Terry Horgan

The ancient sorites paradox has important implications for metaphysics, for logic, and for semantics. Metaphysically, the paradox can be harnessed to produce a powerful argument for the claim that there cannot be vague objects or vague properties. With respect to logic, the paradox forces a choice between the highly counterintuitive ‘epistemic’ account of vagueness and the rejection of classical two-valued logic. Regarding semantics, nonclassical approaches to the logic of vagueness lead naturally to the idea that truth, for vague discourse, is not direct language-world correspondence grounded in referential connections linking a statement’s basic subsentential constituents (names, predicates, the apparatus of quantification) to real objects and real properties; rather, truth is a matter of indirect correspondence between vague language and nonvague reality

Jaegwon Kim argues that one should distinguish naturalism from materialism, and that both should be construed as ontological rather than epistemological. I agree, on both counts. Although I have sometimes tended to slur together materialism and naturalism in of my writings (as is done in much recent philosophy), I do think that it is important to distinguish them. It is a serious philosophical task to get clearer about how each position is best articulated, and about ways that one could embrace naturalism without embracing materialism. British emergentism, for example, seems reasonably classified as a position that is naturalist but not materialist (and evidently the British emergentists themselves construed their view this way). Here are two key tenets of British emergentism, both of which seem to disqualify the view from being a form of materialism without thereby disqualifying it as a form of naturalism: (E.1) There are emergent properties in nature, in the following sense: although (i) these properties are supervenient on certain other properties, the relevant supervenience facts are ontologically sui generis (and hence are unexplainable). (E.2) Emergent properties are fundamental force generating properties , in this sense: they produce additional fundamental forces that affect the distribution of matter, above and beyond the fundamental forces posited in physics. A position worth of the label “materialism,” it seems to me, should preclude both of these emergentist theses. My notion of superdupervenience is intended as a condition that any version of materialism should satisfy, and is supposed to be incompatible with theses (E.1) and (E.2). Although sometimes, as in Horgan and Timmons (1992) and Horgan (1994), the condition is articulated in terms of the need for supervenience to be explainable “in a naturalistically acceptable way” (thereby slurring the naturalism/materialism distinction), what I had in mind was that supervenience relations must be explainable in a materialistically acceptable way..

What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is really only one concrete particular, viz., the entire cosmos (see Horgan and Potr (2000, 2002), Potr (2003)). But there are various potential versions of the generic position we are here calling austere metaphysical realism; and it is the generic view that constitutes the ontological part of the overall approach to realism and truth that we will describe here. What is true? More than you might think, given our austere metaphysical realism. We maintain that truth is semantically correct affirmability, under contextually operative semantic standards. We also maintain that most of the time, the contextually operative semantic standards work in such a way that semantic correctness (i.e., truth) is a matter of indirect correspondence rather than direct correspondence between thought or language on the one hand, and the world on the other.1 When correspondence is indirect rather than direct, a given statement (or thought) can be true even if the correct ontology does not include items answering to all the referential commitments (as we will here call them) of the statement. 2 This means that even if a putative object is repudiated by a correct ontological theory, ordinary statements that are putatively about that object may still be true. For instance, the statement “The University of St. Andrews is in Scotland” can be semantically correct (i.e., true) even if the right ontology does not include any entity answering to the referring term ‘The University of St. Andrews’, or any entity...

I maintain, in defending “thirdism,” that Sleeping Beauty should do Bayesian updating after assigning the “preliminary probability” 1/4 to the statement S: “Today is Tuesday and the coin flip is heads.” (This preliminary probability obtains relative to a specific proper subset I of her available information.) Pust objects that her preliminary probability for S is really zero, because she could not be in an epistemic situation in which S is true. I reply that the impossibility of being in such an epistemic situation is irrelevant, because relative to I, statement S nonetheless has degree of evidential support 1/4.

We propose an approach to epistemic justification that incorporates elements of both reliabilism and evidentialism, while also transforming these elements in significant ways. After briefly describing and motivating the non-standard version of reliabilism that Henderson and Horgan call “transglobal” reliabilism, we harness some of Henderson and Horgan’s conceptual machinery to provide a non-reliabilist account of propositional justification (i.e., evidential support). We then invoke this account, together with the notion of a transglobally reliable belief-forming process, to give an account of doxastic justification.

