John Biro

In defending the startling claim that that there are no artifacts, indeed, no inanimate material objects of the familiar sort, Peter van Inwagen has argued that truths about such putative objects can be paraphrased as truths that do not make essential reference to them and that we should endorse only the ontological commitments of the paraphrase. In this note I argue that the paraphrases van Inwagen recommends cannot meet his condition. Read one way, they lose us some truths. Read another, they entail the existence of the very objects they are supposed to rid us of. However, we need not share van Inwagen's distaste for the latter: to say that they exist is not to say that anything exists in addition to the simples composing them.

Garssen and van Laar in effect concede our main criticism of the pragma-dialectical approach. The criticism is that the conclusions of arguments can be ‘P-D reasonable’ yet patently unreasonable, epistemically speaking. The concession consists in the claim that the theory “remains restricted to the investigation of standpoints in the light of particular sets of starting points” which are “up to individual disputants to create” and the admission that all the relevant terms of normative appraisal have been redefined. We also discuss their criticisms of the epistemic account of argumentation and argument evaluation and raise some new questions about the approach they defend

A major virtue of the Pragma-Dialectical theory of argumentation is its commitment to reasonableness and rationality as central criteria of argumentative quality. However, the account of these key notions offered by the originators of this theory, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, seems to us problematic in several respects. In what follows we criticize that account and suggest an alternative, offered elsewhere, that seems to us to be both independently preferable and more in keeping with the epistemic approach to arguments and argumentation we favor

In this paper we defend a particular version of the epistemic approach to argumentation. We advance some general considerations in favor of the approach and then examine the ways in which different versions of it play out with respect to the theory of fallacies, which we see as central to an understanding of argumentation. Epistemic theories divide into objective and subjective versions. We argue in favor of the objective version, showing that it provides a better account than its subjectivist rival of the central fallacy of begging the question. We suggest that the strengths of the objective epistemic theory of fallacies provide support for the epistemic approach to argumentation more generally.

ABSTRACT: While we applaud several aspects of Lilian Bermejo-Luque's novel theory of argumentation and especially welcome its epistemological dimensions, in this discussion we raise doubts about her conception of argumentation, her account of argumentative goodness, and her treatments of the notion of “giving reasons” and of justification.RESUMEN: Aunque aprobamos varios aspectos de la nueva teoría de la argumentación propuesta por Lilian Bermejo Luque y, en particular, su dimensión epistemológica, en este debate planteamos algunas dudas sobre su concepción de la argumentación, su análisis de la bondad argumentativa y su tratamiento de la noción de “dar razones” y de justificación.

A widely held view has it that sometimes there is more than one thing in exactly the same place, as is the case, allegedly, with a clay statue. There is the statue, but there also is a piece of clay—both obviously in the same place yet distinct in virtue of their differing properties, if only modal ones. Those holding this view—pluralists—often describe the relation between such objects as one of constitution, with the piece of clay being said to constitute the statue. In the first part of this paper I consider ways in which the supposed relation of constitution may be understood. I conclude that the only coherent interpretation of ‘x constitutes y’ is one on which it is presupposed that x and y are identical. While this does not, by itself, show that pluralism is false, it is something that should make us suspicious of it. In the second part of the paper I propose a simple way with the temporal and modal facts the pluralist appeals to, showing that they do not force us into accepting his puzzling doctrine.

Abstract“That there are scattered material objects seems … beyond reasonable doubt.” Many have agreed with this confident assertion by Richard Cartwright. I give reasons to doubt it. While there is an uninteresting sense in which there are scattered material objects, what makes Cartwright’s claim startling is that he makes it clear that by ‘a material object’ he means ‘a body.’ I argue that the every-day examples Cartwright gives – and similar ones offered by others who endorse his claim – are not both material objects in that sense and scattered. There are no scattered bodies.

That in Gettier's alleged counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief the belief condition is satisfied has rarely been questioned. Yet there is reason to doubt that a rational person would come to believe what Gettier's protagonists are said to believe in the way they are said to have come to believe it. If they would not, the examples are not counter-examples to the traditional analysis. I go on to discuss a number of examples inspired by Gettier's and argue that they, too, fail to be counter-examples either for reasons similar to those I have urged or because it is not clear that their subject does not know.

This collection of previously unpublished essays on Spinoza provides a representative sample of new and interesting research on the philosopher. Spinoza's philosophy still has an underserved reputation for being obscure and incomprehensible. In these chapters, Spinoza is seen mostly as a metaphysician who tried to pave the way for the new science. The essays investigate several themes, notably Spinoza's monism, the nature of the individual, the relation between mind and body, and his place in 17th century philosophy including his relation to Descartes and Leibniz. The top scholars working on Spinoza today are all represented, including John Carriero, Michael Della Rocca, and Don Garrett.

