Frank Hofmann

In a recent book (Tye 2017), Michael Tye argues that we have reason to attribute phenomenal consciousness to functionally similar robots like commander Data of Star Trek. He relies on a kind of inference to the best explanation – ‘Newton’s Rule’, as he calls it. I will argue that Tye’s liberal view of consciousness attribution fails for two reasons. First, it leads into an inconsistency in consciousness attributions. Second, and even more importantly, it fails because ceteris is not paribus. The big, categorical difference in history between Data-like robots on the one hand and human beings on the other hand defeats the ceteris paribus assumption, which can be seen by various considerations. So the inference rule cannot be applied. We should not attribute phenomenal consciousness to robots like Data.

I would like to propose a demonstrative transparency model of our immediate, introspective self-knowledge of experiences. It is a model entirely in line with transparency. It rests on three elements: mental demonstration, the capacity to apply concepts to what is given in experience, and ordinary inference. The model avoids inner sense, acquaintance, and any special kind of normativity or rationality. The crucial and new ingredient is mental demonstration. By mental demonstration we can refer indexically to the contents of our own experiences in a unique way. This allows for the application of ordinary, non-mental concepts in order to arrive at a judgment about what it is that one is experiencing. In a transparent way one can then move inferentially to the self-ascription of an experience with such a content. I compare the demonstrative model with other accounts of introspective self-knowledge.

This paper is concerned with the reconstruction of a core argument that can be extracted from Street’s ‘Darwinian Dilemma’ and that is intended to ‘debunk’ moral realism by appeal to evolution. The argument, which is best taken to have the form of an undermining defeater argument, fails, I argue. A simple, first formulation is rejected as a non sequitur, due to not distinguishing between the evolutionary process that influences moral attitudes and the cognitive system generating moral attitudes. Reformulations that respect the distinction and that could make the argument valid, however, bring in an implausible premise about an implication from evolutionary influence to unreliability. Crucially, perception provides a counterexample, and the fitness contribution of reliably accurate representation has to be taken into account. Then the moral realist can explain why and how evolution indirectly cares for the truth of moral attitudes. The one and only condition that has to be satisfied in order for this explanation to work is the sufficient epistemic accessibility of moral facts. As long as the moral facts are sufficiently reliably representable, one can see how evolution could favor getting it right about the moral facts. Interestingly, apart from this epistemic constraint no further constraint and, in particular, no objectivity constraint on what the moral facts have to be like can be derived. Thus, the only problem for the moral realist is to make good on epistemic access to moral facts—an old problem, not a new one.

Quite plausibly, epistemic justification and rationality is tied to possession of evidence. According to Williamson, one’s evidence is what one knows. This is not compatible with non-epistemic perception, however, since non-epistemic perception does not require belief in what one perceives and, thus, does not require knowledge of the evidence – and, standardly, knowledge does require belief. If one non-epistemically perceives a piece of evidence, this can be sufficient for possessing it as evidence. Williamson’s arguments for the necessity of belief will be discussed and rebutted. Interestingly, the view that non-epistemic perception is sufficient for possession of evidence can allow for conceptual or non-conceptual content of perception and it provides the framework for a neo-foundationalist account of epistemic justification.

In a recent book, Michael Tye argues that we have reason to attribute phenomenal consciousness to functionally similar robots like commander Data of Star Trek. He relies on a kind of inference to the best explanation – ‘Newton’s Rule’, as he calls it. I will argue that Tye’s liberal view of consciousness attribution fails for two reasons. First, it leads into an inconsistency in consciousness attributions. Second, and even more importantly, it fails because ceteris is not paribus. The big, categorical difference in history between Data-like robots on the one hand and human beings on the other hand defeats the ceteris paribus assumption, which can be seen by various considerations. So the inference rule cannot be applied. We should not attribute phenomenal consciousness to robots like Data.

I would like to propose a demonstrative transparency model of our immediate, introspective self-knowledge of experiences. It is a model entirely in line with transparency. It rests on three elements: mental demonstration, the capacity to apply concepts to what is given in experience, and ordinary inference. The model avoids inner sense, acquaintance, and any special kind of normativity or rationality. The crucial and new ingredient is mental demonstration. By mental demonstration we can refer indexically to the contents of our own experiences in a unique way. This allows for the application of ordinary, non-mental concepts in order to arrive at a judgment about what it is that one is experiencing. In a transparent way one can then move inferentially to the self-ascription of an experience with such a content. I compare the demonstrative model with other accounts of introspective self-knowledge.

