Tim Kenyon

We shall see that both these projects are deeply misguided. The first suffers from Searle’s misrepresentation, en masse and individually, of the various materialist theories. To show this, I will focus on the basic claims of token identity specifically, and draw out the inaccuracy of Searle’s straw materialism. This is a shortcut; by showing one conjunct to be false, we may show the conjunction of Searle’s summaries to be false. And, after all, token identity is the most widely held current view. Searle’s second project, I will argue, is characterized by two unfortunate traits: it makes some confused and unsupported claims about supervenience and causality, and, when interpreted most charitably, it is fundamentally indistinguishable from a prevalent account of token identity augmented by supervenience.

False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project

An interesting recent reply to the Paradox of Knowability is Neil Tennant's proposal: to restrict the anti-realist's knowability thesis to truths the knowing of which is logically consistent. However, this proposal is egregiously ad hoc unless motivated by something other than the wish to save anti-realism from embarrassment. We examine Tennant's argument that his restriction is motivated by parallel considerations in cases that are neutral with respect to debates about realism. We conclude that the cases are not neutral, nor the considerations parallel. The failure of Tennant's argument provides an opportunity to reflect on, among other things, the nature of Moore's paradox, and the role of idealization in doxastic logic.