Adrian Heathcote and I agree that a stopped clock does not show—as the adage has it—the right time twice a day, but he thinks, as I do not, that it does show what time it stopped. To think that it does is to treat the position of its hands as evidence of its stopping at the time it did. Add to the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge the requirement that the evidence on the basis of which the believer is justified be evidence of what is believed in this sense, and you have the long-sought fourth condition to block Gettier cases. I argue that requiring that one’s evidence be evidence in this sense is incompatible with the fallibilism on which Gettier cases are predicated.

It is not uncommon for philosophers to seek the imprimatur of a great predecessor by attempting to show that the truths they proclaim have been perceived by the latter, even if only through a glass darkly. In this slim but rich volume, it is Jerry Fodor’s turn to claim Hume as a philosophical ancestor, both for cognitive science, in general, and for the theory of the mind he has championed for some time, in particular. He writes: “Hume’s Treatise is the foundational document of cognitive science: it made explicit, for the first time, the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of the mind”.

Davidson's paratactic account of indirect speech exploits the fact that ‘that’ can be either a demonstrative pronoun or a subordinating conjunction. Davidson thinks that the fact that it is plausible to think that it inherited the latter function from the former lends support to his account. However, in other languages the two functions are performed by unrelated words, which makes the account impossible to apply to them. I argue that this shows that, rather than revealing the underlying form of indirect reports, the account reflects only a quirk of English.

Ned Block has recently adduced some new arguments to show that “psychologism is true and thus a natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence that is incompatible with psychologism is false”. He introduces a thought experiment in which a machine is programmed to exhibit intelligent-seeming behavior and appeals to our intuition that such a machine is nevertheless not really inteligent; he traces that intuition to the fact that the machine is being thought of as operating with internal processes that, first, lack a certain internal structure with a certain kind of complexity and, second, are in a certain sense mechanical, reflecting only the programmer’s intelligence.I argue against Block both that the mistakes the source and nature of our intuition and that the conclusion he draws concerning psychologism does not follow. While the intuition he appeals to may show that behaviorism is false, that is not equivalent to showing that psychologism in the sense intended by Block is true.Em trabalhos recentes Ned Block fornece alguns argumentos novos para mostrar que “o psicologismo é verdadeiro e, portanto, uma análise behaviorista da inteligência que seja incompatível com este último tem de ser falsa”. Ele elabora um experimento mental no qual uma máquina é programada para exibir comportamento aparentemente inteligente e mostra em que sentido nossa intuição leva-nos a concluir que tal máquina não é realmente inteligente. Tal intuição origina-se no fato de que a máquina é concebida como operando com processos internos aos quais falta uma estrutura interior dotada de um certo tipo de complexidade e que tais processos internos são mecânicos, refletindo apenas a inteligência do programador.A argumentação contra Block é feita em duas direções: em primeiro lugar mostra-se que a origem e a natureza de nossa intuição é incorreta; em segundo que as conclusões que ele extrai a partir do psicologismo não procedem. Embora a intuição que Block invoca possa mostrar que o behaviorismo é falso, isso não equivale a provar que o psicologismo no sentido por ele pretendido seja verdadeiro.

The so–called truthmaker solution to the problem Gettier is thought to have posed for the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief is to add a fourth condition, requiring that one’s evidence for one’s belief be the state of affairs that makes the belief true. Adrian Heathcote argues that the reason why one lacks knowledge in Russell’s case of the stopped clock is that, as in the classic Gettier–style cases, this condition is not satisfied. I argue that the proposed solution fails, as it embodies a misunderstanding of what evidence is.

Many who agree with Kripke that ‘sloppy, colloquial speech’ often confuses use and mention would deem ‘ a is called N’ an example of such confusion, insisting on ‘ a is called "N"’ as the properly philosophical, un-sloppy, way of saying what is usually intended. Delia Graff Fara demurs – in my view, rightly. But the reasons she gives for doing so are, I think, themselves questionable and in any case do not go to the heart of the mistake on which Kripke's condemnation of colloquial speech as sloppy rests. I discuss Fara's claims that what is behind the mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between "appellative" and "referring" uses of names and overlooking the fact that names sometimes function as predicates, finding fault with both. I then argue that the mistake stems from adherence to a widely accepted picture of the mechanics of mentioning and that it is that picture that is confused, not ordinary speakers.

In this essay we develop a theory of discourse reports. The theory provides a common set of structural and interpretive principles that together account for the truth conditions of direct, indirect and mixed reports. A distinguishing feature of our view is the assumption that the complement sentence of a report divides exclusively and exhaustively into regions that characterize the content of the reported utterance and regions that characterize the form of the utterance. This assumption implies that mixed reports do not imply full direct or indirect reports. We discuss a classical David‐sonian proposal by Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore which conflicts with our theory on this latter point and show that it is unable to account for many of the phenomena we discuss.