The question of what means-and-ends structure our epistemic endeavors have is an important issue in recent epistemology, and is fundamental for understanding epistemic matters in principle. Crispin Sartwell has proposed arguments for the view that knowledge is our only ultimate goal, and justification is no part of it. An important argument is his instrumentality argument which is concerned with the conditions under which something could belong to our ultimate epistemic goal. Recently, this argument has been reconstructed and criticized by Pierre Le Morvan in a clear and helpful way. It will be shown, however, that Le Morvan’s criticism is not adequate, since it misconstrues the real instrumentality argument that can be found in Sartwell’s writings.

The paper attempts to give an account of the introspective self-knowledge of our own experiences which is in line with representationalism about phenomenal consciousness and the transparency of experience. A two-step model is presented. First, a demonstrative thought of the form ‚I am experiencing this’ is formed which refers to what one experiences, by means of attention. Plausibly, this thought is knowledge, since safe. Second, a non-demonstrative thought of the form ‚I am experiencing a pain’ occurs. This second self-ascription is justified inferentially, on the basis of the first, demonstrative thought. Thus, an account of introspective experiential self-knowledge can be developed which is richer and more adequate to the phenomena than pure reliabilism and Dretske’s displaced perception model. There is really such a thing as introspection, but no inner sense.

According to Antonia Barkes version of contextualism, epistemic contextualism, a context is defined by a method and its associated assumptions. The subject has to make the assumption that the method is adequate or reliable and that good working conditions hold in order to arrive at knowledge by employing the method. I will criticize Barkes claim that epistemic contextualism can provide a more satisfactory explanation or motivation for context shifts than conversational contextualism (in particular, David Lewiss contextualism). Two more points of criticizm will be presented, which are meant to show that epistemic contextualism presupposes epistemic internalism, and that (epistemic) contextualism leads to an implausible view about which parameters the special achievement that is constitutive of knowledge depends on. I suggest that, contra (epistemic) contextualism, knowledge is a more robust phenomenon that does not depend on whether anyone calls into question any assumptions or raises skeptical doubts in conversation or in his or her mind (as, for example, Fred Dretskes account says). I indicate how this can be reconciled with the phenomenon that knowledge attributions are somewhat unstable and seemingly context-dependent.

I will present a problem for any externalist evidentialism that allows for accidental possession of evidence. There are Gettier cases for justification. I will describe two such cases – cases involving veridical hallucination. An analysis of the cases is given, along the lines of virtue epistemology . The cases show that certain externalist evidentialist accounts of justification do not provide sufficient conditions. The reason lies in the fact that one can be luckily in possession of evidence, and then one will not have a justified belief. Justified belief requires an anti-luck condition on possession of evidence. This opens up the prospects of a unified virtue-epistemology covering both knowledge and justification

The paper is an investigation into the prospects of an epistemology of non-conceptual knowledge. According to the orthodox view, knowledge requires concepts and belief. I present several arguments to the effect that there is non-conceptual, non-doxastic knowledge, the obvious candidate for such knowledge being non-conceptual perception. Non-conceptual perception seems to be allowed for by cognitive scientists and it exhibits the central role features of knowledge—it plays the knowledge role: it respects an anti-luck condition, it is an achievement, it enables one to act for a reason, and it provides justification. Furthermore, it makes a straightforward and elegant explanation of perceptual knowledge possible: doxastic perceptual knowledge builds on non-conceptual perception as non-conceptual knowledge. Three objections that might naturally arise will be discussed and answered. Thus, the prospects of an epistemology without belief seem to be much better than the orthodoxy wants to have it. We can extend knowledge into the non-conceptual realm

Recently, a new movement of philosophers, called 'experimental philosophy', has suggested that the philosophers' favored armchair is in flames. In order to assess some of their claims, it is helpful to provide a theoretical background against which we can discuss whether certain facts are, or could be, evidence for or against a certain view about how philosophical intuitions work and how good they are. In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with providing such a theoretical background, and I will start discussing in which way experimental philosophy challenges the reliability of philosophical intuitions and how its challenge fits into some more theoretical considerations that also point towards a reliability problem for intuitions. The paper attempts to argue that a certain account of intuitions—the imaginationist account—is available which is well-suited for explicating the expertise reply to the challenge of experimental philosophy

Hugh Mellor has proposed what appears to be a new solution to the problem of intrinsic change (Mellor 1998). Assuming endurantism and a B‐theoretic, nonpresentist view of time, facts are supposed to have only enduring things and atemporal properties (or relations) as constituents, but no times. The having of properties and relations is not relativised to times. Instead, the whole of a fact is conceived of as temporally localised. It will be argued that this interesting and novel proposal does not succeed as an account of change in the intrinsic properties of things. The basic difficulty is that the view still leads into contradiction, since it makes it incomprehensible how one and the same thing can have both a property and some incompatible property. The having of these incompatible properties is treated as two facts. But to add that these facts have certain temporal locations is of no help for avoiding the contradiction.

The idea of truthmakers is important for doing serious metaphysics, since a truthmaker principle can give us important guidance in finding out what we would like to include into our ontology. Recently, David Lewis has argued against Armstrong’s argument that a plausible truthmaker principle requires us to accept facts. I would like to take a close look at the argument. I will argue in detail that the Humean principle of recombination on which Lewis relies is not plausible (independently of the issue of facts). Then I will show that the right truthmaker principle that vindicates facts is superior to the modified truthmaker principle that Lewis has proposed. This will lead into the topic of being and existence. It turns out that truthmaking and facts are plausible, well suited for one another, and very coherent with a plausible conception of being.

Sydney Shoemaker has attempted to save mental causation by a new account of realization. As Brian McLaughlin argues convincingly, the account has to face two major problems. First, realization does not guarantee entailment. So even if mental properties are realized by physical properties, they need not be entailed by them. This is the first, rather general metaphysical problem. A second problem, which relates more directly to mental causation is that Shoemaker must appeal to some kind of proportionality as a constraint on causation in order to avoid redundant mental causation. I argue that, in addition, a “piling problem” arises, since causal powers seem to be bestowed twice. Then, I try to sketch an alternative view of the relation between causal powers and properties—a reductionist view—which fares better on some accounts. But it may have to face another and, perhaps, serious problem, the “problem of the natural unity of properties”. Finally, I will pose a question about the relation between causal powers and causation.

I distinguish between three kinds of reliabilism for epistemic justification, namely, pure reliabilism, evidential reliabilism, and reasons reliabilism, and I argue for reasons reliabilism. Pure reliabilism and evidential reliabilism are plagued, most importantly, by the generality problem, and they cannot deal adequately with defeater phenomena. One can avoid these problems only by jettisoning the idea of process reliability. The truth connection ? which is essential for any kind of reliabilism ? has to be provided in an altogether different way, namely, by means of facts in the world which serve as objective reasons (or evidence). So, as reasons reliabilism says, a justified belief has to be anchored in an objective reason which speaks in favor of its truth. Only in this way can intuitions about defeaters be preserved and explained. And reasons reliabilism can avoid the generality problem

Plato’s Meno problem is the problem of why knowledge is better than true belief which is not knowledge. The paper studies the account of this surplus value of knowledge that recent reliabilist virtue epistemologists like John Greco and Ernest Sosa have proposed: knowledge is true belief from epistemic virtue. I reconstruct the master argument which subsumes the epistemic case under the general case of success from virtue. Five accounts of virtue are presented and discussed critically. The result is that only the fifth account – the refined dispositionalist account of virtue, based on an idea of J.J. Thomson – is viable, for the purposes of accounting for the surplus value of knowledge along the lines of the master argument. However, there is at least one remaining question, namely, of why success from virtue has surplus value in general

Can there be a state which is both a belief and a desire? More exactly, a state which is a belief that p and a desire that q, where p and q may be the same proposition or a different one? Such a state would be a ‘besire’. So a first question is the general question whether besires are possible. Normative attitudes would be good candidates for besires. For example, if Sandra has the normative attitude that it would be best for her to leave the country, this seems to be a propositional state of hers which may be both a belief and a desire. Or, for another example, suppose that Michael has the normative attitude that one should not lie without good reason. Then he seems to hold a belief about lying, namely, that lying without good reason is normatively forbidden, and, at the same time, he also seems to have a desire with respect to lying, namely, the desire not to lie without good reason. A second question is whether normative attitudes are besires.1 There are other good candidates for besires. A ‘simple’ state like the state of the young chicken expressed by its cry may be a case in point. Even though the chicken’s state is probably not a full-blooded propositional state, it seems to be ‘Janus-faced’ as well. Does it descriptively represent the chicken’s hunger? Or is it a desire for food? Maybe both – and then it could be a besire, or something like that.2 Ruth Garrett Millikan mentions another candidate, namely, intentions. Intentions clearly have a desire-like nature. And arguably, they..