Joseph Ulatowski

In the past, experimental philosophers have explored the psychological underpinning of a number of notions in philosophy, including free will, moral responsibility, and more. But prior to this chapter, although a number of philosophers have speculated on how ordinary folks might, or should, think about the liar paradox, no one had systematically explored the psychological underpinnings of the Liar itself. The authors take on this task. In particular, the chapter investigates the status of a liar sentence, L = ‘Sentence L is false’. The thesis, arrived at by interpreting the data the authors have accrued, is that reflective thinkers (some of whom possess a modicum of philosophical expertise) judge L to be neither true nor false (as opposed to false or true), and the authors see this as some evidence for the claim that L _is_ neither true nor false.

There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: 〈p〉 is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosophers talk about truth and how they judge that a proposition is true, a significant amount of data collected over the years reveal that the ordinary or folk view of truth is compatible with the epistemological fundamentality of alethic minimalism. This, I take it, suggests that people share in the same intuitions that form the bedrock of Horwich’s minimalism.

Michael P Lynch is the Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Lynch’s core research has focused on questions of the nature and value of truth, the function of truth in domains like artificial intelligence and politics, and the “post-truth” era. But he has published widely in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind; his work also spills over into scholarship on social and racial justice, culture and technology, and sociopolitical aspects of the philosophy of language. Because Lynch’s work is diverse and wide-ranging, the volume we would like to construct is one where critics and admirers alike engage with select aspects of his vast corpus of philosophical work. The result should be a volume that is attractive to many people in Philosophy and beyond. Lynch is a prolific scholar, and he’s just published his seventh monograph this month, entitled On Truth in Politics (Princeton, 2025). He began his career tackling questions concerning the nature of truth, which resulted in his acclaimed first book, Truth in Context (MIT, 1998). In that book, Lynch laid out an early vision for pluralism about truth that closely aligned with metaphysical realism, which he likely inherited from his mentor and PhD dissertation advisor, William P Alston. His follow-up second book, True to Life (MIT, 2004), argued for a vision of the value of truth that applied his functionalist account of alethic pluralism to issues in politics and democracy. In particular, that book addressed a concern raised by Richard Rorty that theorizing about the nature of truth impotently makes no difference whatsoever to practical or political affairs. Lynch’s compelling and optimistic argument continues to offer an antidote against Rorty’s pessimism about the nature of truth. From there, Lynch’s functionalist theory blossomed and matured with the publication of his third book, Truth as One and Many (Oxford, 2009), which drove much of the conversation about pluralism in the decade thereafter. For instance, the advent of commentaries and volumes that further addressed concerns over alethic pluralism, e.g., Cory Wright & Nikolaj JLL Pedersen’s anthology Truth and Pluralism (Oxford, 2013) were a direct result of Lynch’s work. Writing a trilogy is a rare feat. Most scholars who do so are apt to take a breather. Lynch instead followed up on his trilogy with a second hat trick: In Praise of Reason (MIT, 2014), followed by two more books for popular but well-informed audiences The Internet of Us (Norton, 2016) and Know-It-All Society (Norton, 2019). This body of work has brought him admiration and acclaim among students and colleagues throughout the profession. His latest book, On Truth in Politics (Princeton, 2025), is a tour de force drawing together years of thinking on the nature and value of truth to address the gravest threat ignoring it poses: the complete downfall and dismantling of democracy. In the background of this research are half a dozen edited collections, which together bear on the additional reach of his influence.

The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal’s perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed toward offline content, e.g., from big events like birthday parties, weddings, and the birth of one’s children to the more mundane such as what the embodied mortal had for breakfast on 22 June 1987. The possibility of digital immortals living a person’s life indefinitely means that the digital immortal is able to conceive of and understand the content of the mortal’s embodied mind. To conceive of and to understand the content of a mortal’s embodied mind the digital immortal must know what it is like to be an embodied mortal. However, the digital immortal cannot conceive of what it is like to be an embodied mortal because the experience would be so transformative that it would be irrational to consider it (cf. (Paul in Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014)) and because it would have to conceive of its own offline afterlife, which is something well beyond its capacity. Just as we cannot conceive what it’s like to be immortal because of its highly transformative experience (cf. (Ulatowski in Diametros: Online J. Philos. 16(62), 65–77, 2019), digital immortals would be similarly perplexed by an offline afterlife. Our digital döppelganger would have no way of knowing what meaty embodied lives are like. The pollyannaish view of living forever as a digital döppelganger gives rise to the realisation that our functionally equivalent digital replica would be filled by memories, experiences, and other content of which it cannot possibly conceive.

Rok 2025 stanowi kamień milowy dla Szkoły Lwowsko-Warszawskiej. Jest to 130. rocznica jej założenia przez Kazimierza Twardowskiego (1866–1938). W tym rozdziale zastanawiam się nad podejściem Twardowskiego do zagadnień filozoficznych, jego unikalnością w historii filozofii oraz nad tym, jak jego dziedzictwo, choć na swój własny, niepowtarzalny sposób, kontynuowali jego uczniowie. W szczególności filozofki Szkoły Lwowsko-Warszawskiej cieszą się szczególnym uznaniem i uznaniem za swoją innowacyjność i nowatorstwo.

