Sydney Shoemaker

Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counterexemplifies that identification. The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently far. Three kinds of entitlement are characterized and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested antisceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do

Contrary to what David Wiggins seems to suppose, I do not hold a view that attempts to “replace the self, the person, by a construct.” I do not hold that persons are “constructed from” states over which the psychological continuity relation is to be defined. I do not think that anything I say implies, or even suggests, such a view. I take it as obvious that a state must be a state of something, so it is assumed from the start that there are subjects of whatever states are in question. In the case of mental states, of the sort that concern us, these subjects are persons. So there is no suggestion that psychological predicates are in the first instance applied to “assemblages of states or to person stages.”

This paper is about the relation between two metaphysical topics: the nature of properties, and way the instantiation of a property is sometimes “realized in” something more fundamental. It is partly an attempt to develop further, but also to correct, my earlier treatments of these topics. In my published work on realization, including my book Physical Realization, I was at pains to insist that acceptance of my view about this does not commit one to the causal theory of properties I have defended in several places. I held that it commits one to the claim that within any given world, properties with the same causal profile are identical, but not to the requirement that a property must have the same causal profile in any world in which it can be instantiated. I now think that this was a mistake. There is an argument from the account of realization I have offered to the conclusion that, if physicalism is true, properties of macroscopic objects have their causal profiles essentially. In what follows I will present that argument.Along the way I will correct what now seem to me mistakes in my earlier presentationsof the account of realization. And I will conclude with an additional argument for the causal theory of properties, one that does not tie it to the assumption that physicalism is true or to my account of realization.

The sense in which having the available belief that P gives one a reason for believing that one believes that P is just that if one has that available belief one is thereby justified, or warranted, in believing that one has it. In explaining why it is so it helps to bring in the notion of rationality. We noted earlier that it is a requirement of full human rationality that one regularly revise one’s belief system in the direction of greater consistency and coherence, and, as a condition of one’s being able to do this, that one have access to its contents and their relations to one another. Judging that one believes something when one does, and judging that one doesn’t believe something when one doesn’t, are manifestations of the satisfaction of this requirement of rationality. That seems a sufficient reason to say that one is warranted in doing so.

Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties can be realized in thin physical properties shared by a person and her body. Defining this in turn requires defining a sense in which the instantiations of sortal properties and of thick properties are realized in micro-structural states of affairs. A fourth notion of realization is needed to allow for the possibility of coincident entities that share a sortal property, e.g., coincident persons.

What is introspective know ledge of one’s own intentional states like? This paper aims to make plausible the view that certain cases of self-knowledge, namely the cogito-type ones, are enough like perception to count as cases of quasi-observation. To this end it considers the highly influential arguments developed by Sydney Shoemaker in his recent Royce Lectures. These present the most formidable challenge to the view that certain cases of self-knowledge are quasi-observational and so deserve detailed examination. Shoemaker’s arguments are directed against two models of ordinary perception, the “object perception model” and the “broad perceptual model”. I argue that the core theses that Shoemaker associated with them are either dubious in their own right or applicable to certain cases of self-knowledge. Overall the aim is to show that there is such a variety of patterns in each case that simple analogies or disanalogies are unhelpful.

A common conception of what it is for one property to “realize” another suggests that it is the realizer property that does the causal work, and that the realized property is epiphenomenal. The same conception underlies George Bealer’s argument that functionalism leads to the absurd conclusion that what we take to be self-ascriptions of a mental state are really self-ascriptions of “first-order” properties that realize that state. This paper argues for a different concept of realization. A property realizes another if its “forward looking” causal features are a subset of those of the property realized. The instantiation of the realizer property will include the instantiation of the property realized; and when the effects produced are due to the causal features of the latter, it is the instantiation of it that is appropriately regarded as their cause. Epiphenomenalism is avoided, and so is Bealer’s absurd conclusion.

A common conception of what it is for one property to “realize” another suggests that it is the realizer property that does the causal work, and that the realized property is epiphenomenal. The same conception underlies George Bealer’s argument that functionalism leads to the absurd conclusion that what we take to be self-ascriptions of a mental state are really self-ascriptions of “first-order” properties that realize that state. This paper argues for a different concept of realization. A property realizes another if its “forward looking” causal features are a subset of those of the property realized. The instantiation of the realizer property will include the instantiation of the property realized; and when the effects produced are due to the causal features of the latter, it is the instantiation of it that is appropriately regarded as their cause. Epiphenomenalism is avoided, and so is Bealer’s absurd conclusion

The paper discusses how mental states can be physically realized without their causal efficacy being preempted by their physical realizers—either _property realizers_, which are physical property instances, or _microphysical realizers_, which are microphysical state of affairs. On the ‘subset account’ of property realization P is realized by Q when the forward-looking causal features of P are a subset of the forward-looking causal features of Q. An instance of a mental property is a part of the instance of the physical property that realizes it, and the latter causes what it does in virtue of having the mental property instance as a part. Corresponding to every type of microphysical states of affairs there is an MSE property that something has in virtue of embedding a state of affairs of that type, and these are property realizers of other properties.