Michael Hymers

Barry Allen, drawing on Wittgenstein's standard-metre example from Philosophical Investigations, argues there can be no determinate similarities or differences in the absence of a practice of measuring such similarities or differences. I contend that one can accept Allen's premises without accepting his conclusion if we draw a distinction between being and being true of the following sort: although it was not true, in the absence human or other epistemic practices, that water was H2O, nonetheless, before there were any human or other epistemic practices, water was H2O. This, I argue, is compatible with retaining the truism that it is true that p if and only if p, and it allows us to avoid the idealism of Allen's conclusion.

In 'Sartre on Bad Faith' Leslie Stevenson attempts to formulate the Sartrean notion of bad faith. According to Stevenson, someone is in bad faith, if she reflectively denies some state of affairs, of the truth of which she is pre-reflectively aware. Jeffrey Gordon counters with the criticism that, although Stevenson's analysis of Sartre is correct, it is a position which is philosophically indefensible. I argue that Stevenson's reflective denial account falls to Gordon's criticism, but that it is also inadequate as a description of bad faith. I then offer an analysis of bad faith which provides both a better reading of Sartre and a way of overcoming Gordon's objection.

Tyler Burge says that first-person authority can be reconciled with anti-individualism about the intentional by denying part of the "Cartesian conception" of authority, which claims that I am actually authoritative about my intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This clause, he says, wrongly conflates the evaluation-conditions for sceptical doubts about the "external" world with the conditions for classifying intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This paper argues that the kind of possibility needed to understand external-world scepticism justifies the conflation and that Burge can reject the Cartesian conception only if he rejects either metaphysical realism or anti-individualism.

In "What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?" David Braybrooke claims that the justification of a moral claim is independent of the justification of morality generally–that ethical justification does not have to be traced back to meta-ethical justification. I support this claim by appealing to a contextualist theory of epistemic justification. Drawing on the work of Michael Williams and Robert Brandom, I contend, first, that every claim is justified by default and requires articulated reasons only when it is challenged. Not every challenge is a reasonable challenge–only those that share the burden of proof are. Secondly, I hold that sceptics about moral truth and justification, such as J. L. Mackie, are committed to a substantive philosophical position, closely linked to foundationalism, that Williams has called “epistemological realism”, insofar as they hold that moral claims are intrinsically less certain than claims about non-moral facts on which moral facts might be taken to supervene. But there is no reason to believe that any propositions are intrinsically more certain than any others. Certainty is a function of epistemic context, not semantic or empirical content. Therefore, although moral claims may presuppose the truth of some meta-ethical claims, the justification of moral claims does not depend on the justification of meta-ethical claims.