Anil Gupta

A foundationalist account of our empirical thinking divides propositions we accept into two classes, basic and derivative, and sees the warrant of derivative propositions as accruing to them through their derivation from basic propositions. Such an account needs to answer two questions: which propositions are basic, and whence do basic propositions acquire their warrant? A natural and ancient answer to these questions is that basic propositions are observational and that these propositions gain their warrant from perceptions. I critically examine this view and also a variant view offered by Wilfrid Sellars. I put forward an alternative conception, dialectical foundationalism, that sees the distinction between the basic and the derivative as issuing from a distinction between two kinds of reasoning, derivational and dialectical. This type of foundationalism provides a more accurate account of our empirical thinking, I argue, than its traditional and Sellarsian counterparts.

Adam Marushak raises a dilemma for the proponents of the hypothetical given. On one of its horns, the proponents are said to be committed to rationalism; and on the other horn, to skepticism. I argue, in response, that even if we grant that the arguments of both horns are sound, the commitments incurred are light and unproblematic. I argue also that the dilemma is based on a reading of the hypothetical that, though valuable, needs to be refined in light of certain distinctions. These distinctions concern the different support relations that can obtain between beliefs are various elements of a view.

This book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that help us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine qualities at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.--

Tim Maudlin’s Truth and Paradox offers a theory of truth that arises from a foundationalist picture of language. The picture is attractive, and Maudlin builds on it courageously. From the formal point of view, the theory of truth that emerges is, as Maudlin observes, nothing other than the least-fixed-point theory of Saul Kripke. From the philosophical point of view, however, the differences between Maudlin’s and Kripke’s theories are large. It is these differences that lead Maudlin to claim advantages that Kripke did not claim for his own theory. Maudlin says that his theory demands no object-language/metalanguage distinction, that he has “developed a theory of truth for a language that can serve as its own metalanguage.” He promises early on that his theory will be “more adequate to our actual practice of reasoning about truth [than revision and other fixed-point theories].” And he claims that the language he has constructed is expressively complete.