Terry Horgan

We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction between core and ancillary epistemic virtues. Core epistemic virtues involve several inter-related kinds of epistemic rationality in belief fixation. Other “habits of mind” pertinent to belief fixation constitute ancillary epistemic virtues. Finally, we discuss the relationship between both kinds of virtues, offering a unified account of epistemic virtuousness.

Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief.

© Mind Association 2018Gila Sher’s Epistemic Friction is a bold and ambitious book, with many interesting things to say not only about knowledge, truth, and logic but also about matters ontological. It often requires the reader to construe it hermeneutically, but repays the effort of doing so.She coins the expression ‘epistemic friction’ to refer to constraints on a system of knowledge, coming from both the world and the mind. She says, ‘The world as the object or target of our theories restricts what we can truly say about it, and the mind restricts our theories both voluntarily and involuntarily’. Borrowing terminology from Shapiro, she describes her project as foundation without foundationalism. ‘The key idea’, she says, ‘… is that there is no inherent connection between grounding our system of knowledge in reality and...

Two philosophical questions arise about rationality in centipede games that are logically prior to attempts to apply the formal tools of game theory to this topic. First, given that the players have common knowledge of mutual rationality and common knowledge that they are each motivated solely to maximize their own profits, is there a backwards-induction argument that employs only familiar non-technical concepts about rationality, leads to the conclusion that the first player is rationally obligated to end the game at the first step, is deductively valid, employs premises all of which are prima facie highly plausible, and is prima facie sound and )? Second, if there is such an argument, then is it actually sound, or is it instead defective somehow despite being prima facie sound? Addressing these two questions is our project. We present a backwards-induction argument that is prima facie sound; we argue that it is an instance of the notorious sorites paradox, and hence that the concepts of rational obligatoriness and rational permissibility are vague; and we briefly address the potential consequences of all this for the foundations of game theory and decision theory.

I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether credence 1 is construed as full belief (the limit case of so-called partial belief) or instead is construed as absolute certainty. I argue that the notion of an “ideal Bayesian reasoner” cannot serve as a normative ideal that actual human agents should seek to emulate as closely as they can, because different such reasoners who all have the same evidence as oneself—no single one them being uniquely psychologically most similar to oneself—will differ from one another in their credences (e.g., because they commence from different prior credences). I argue that epistemic probability, properly understood, is quantitative degree of evidential support relative to one’s evidence, and that principled epistemic probabilities arise only under quite special evidential circumstances—which means that epistemic probability is ill suited to figure centrally within general norms of human epistemic rationality.

In the formation of epistemically justified beliefs, what is the role of attention, and what is the role (if any) of non-attentional aspects of cognition? We will here argue that there is an essential role for certain nonattentional aspects. These involve epistemically relevant background information that is implicit in the standing structure of an epistemic agent’s cognitive architecture and that does not get explicitly represented during belief-forming cognitive processing. Since such “morphological content” (as we call it) does not become explicit during belief formation, it cannot be information that is within the scope of attention. Nevertheless,it does exert a subtle influence on the character of conscious experience, rather than operating in a purely unconscious way.

Abstract We propose a metaethical view that combines the cognitivist idea that moral judgments are genuine beliefs and moral utterances express genuine assertions with the idea that such beliefs and utterances are nondescriptive in their overall content. This sort of view has not been recognized among the standard metaethical options because it is generally assumed that all genuine beliefs and assertions must have descriptive content. We challenge this assumption and thereby open up conceptual space for a new kind of metaethical view. In developing our brand of nondescriptivist cognitivism we do the following: (1) articulate a conception of belief (and assertion) that does not require the overall declarative content of beliefs (and assertions) to be descriptive content; (2) make a case for the independent plausibility of this conception of belief and assertion; and (3) argue that our view, formulated in a way that draws upon the proposed conception of belief, has significant comparative advantages over descriptivist forms of cognitivism.

For the last 20 years or so, philosophers of mind have been using the term ‘qualia’, which is frequently glossed as standing for the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The examples of what-it-is-like that are typically given are feelings of pain or itches, and color and sound sensations. This suggests an identification of the experiential what-it-islike with such states. More recently, philosophers have begun speaking of the “phenomenology“ of experience, which they have also glossed as “what-it-is-like”. Many say, for example, that any acceptable materialism—or any acceptable account of the relation of mind and body—must “respect the phenomenology.”1 Typically, no examples beyond those mentioned in the first paragraph are offered. This suggests that the picture of the phenomenology that ”must be respected” is the what-it-is-like of bodily sensations, of sensations that occur in perception, and perhaps of certain analogous nonperceptual states, such as imaginings and image-like rememberings. According to the suggested picture, all there is to phenomenology is such states; intentional mental states—as such— have no phenomenology; there is nothing that it is like to undergo them. Although beliefs and desires are intentionally directed—i.e., they have aboutness—these mental states allegedly are not inherently phenomenal. On this view, there is nothing that it is like to be..

The hypothesis of the mental state-causation of behavior asserts that the behaviors we classify as actions are caused by certain mental states. A principal reason often given for trying to secure the truth of the MSC hypothesis is that doing so is allegedly required to vindicate our belief in our own agency. I argue that the project of vindicating agency needs to be seriously reconceived, as does the relation between this project and the MSC hypothesis. Vindication requires addressing what I call the agent-exclusion problem: the prima facie incompatibility between the intentional content of agentive experience and certain metaphysical hypotheses often espoused in philosophy

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.