogue, whose aim depends on its participants, Paul Boghossian questions whether there can be conflicting, yet equally valid, ways of arriving at justified beliefs about the world. For her part, Georgina Stewart draws out the similarities between Ganeri’s understanding of comparative philosophy and the ethical stance involved in studying Maori science. In his Reply, Ganeri fleshes out his understanding of a pluralistic realism. Only an epistemic culture, which is open to a plurality of epistemic stances, he contends, can propel polycentric modes of knowledge production.

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.

Recently, there has been a significant upsurge of interest in what has come to be known as the 'Adoption Problem', first developed by Saul Kripke in 1974. The problem purports to raise a difficulty for Quine’s anti-exceptionalist conception of logic. In what follows, we first offer a statement of the problem and argue that, so understood, it depends upon natural but resistible assumptions. We then use that discussion as a springboard for developing a different adoption problem, arguing that, for a significant class of basic logical principles, there is indeed a difficulty in seeing how they might be ‘freely adopted,’ thereby vindicating something close to the spirit of Kripke’s original claim. This first part of our argument will enforce a significant qualification of Quine’s claim that basic logical principles can be empirically confirmed. In the concluding sections of the paper, we turn to the question, specifically, of the empirical revisability of logic, arguing that when proper attention is paid to the role of reasoning in theory revision, it does indeed emerge that anti-exceptionalism, in full generality, is untenable.

This collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, resumes the current surge of interest in the proper explication of the notion of a priori. The authors discuss the relations of the a priori to the notions of definition, meaning, justification, and ontology, explore how the concept figured historically in the philosophies of Leibniz, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and address its role in the contemporary philosophies of logic, mathematics, mind, and science. The editors’ Introduction familiarizes the reader with the issues that are to be explored in detail in later parts of the anthology.

This chapter aims to provide materials with which to substantiate the claim that, under the appropriate circumstances, the notion of analyticity can help explain how one might have a priori knowledge even in the strong sense. It argues that Implicit Definition, properly understood, is completely independent of any form of irrealism about logic. The chapter defends the thesis of Implicit Definition against Quine's criticisms, and examines the sort of account of the apriority of logic that this doctrine is able to provide. The chapter shows that, against the background of a rejection of indeterminacy, its insolubility cannot be conceded. It also argues that neither a non‐factualism about Frege‐analyticity, nor an error thesis about it, can plausibly fall short of an outright rejection of meaning itself. The chapter shows how the doctrine that appears to offer the most promising account of how we grasp the meanings of the logical constants.

I argue for the claim that there are instances of a priori justified belief – in particular, justified belief in moral principles – that are not analytic, i.e., that cannot be explained solely by the understanding we have of their propositions. §1–2 provides the background necessary for understanding this claim: in particular, it distinguishes between two ways a proposition can be analytic, Basis and Constitutive, and provides the general form of a moral principle. §§3–5 consider whether Hume's Law, properly interpreted, can be established by Moore's Open Question Argument, and concludes that it cannot: while Moore's argument – appropriately modified – is effective against the idea that moral judgments are either reductively analyzable or Constitutive-analytic, a different argument is needed to show that they are not Basis-analytic. Such an argument is supplied in §6. §§7–8 conclude by considering how these considerations bear on recent discussions of “alternative normative concepts”, on the epistemology of intuitions, and on the differences between disagreement in moral domains and in other a priori domains such as logic and mathematics.

I defend normative realism—the claim that there are mind-independent, absolute normative facts—mostly by arguing against its rivals. Against mind-dependent theories of normativity, I argue that at least one highly influential version of such a view, Lewis's dispositional theory of value, is subject to at least three severe problems: the problem of the implausible contingency of value, the problem of ideal conditions, and the problem of lack of convergence. Against relativistic conceptions of normativity, I argue that either they fail to evade a commitment to absolute normative truths, or they fail to distinguish themselves from Nihilism. Finally, against Nihilism, I argue that it is not a coherent option at least for the normative domain of rationality, since facts about rationality are presupposed by any judgment, including any judgment meant to express a skepticism about facts about rationality.

Extract: Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva (henceforth, B&C) have written a superb, compendious book on various kinds of relativism (2019). While they give nuanced and sympathetic reconstructions of these views, it is illuminating to see them show, repeatedly and in detail, how each of these views succumbs to a familiar dilemma: a relativistic view requires that it be possible for two judgers to genuinely disagree with one another, even while their views count as ‘equally valid’. However, it is not possible to make sense of this combination: in each and every case, the view either fails to specify a genuine disagreement, or it fails to make sense of equal validity. Since I completely agree with this type of critique of relativistic views (see Boghossian 2006, 2008), I found it hard to find something to write a critical notice about. However, there is one argument I was not convinced by and that is B&C’s argument against Gilbert Harman’s influential version of moral relativism. Since their discussion of Harman is original and interesting and leads to a number of fundamental philosophical issues, I will devote this notice to a detailed critique of it.