Disagreement affords humans as members of epistemic communities important opportunities for refining or improving their epistemic situations with respect to many of their beliefs. To get such epistemic gains, one needs to explore and gauge one’s own epistemic situation and the epistemic situations of others. Accordingly, a fitting response to disagreement regarding some matter, p, typically will turn on the resolution of two strongly interrelated questions: (1) whether p, and (2) why one’s interlocutor disagrees with oneself about p. When one has high intellectual respect for one’s interlocutor, answering question (2) involves arriving at a sympathetic explanatory understanding of the interlocutor’s own epistemic attitude toward p. Sorting out (2) is an abductive matter. Further, so far as the abductive explanation conditions one’s epistemic take regarding (1), there will be an abductive character to one’s epistemic position with respect to whether p—even where one’s initial purchase on whether p was not an abductive matter. We explain here how this can be managed naturally and tractably.

You are given a choice between two envelopes. You are told, reliably, that each envelope has some money in it—some whole number of dollars, say—and that one envelope contains twice as much money as the other. You don’t know which has the higher amount and which has the lower. You choose one, but are given the opportunity to switch to the other. Here is an argument that it is rationally preferable to switch: Let x be the quantity of money in your chosen envelope. Then the quantity in the other is either 1/2x or 2x, and these possibilities are equally likely. So the expected utility of switching is 1/2(1/2x) + 1/2(2x) = 1.25x, whereas that for sticking is only x. So it is rationally preferable to switch. There is clearly something wrong with this argument. For one thing, it is obvious that neither choice is rationally preferable to the other: it’s a tossup. For another, if you switched on the basis of this reasoning, then the same argument could immediately be given for switching back; and so on, indefinitely. For another, there is a parallel argument for the rational preferability of sticking, in terms of the quantity y in the other envelope. But the problem is to provide an adequate account of how the argument goes wrong. This is the two envelope paradox. In an earlier paper Horgan 2000) I offered a diagnosis of the paradox. I argued that the flaw in the argument is considerably more subtle and interesting than is usually believed, and that an adequate diagnosis reveals important morals about both probability and the foundations of decision theory. One moral is that there is a kind of expected utility, not previously noticed as far as I know, that I call nonstandard expected utility. I proposed a general normative principle governing the proper application of nonstandard expected utility in rational decisionmaking. But this principle is inadequate in several respects, some of which I acknowledged in note added in press and some of which I have meanwhile discovered..

Morphological content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing structure of a cognitive system and is automatically accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming explicit in consciousness. We maintain that much belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological : i.e., it draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of background information possessed by the cognitive agent. We also advocate a form of experiential evidentialism concerning epistemic justification—roughly, the view that the justification-status of an agent’s beliefs is fully determined by the character of the agent’s conscious experience. We have previously defended both the thesis that much belief-formation is essentially morphological, and also a version of evidentialism. Here we explain how experiential evidentialism can be smoothly and plausibly combined with the thesis that much of the cognitive processing that generates justified beliefs is essentially morphological. The leading idea is this: even though epistemically relevant morphological content does not become explicit in consciousness during the process of belief-generation, nevertheless such content does affect the overall character of conscious experience in an epistemically significant way: it is implicit in conscious experience, and is implicitly appreciated by the experiencing agent.

I explore the prospects for overcoming the prima facie tension in the following four claims, all of which I accept: the phenomenal character of experience is narrow; virtually all aspects of the phenomenal character of experience are intentional; the most fundamental kind of mental intentionality is fully constituted by phenomenal character; and yet introspection does not by itself reliably generate answers to certain philosophically important questions about the phenomenally constituted intentional content of experience. The apparent tension results from the following initially plausible thought: if indeed the answers to such questions are entirely fixed by phenomenal character by itself, then presumably these answers should be directly available introspectively. I focus the discussion specifically on certain questions about the phenomenal intentional content of agentive experience—e.g., the question whether the content of agentive experience is compatible with causal determinism. I consider three alternative possibilities for explaining why the answers to such questions are not directly available introspectively—two of which I argue against and the third of which I embrace.

Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G. E. Moore's 1903 classic, Principia Ethica. Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, metaethics is concerned to answer second order non-moral questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought and discourse. Moore has continued to exert a powerful influence, and the sixteen essays here represent the most up-to-date work in metaethics after, and in some cases directly inspired by, the work of Moore.

We present a new argument for the claim that in the Sleeping Beauty problem, the probability that the coin comes up heads is 1/3. Our argument depends on a principle for the updating of probabilities that we call ‘generalized conditionalization’, and on a species of generalized conditionalization we call ‘synchronic conditionalization on old information’. We set forth a rationale for the legitimacy of generalized conditionalization, and we explain why our new argument for thirdism is immune to two attacks that Pust (Synthese 160:97–101, 2008) has leveled at other arguments for thirdism