Carl Gillett

Foundationalist, Coherentist. Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect—all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non‐repeating. chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls “Intinitism”—the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a venerable metaphysical concern about a certain type of regress. My conclusion will be that until Klein answers these metaphysical worries he will not have restored Infinitism as a viable option in epistemology.

One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” properties to be second-order properties and claims there are two metaphysical forms of “functionalism,” in so-called “role” and “realizer” functionalism. Looking at mechanistic explanations, I show that the “functional properties” posited in the special sciences are not second-order properties and that Continuity Functionalism is a distinctive metaphysical version of functionalism not covered by the Standard Picture. My conclusion is that the Standard Picture offers us a false dichotomy of ways to be a “functionalist” and that “functionalists” thus need to look once more to the special sciences to configure their views, thus eschewing the machinery inherited from “analytic” philosophers.

In his “New Consensus” on explanation, Wesley Salmon (1989) famously argued that there are two kinds of scientific explanation: global, derivational, and unifying explanations, and then local, ontic explanations backed by causal relations. Following Salmon’s New Consensus, the dominant view in philosophy of science is what I term “neo-Causalism” which assumes that all ontic explanations of singular fact/event are causal explanations backed by causal relations, and that scientists only search for causal patterns or relations and only offer causal explanations of singular facts/events. I argue that there are foundational, and fatal, flaws in the neo-Causal picture. The relations backing constitutive mechanistic explanations of activities of wholes using activities of parts, as well as other species of compositional explanation, cannot be causal relations. Treating them as causal or causation-like is therefore plausibly a category mistake. Compositional explanations in the sciences represent instead a sui generis kind of ontic explanation of singular fact/event backed by sui generis compositional relations. We thus need a pluralistic revision of Salmon’s New Consensus on explanation to reflect these findings.

My thesis addresses the status of 'naturalizations' of intentionality and the recent debate about their importance. After formulating an account of scientific theory appraisal I argue, contrary to recent critics of naturalization, that there is a place for the use of 'interlevel' properties in assessing scientific theories, but that this takes a more modest form than that assumed by the physicalist proponents of naturalization. Although I argue that we should be agnostic about the truth of the physicalist account of scientific methodology recently used to justify naturalizing theories of intentionality, I show that such accounts are nonetheless important on the more minimal view of theory appraisal that I defend. ;The orthodox philosophical position about scientific theory appraisal is 'methodological physicalism' , which takes scientists to evaluate theories using a 'Physicalist Criterion'. Recent critics of MP have offered an alternative view of scientific theory appraisal which I call 'explanationism' . This position claims that scientific theories are only evaluated by their properties within their own domain of inquiry. Using E, these critics attack the projects pursued by supporters of MP, such as naturalizations, as philosophical impositions upon the sciences. ;To illuminate this debate I examine the relationships that hold between theories in different scientific domains. I outline an 'abstract' framework for theory appraisal using such interlevel properties, which I call 'minimal appraisal'. I argue that minimal appraisal has an obvious a priori justification which provides a straightforward a priori argument against E. After examining a posteriori historical evidence, I conclude that it supports the a priori argument against E and that we should reject explanationism. Using the same historical evidence I then argue that use of the Physicalist Criterion in explanations of historical cases is presently a 'Third Wheel', superfluous to the best explanation of these cases based upon minimal appraisal. I conclude that we should be agnostic about the truth of MP as an account of scientific practice. Finally, I argue that minimal appraisal leaves a methodological role for naturalizing theories of belief content, as a historically common form of vindicatory scientific theory