Terry Horgan

Josep Corbi raises several worries about the metaethical position that Mark Timmons and I have articulated and defended, which we call “nondescriptivist cognitivism.â€â€¦ His remarks prompt some points of clarification…. Timmons and I characterize descriptive content as “way-the-world-might-be†content. We maintain that “base case†beliefs—roughly, those non-evaluative and evaluative beliefs whose contents have the simplest kinds of logical form—are of two types: a non-evaluative belief is an is-commitment with respect to a core descriptive content, and an evaluative belief is an ought-commitment with respect to a core descriptive content. Core descriptive contents are those descriptive contents expressible by (nonevaluative) atomic sentences. Concerning the notion of a core descriptive content, Corbi says.

In recent years Jaegwon Kim has propounded and elaborated an influential theory of events. He takes an event to be the exemplification of an empirical property by a concrete object at a time. He also has proposed and endorsed a version of the “Humean” tradition concerning causation: the view that causal relations between concrete events depend upon general "covering laws." But although his explication of the covering-law conception of causation seems quite natural within the framework of his theory, it gives rise to a serious problem: in numerous garden-variety instances of causation, the Humean conditions are not satisfied. In this paper I shall suggest a way to modify Kim's theory of events in order to reconcile it with his treatment of causality.

Philosophers who advocate an ontology without events must show how sentences containing apparent reference to events can be systematically paraphrased, or "regimented," into sentences which avoid ontological commitment to these putative entities. Two alternative proposals are set forth for regimenting statements containing putatively event-denoting definite descriptions. Both proposals eliminate the apparent reference to events, while still preserving the validity of inferences sanctioned by the surface grammar of the regimented sentences.

Connectionism was explicitly put forward as an alternative to classical cognitive science. The questions arise: how exactly does connectionism differ from classical cognitive science, and how is it potentially better? The classical “rules and representations” conception of cognition is that cognitive transitions are determined by exceptionless rules that apply to the syntactic structure of symbols. Many philosophers have seen connectionism as a basis for denying structured symbols. We, on the other hand, argue that cognition is too rich and flexible to be simulable by the exceptionless representation-level rules that classicism requires. However, this very richness of cognition requires syntactically structured representations—what philosophers call a language of thought. The natural mathematical characterization of neural networks comes from the theory of dynamical systems. We propose that the mathematics of dynamical systems, not the mathematics of algorithms, holds the key to how cognitive structure and cognitive processes can be realized in the physical structure and processes of a network.

I propose a metaphysical position I call 'limited metaphysical realism', and I link it to a position in the philosophy of language I call 'psychologistic semantics'. Limited metaphysical realism asserts that there is a mind-independent, discourse-independent world, but posits a sparse ontology. Psychologistic semantics construes truth not as direct word/world correspondence, and not as warranted assertibility (or Putnam's "ideal" warranted assertibility), but rather as 'correct assertibility'. I argue that virtues of this package deal over each of the two broad positions that have recently dominated metaphysics and philosophy of language--positions I call package deal metaphysical realism, and package deal anti-realism

Philosophers who advocate an ontology without events must show how sentences containing apparent reference to events can be systematically paraphrased, or "regimented," into sentences which avoid ontological commitment to these putative entities. Two alternative proposals are set forth for regimenting statements containing putatively event-denoting definite descriptions. Both proposals eliminate the apparent reference to events, while still preserving the validity of inferences sanctioned by the surface grammar of the regimented sentences.

In “Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem,” Anna Mahtani and I offer a new argument for thirdism that relies on what we call “generalized conditionalization.” Generalized conditionalization goes beyond conventional conditionalization in two respects: first, by sometimes deploying a space of synchronic, essentially temporal, candidate-possibilities that are not “prior” possibilities; and second, by allowing for the use of preliminary probabilities that arise by first bracketing, and then conditionalizing upon, “old evidence.” In “Beauty and Conditionalization: Reply to Horgan and Mahtani,” Joel Pust replies to the Horgan/Mahtani argument, raising several objections. In my view his objections do not undermine the argument, but they do reveal a need to provide several further elaborations of it—elaborations that I think are independently plausible. In this paper I will address his objections, by providing the elaborations that I think they prompt.

The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic point or purpose may be readily sensed—and for which the intimate connection between point/purpose and the concept itself is readily understandable. Commonly at the inception of philosophical reflection one’s sense for the point or purpose of a specific concept is seldom highly articulate. The chapter argues that this does not prevent one’s grasp of point/purpose from doing real work in philosophical reflection.