Olav Gjelsvik

This chapter has as its point of departure the criticism of Davidson’s notion of radical interpretation in Ludwig and Lepore (2005), and thus of Davidson’s account of thought. The chapter agrees with them in their criticism of Davidson to this extent: as Davidson conceives of evidence available to the third-person point of view in radical interpretation, we are left with a massive and deeply problematic underdetermination of content. There are further questions, however, about how we ought to conceive of the evidence available to the third-person point of view. Davidson’s mistake, it is argued, lies in his quite standard conception of this evidence and not in his basic methodological assumptions, which really do change the philosophical landscape radically. The paper reaches this conclusion about which conception of evidence we ought to have by focusing on cases of error. It establishes a need to employ factive notions when ascribing mental/intentional states to a person if we are to deal properly with error both in thought and action. An account of thought or action not only needs to allow for the possibility of error, but must also give a correct account of error: that is, an account where the errors which speakers actually make arise as errors according to the account of thought and action. The claims of the paper are briefly these. We need a rich conception of evidence in order to account for error; this rich conception of evidence is here made available, it is not incompatible with Davidson’s basic methodological assumptions, and with this conception of evidence we are no longer vulnerable to the arguments levelled by Lepore and Ludwig against Davidson.

In this paper I discuss Fred Dretske's account of knowledge critically, and try to bring out how his account of informational content leads to cases of extreme epistemic good luck in his treatment of knowledge. My main interest, however, is to establish that the cases of epistemic luck arise because Dretske's account of knowledge in a fundamental way fails to take into account the role our actual recognitional capacities and powers of discrimination play in perceptually based knowledge. This result is, I believe, new. The paper has three sections. In Section 1 I give a short exposition of Dretske's theory, and make some necessary qualifications about how it is to be understood. In Section 2 I discuss in greater detail how the theory actually works, and provide some examples I think are very troublesome for Dretske. In Section 3 I argue that these cases establish my main claim. I also show that there are cases of epistemic bad luck due to Dretske's account of how information causes belief

This paper analyses and criticizes S. Kripke's celebrated argument against materialist identity‐theories. While criticisms of Kripke in the literature attack one or more of his premisses, an attempt is made here to show that Kripke's conclusion is unjustified even if his premisses are accepted. Kripke's premisses have sufficient independent plausibility to make this strategy interesting. Having stated Kripke's argument, it is pointed out that Kripke must assume that the contents of the Cartesian intuitions are clear and of a kind suited for the type of explanation he favours, while his own result concerning contents in epistemic contexts is precisely that this might not be so when objects or events we thought distinct happen to be identical. The point is that only by assuming that the identity‐theory is false, can Kripke maintain that the Cartesian intuitions express contents which can be explained in his favoured way. But such an assumption is clearly illegitimate when the aim is to establish that the identity‐theory is false. Kripke cannot conclude that the identity‐theory is false because no explanation of epistemic possibilities is produced, since by his own standards no such explanation can be produced if the identity‐theory is true.

In his target article and recent interesting book about addiction and the brain, Marc Lewis claims that the prevalent medical view of addiction as a brain disease or a disorder, is mistaken. In this commentary we critically examine his arguments for this claim. We find these arguments to rest on some problematical and largely undefended assumptions about notions of disease, disorder and the demarcation between them and good health. Even if addiction does seem to differ from some typical brain diseases, we believe contrary to Lewis, that there are still good reasons to maintain its classification as a mental or behavioral disorder.

David Hunter has recently argued that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘ knowledge of what one is doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing.