David Sosa

How does mind fit into nature? Philosophy has long been concerned with this question. No contemporary philosopher has done more to clarify it than Jaegwon Kim, a distinguished analytic philosopher specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. With new contributions from an outstanding line-up of eminent scholars, this volume focuses on issues raised in Kim's work. The chapters cluster around two themes: first, exclusion, supervenience, and reduction, with attention to the causal exclusion argument for which Kim is widely celebrated; and second, phenomenal consciousness and qualia, with attention to the prospects for a functionalist account of the mental. This volume is sure to become a major focus of attention and research in the disciplines of metaphysics and philosophy of mind

While groups can do many things, and are subject to important sorts of assessment, persons can exhibit some normative statuses that no group can realize. I defend an anti-realist position about group belief (and group agency, generally) and suggest that it can still, in a way, sympathetically accommodate the range of cases discussed by Lackey in her groundbreaking The Epistemology of Groups. The distinctive normative character of belief—its integration, in consciousness, into a framework of rational relations—makes it impossible for a group to believe. Our critique of a club, or a commission, or a community, or a company or corporation—in just the ways in which we seem also to evaluate individuals—can be explained in ways that do not require postulating that the group in question have beliefs: the evaluation is revealed as indicating a fundamentally different sort of feature. The group has perhaps failed, in a way that is worth attending to, but that failure was different in normative kind from the sort of flaw that characterizes, for example, irrational belief.

It can be seen as a mark against a belief that its causal history be disconnected from the truth. And that idea fits well with the view that discovering that a belief’s causal history is so disconnected itself diminishes its normative status. But this latter view can also be held independently: believing that your belief was influenced by irrelevant factors might be seen as problematic even should it not be seen as in general a mark against a belief that it be caused in one way or another. I pursue a more radical rejection of the role of truth in an adequate understanding of the normative status of belief. If a belief can be perfectly good independently of its connection to the truth, then perhaps it can be perfectly good even for an agent who knows that it is not causally determined by the truth.