The question “what is action?” cannot be fully addressed until it is established whether two action descriptions—whether in law, business, insurance policies, or ordinary conversation—refer to the same or different actions. This book approaches the problem of action individuation by arguing for a variantist account, where the moral valence of the consequences of an action plays a foundational role in distinguishing between actions. Actions with bad consequences elicit judgements where various descriptions of the action refer to one and the same act; actions with positive consequences give rise to judgements that treat different descriptions of action as referring to distinct acts. When we consider whether a bad or good consequence is identical to an originating action, the normative valence of the consequences of the action matter. Drawing from an empirical assessment that tests non-philosophers’ intuitions about individuating actions, along with real-world examples, Joseph Ulatowski explores the practical and philosophical significance of how we distinguish between actions.

Over the past 20 years, predicates of personal taste (PPT) have been at the centre of a set of lively debates in the philosophy of language and linguistics. These debates have yielded many subtle and inventive analyses of PPT. There is, however, a crucial methodological question about PPT that remains underexplored: what sorts of evidence should be used in evaluating an account of PPT? In line with a fairly large body of recent work, we point out that since hypotheses about PPT are empirical, they need to be evaluated empirically, using clearly articulated tests. The test on which we focus involves ordinary speakers’ judgments about retraction. We identify what we take to be two significant problems with the leading account, due to John MacFarlane, of why retraction data matter in the PPT debates. We then develop an improved framework for thinking about this issue. To close, we use our improved framework to re-evaluate the findings on retraction reported by Markus Kneer, and we discuss a few loose ends that will need to be addressed by future experimental research on PPT.

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight into the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves.

Critics of the scope problem that motivates pluralism about truth have argued that it is a pseudo-problem. If the criticism is correct, then truth pluralism is left unmotivated and potentially bankrupt. In this paper, I argue that closely related to the scope problem is another problem, which I call “the scalar problem.” If the property of truth is sensitive to how an agent expresses the truth predicate within a single linguistic discourse and different agents or groups of agents express truth differently within that discourse, then there are different ways of being true within the same linguistic discourse. Given this possibility, even if the scope problem fails, truth pluralism remains fully motivated.

Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “tra- ditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected phil- osophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps rad- ical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 1.2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, rang- ing from the ancients (Section 1.3), to the early moderns (Section 1.4), to the late mod- erns (Section 1.5), and on to the present (Section 1.6).

On the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to fact. Criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth have argued that such a strict interpretation of the correspondence relation will not be able to account for the truth of statements about fiction or mathematics. This challenge has resulted in the introduction of more permissive correspondence relations, such as Austin’s correspondence as correlation or Tarski’s correspondence as reference satisfaction. Recently, some mediated correspondence theorists of truth have proposed that the correspondence relation holds not only between thought and world but also between thought and language. In this paper, I argue that correspondence truth, direct or mediated, is not a monistic theory of truth, the view that there is one and only way for a proposition to be true. To argue for this position, I will have to show that each of the correspondence theories accept direct and indirect ways of understanding the correspondence relation as well as address potential objections to the view that correspondence theory is not singular and monolithic.

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson’s picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate structural properties of objects. While we retain the spirit of the causal theory, we wish to guard against any unwarranted optimism that an explicitly scientific explanation for human action lies in our future, drawing on Chomsky’s view that a causal explanation of human actions is likely to remain beyond human science forming capacities. We take a mild-realist view of virtues and self-narratives, in the style of Dennett. We argue that, in spite of that limited form of realism, underlined by Chomsky’s mysterian position in this domain, we still need to frame our explanations of behaviour based on virtues and self-narratives in causal terms.

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6).

There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: 〈p〉 is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosophers talk about truth and how they judge that a proposition is true, a significant amount of data collected over the years reveal that the ordinary or folk view of truth is compatible with the epistemological fundamentality of alethic minimalism. This, I take it, suggests that people share in the same intuitions that form the bedrock of Horwich’s minimalism.

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself.

Virtue, Narrative, and Self connects two philosophical areas of study that have long been treated as distinct: virtue theory and narrative accounts of personal identity. Chapters address several important issues and neglected themes at the intersection of these research areas. Specific examples include the role of narrative in the identification, differentiation, and cultivation of virtue, the nature of practical reasoning and moral competence, and the influence of life's narrative structure on our conceptions of what it means to live and act well. This volume demonstrates how recent work from the philosophy of mind and action concerning narrativity and our understanding of the self can shed new light on questions about the nature of virtue, practical wisdom, and human flourishing. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in virtue theory, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and moral education.

The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word “nonsense” and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute reading, that “nonsense” is a term of philosophical criticism. Finally, I conclude that resolute readings have not sufficiently accounted for how nonsense behaves in our language; they have failed to heed Wittgenstein’s warning: “don’t think, but look!”