Terry Horgan

Moral phenomenology is concerned with the elements of one's moral experiences that are generally available to introspection. Some philosophers argue that one's moral experiences, such as experiencing oneself as being morally obligated to perform some action on some occasion, contain elements that (1) are available to introspection and (2) carry ontological objectivist purportargument from phenomenological introspection.neutrality thesisthe phenomenological data regarding one's moral experiences that is available to introspection is neutral with respect to the issue of whether such experiences carry ontological objectivist purport

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy.

Alvin Goldman’s contributions to contemporary epistemology are impressive—few epistemologists have provided others so many occasions for reflecting on the fundamental character of their discipline and its concepts. His work has informed the way epistemological questions have changed (and remained consistent) over the last two decades. We (the authors of this paper) can perhaps best suggest our indebtedness by noting that there is probably no paper on epistemology that either of us individually or jointly have produced that does not in its notes and references bear clear testimony to the influence of Professor Goldman’s arguments. The present paper is no exception (and this would be a particularly inapt place to break with our tradition of indebtedness). Professor Goldman has produced a series of discussions that we find particularly important for coming to terms with the venerable idea that there may be truths that can be known a priori (Goldman 1992a, 1992b, 1999). We do not altogether follow his lead, while he draws on the idea that a priori justification has something to do with innateness or processess, we prefer to accentuate the idea that a priori justification turns on a conceptually grounded truths and access via acquired conceptual competence (at least in many significant philosophical cases). Still, in developing our understanding we have been aided by much that Professor Goldman says regarding concepts, conceptual competence, and related psychological processes. The influences should become progressively clear, particularly in the later sections of this paper. What would it take for there to be a priori knowledge or justification? We can begin by reflecting on a widely agreed on answer to this question—one that purports to identify something that would at least be adequate for a priori justification. The answer will then serve as one anchor for the present investigation, a bit of shared ground on which empiricists and rationalists can, and typically do, agree..

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.

The paradox of analysis asks how a putative conceptual analysis can be both true and informative. If it is true then isn’t it analytic? And if it is analytic then how can it be informative? Our proposed solution rests on a distinction between explicit knowledge of meaning and implicit knowledge of meaning and on a correlative distinction between two kinds of conceptual competence. If one initially possesses only implicit knowledge of the meaning of a given concept and the associated linguistic expression, then a conceptual analysis can be both analytic and informative.

We sketch the view we call contextual semantics. It asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability under contextually variable semantic standards, that truth is frequently an indirect form of correspondence between thought/language and the world, and that many Quinean commitments are not genuine ontological commitments. We argue that contextualist semantics fits very naturally with the view that the pertinent semantic standards are particularist rather than being systematizable as exceptionless general principles.