Normativity is both one of the most important and ubiquitous of phenomena and, despite its historical centrality to philosophy, one of the least understood. The idea that there might be objective, attitude-independent, truths about what we ought to do (morality), what we ought to believe (rationality) or what we ought to appreciate (aesthetics), has always seemed very puzzling to philosophers, even though ordinary thought seems steeped in such judgments. Up until quite recently, the received view was that there was no good way to make sense of such a realistic, objectivist construal of normativity, that we have to make do with one or another anti-realistic alternative, principally, Expressivism, some forms of Constructivism, or Relativism. However, the well-known difficulties with these anti-realist options have motivated philosophers, most especially younger ones, to take a fresh look at Realism and to assess and develop it in new ways. Sometimes the result is that Realism is seen to be better protected against classic objections than had been previously realized; at others, the result seems to be that Realism is even harder to defend, and perhaps even harder to understand, than traditional thinking had allowed. The upshot is a vigorous and stimulating debate that is just beginning to take shape and whose outcome is far from resolved. The main impulse behind the present volume was to commission new work on Normative Realism by a mix of senior and junior scholars to give the philosophical community a useful sense of the current state of play on this central topic. ...

This chapter revisits the classic questions whether absolute music can express extra-musical meaning and whether such meaning should be thought of as playing an important role in our understanding and appreciation of music. It argues that music’s expressive ability plays a central role in our conception of its phenomenology and value—in our perception of music as expressive and in its capacity to move us, both in the understudied generic sense, and in the sense of arousing specific emotions in us. It examines a type of scepticism about music’s expressive ability made influential by Eduard Hanslick and considers to what extent it can be answered. The chapter concludes that, while the extreme scepticism espoused by Hanslick cannot be sustained, his discussion teaches us deep lessons about the expressive indeterminacy involved in music. The chapter illustrates some of the issues it deals with through an analysis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major and explores the connection between meaning in music and meaning in poetry.

This chapter assumes that intuitions must play a central role in explaining a priori justification and looks at the conditions under which they would be able to do so. It argues that if an appeal to intuitions is to help, they must provide epistemological resources that go beyond those provided by explanations in terms of epistemological analyticity (appeals to conceptual understanding). Accounts, like Ernest Sosa’s, which reduce intuitions to attractions to assent, and which give the understanding an indispensable role in explaining the justificatory powers of such attractions, are unable to provide such a resource. As a result, such accounts must be rejected. Towards the end of the chapter, an alternative account of these issues is briefly presented, one that seems to the author to hold greater promise.

This chapter revisits the question whether facts about intentional content can be understood in purely naturalistic terms. In a previous work, ‘The Rule-Following Considerations’, it was argued that Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein-inspired discussion of following a rule was, pace Kripke’s intention, best understood as showing that facts about intentional content resist naturalistic reduction. The message of this chapter is the same, although it differs from, and hopefully improves upon, the earlier work in several respects. First, it argues for a somewhat weaker conclusion—not that facts about intentional content cannot be naturalistically reduced, but, rather, that either they cannot be reduced or that they are indeterminate. Second, it uses bits of Kripke’s discussion not emphasized previously and that, in any case, have been widely rejected as ineffective. And, finally, it takes into account important distinctions that were missing both from Kripke’s original discussion and from the previous work referenced here.

What happens when we reason our way from one proposition to another? This process is usually called “inference” and this chapter examines its nature. It revisits the author’s earlier attempts to explain the nature of the process of inference, and tries to further clarify why we need the type of “intellectualist” account of that process that he has been pursuing. In the course of doing so, the chapter traces some unexpected connections between our topic and the distinction between a priori and a posteriori justification, and tries to draw some general methodological morals about the role of phenomenology in the philosophy of mind.

The book records a series of philosophical exchanges between its authors, amounting to a debate extended over more than fifteen years. Its subject matter is the nature and scope of reason. A central case at issue is basic logical knowledge, and the justification for basic deductive inferences, but the arguments range far more widely, at stake the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, and between a priori and a posteriori. The discussion naturally involves problems about the conditions for linguistic understanding and competence, and what it might be to grasp a concept or to have an intuition. Since reason is central to philosophical method, there are associated implications for how philosophy itself works, or should work. In particular, the discussion raises fundamental concerns about how to approach epistemology.

The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.