Martin Grajner

Frege hat in seinen Schriften zu den philosophischen Grundlagen der Logik eine eigenwillige Konzeption der Wahrheit skizziert, der zufolge das Wahre und das Falsche keine Eigenschaften von Sätzen oder Gedanken sind, sondern Gegenstände, die von Sätzen bezeichnet werden. In dem vorliegenden Sammelband werden zentrale Komponenten dieser Konzeption näher beleuchtet: die Thesen der Undefinierbarkeit der Wahrheit und der Redundanz des Wortes „wahr“, die Auffassung der Wahrheitswerte als Gegenstände, das so genannte slingshot-Argument, die Konzeption der Tatsachen als wahre Gedanken und die Bestimmung der logischen Gesetze als Gesetze des Wahrseins. Mit Beiträgen von Joachim Bromand, Gottfried Gabriel, Martin Grajner, Dirk Greimann, Andreas Kemmerling, Ulrike Kleemeier, Michael Kober, Verena Mayer, Uwe Meixner, Marco Ruffino, Richard Schantz, Hans Sluga und Christian Thiel.

In this paper, I defend Moorean Dogmatism against a novel objection raised by Adam Leite. Leite locates the defectiveness of the Moorean reasoning explicitly not in the failure of the Moorean argument to transmit warrant from its premises to its conclusion but rather in the failure of an epistemic agent to satisfy certain epistemic responsibilities that arise in the course of conscious and deliberate reasoning. I will first show that there exist cases of Moorean reasoning that are not put into jeopardy by the considerations that Leite presents. Second, I will argue that certain commitments of Leite’s concerning the notion of warrant are in tension with his verdict that the Moorean reasoning is defective.

Das Thema der apriorischen Rechtfertigung ist ein klassisches philosophisches Thema. Von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart wird ein intensiver Disput darüber geführt, ob man die Existenz nicht-empirischer Formen der Rechtfertigung anerkennen sollte. In diesem Buch wird ein intuitionenbasiertes Modell apriorischer Rechtfertigung entwickelt und verteidigt. Darüber hinaus werden die folgenden Fragen behandelt: Wie sollte man den Begriff der apriorischen Rechtfertigung charakterisieren? Welche Gründe gibt es für die Annahme nicht-empirischer Quellen der Rechtfertigung? Gibt es Alternativen zu intuitionenbasierten Modellen apriorischer Rechtfertigung? Kann man die Wahrheitsförderlichkeit nicht-empirischer Quellen der Rechtfertigung erklären?

Epistemic expressivists maintain, to a first approximation, that epistemic assertions express non-cognitive mental states, like endorsements, valuations, or pro-attitudes, rather than cognitive mental states such as beliefs. Proponents of epistemic expressivism include Chrisman, Gibbard, Field, Kappel, and Ridge, among others. In this paper, I argue for an alternative view to epistemic expressivism. The view I seek to advocate is inspired by hybrid expressivist theories about moral judgments, Copp Oxford studies in metaethics, 2009), Finlay, Strandberg ). According to these hybrid views, moral judgments express semantically cognitive or representational states and pragmatically convey the speaker’s non-cognitive mental states via implicatures. I will argue that a particular version of this view can reasonably be extended to epistemic judgments and that it has several advantages over its expressivist and cognitivist competitors. In particular, I will try to show that there exist certain phenomena in the epistemic domain that seem to be best accounted for by expressivist theories of epistemic judgments. However, a version of hybrid expressivism that maintains that epistemic judgments convey the attributor’s non-cognitive mental states via generalized conversational implicatures is able to account for these phenomena just as well without running afoul of the main problems that have been identified for different versions of epistemic expressivism.

According to the deductive-nomological account of ground, a fact A grounds another fact B in case the laws of metaphysics determine the existence of B on the basis of the existence of A. Accounts of grounding of this particular variety have already been developed in the literature. My aim in this paper is to sketch a new version of this account. My preferred account offers two main improvements over existing accounts. First, the present account is able to deal with necessitarian as well as non-necessitarian cases of grounding by acknowledging the existence of two types of metaphysical laws. I will argue that we should assume that metaphysical laws come in the necessitarian as well as in the non-necessitarian varietyclosely paralleling the distinction between strict and non-strict laws in the philosophy of science. The second main improvement of the present account is that this account is able to provide an explanation of why the laws of metaphysics have a direction built into them. I will argue that we should characterize metaphysical laws with the help of Theodore Sider’s (2011) notion of structure, which is a descendent of David Lewis’s (1983) notion of naturalness. According to the account of metaphysical laws developed in this paper, metaphysical laws express in their antecedents either perfectly structural truths or more structural truths than in their consequents. Since on Sider’s account structural features of reality are fundamental features of reality, the account is able to explain as to why the laws of metaphysics take us from the fundamental to the derivative.